itors of the _Expository Times_, _Church
Missionary Review_, _Irish Church Quarterly_, and _London Quarterly
Review_ for permission to include papers which have appeared in those
journals.

C.F.

[1] Ghazzali, Munqidh.

[2] Nicholson. Literary History of the Arabs (p. 225).

[3] Tholuck. Sufismus.

[4] Sir John Seeley.

CHAPTER I

PANTHEISTIC SUFISM[5]

I.--THE IMPORT OF ISLAMIC MYSTICISM

The moral law proclaimed by Moses three thousand years ago agrees with
that which governs men to-day, irrespective of their various stages of
culture; the moral precepts of a Buddha and Confucius agree with those
of the Gospel, and the sins for which, according to the Book of the Dead
of the ancient Egyptians, men will answer to the judges of the other
world are sins still after four thousand years. If the nature of the
unknown First Cause is ever to be grasped at all, it can only be in the
light of those unchanging moral principles which every man carries in
his own breast. The idea of God is therefore not an affair of the
understanding, but of the feeling and conscience. Mysticism has always
so taken it, and has therefore always had a strong attraction for the
excitable and emotional portion of mankind whom it has comforted in
trial and affliction. Every religion is accordingly rather intended for
the emotions than for the understanding, and therefore they all contain
mystical tendencies. The mysticism of Islam and Christendom have many
points of contact, and by mysticism perhaps will be first bridged the
wide gulf which separates Islam from Christendom, and thereby from
modern civilisation. Just in proportion as the various religions express
the ideals of goodness and truth they approximate to one another as
manifestations of the unchanging moral principle. Inasmuch as they
surmised this, the Motazilites (or free-thinkers in Islam), at a time
when Europe lay in the profoundest intellectual and moral bewilderment,
fought for one of those ideas which, although they are quickly submerged
again in the stormy current of the times, continue to work in silence
and finally emerge victorious. On that day when the Moslem no longer
beholds in God simply omnipotence, but also righteousness, he will
simultaneously re-enter the circle of the great civilised nations among
whom he once before, though only for a short time, had won the first
place.

It is not perhaps too fanciful to hail, as an omen of the triu