windy of
delusions. You yourselves do not ascribe any merit to Mahommed separate
from that of revealing the unity of God. Consequently, if that is a
shaken craze arising from mere inability on his part, a little, a very
little information would have cut up by the very roots the whole
peculiarity of Islam. For if a wise man could have assembled these
conceited Arabians and told them: Great thieves, you fancy yourselves to
have shot far ahead of the Christians as to the point of unity, and if
you had I would grant that you had made a prodigious advance. But you
are deceiving quarrellers. It is all a word--mere smoke, that blinds
you. The Christian seems to affirm three Gods, and even to aggravate
this wickedness by calling one of them 'a Son,' thus seeming to accept
that monstrous notion that God is liable to old age and decrepitude, so
as to provide wisely against His own dotage. But all this is an error:
these three apparent Gods are but one, and in the most absolute sense
one.

The most shockingly searching, influential, and permanent blunder that
ever has affected the mind of man has been the fancy that a religion
includes a creed as to its [Greek: aporrheta], and a morality; in short,
that it was doctrinal by necessity, enactory, and (which has been the
practical part of the blunder) therefore exclusive, because:

1. With our notion of a religion as essentially doctrinal, the very
first axiom about it is, that being true itself it makes all others
false. Whereas, the capital distinction of the Pagan was--that given,
supposing to be assumed, 10,000 religions--all must be true
simultaneously, all equally. When a religion includes any distinct
propositions offered to the understanding (that is, I think, resting
upon a principle or tendency to a consequence by way of differencing
from facts which also are for the understanding, but then barely to
contemplate not with a power of reacting on the understanding, for every
principle introduces into the mind that which may become a modification,
a restraint; whereas, a fact restrains nothing in the way of thought
unless it includes a principle), it would rise continually in its
exclusive power according to the number of those propositions. At first
it might exclude all but ten, eight, seven, and so on; finally, as
integrated it would exclude all.

2. If you ask on what principle a Pagan believed his religion, the
question to him was almost amusing and laughable. I will i