oposition that mental repose was the true feature of orthodoxy, and in
their _fetwas_ had consistently relied on authority and rejected
original argument. They therefore readily seconded the Sultan in his
views. Argument on first principles was formally forbidden in the
schools; and for the interpretation of existing law two offices were
invented--the one for dogmatic, the other for practical decisions, those
of the Sheykh el Islam and the Great Mufti. This closing of doctrinal
inquiry by the Ottoman Sultans, and the removal of the seat of supreme
spiritual government from the Arabian atmosphere of Cairo to the Tartar
atmosphere of the Bosphorus, was the direct and immediate cause of the
religious stagnation which Islam suffered from so conspicuously in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

We have now brought the history of the Caliphate down to the period
described in the last chapter as one of intellectual torpor for Islam.
It was a lethargy from which there seemed no awakening, and which to
contemporaries, Voltaire among the rest, seemed closely approximating to
the death of unbelief. In spite of Soliman's eternal arrangements, the
temporal power of the house of Othman was wofully diminished, and the
spiritual prestige of the Sultans was gone with Mussulmans. By the
middle of the last century the title of Caliph, even in their own
dominions, was all but forgotten, and the Court of Constantinople was
become a byword for its vice and infidelity. It can therefore be well
imagined that the awakening of religious feeling, which I also described
as having been produced by the Wahhabite movement, especially menaced
the Sultan in his Caliphal pretensions. By the beginning of the present
century the serious world of Islam was already ripening for a change,
and the title of the Caliphate seemed open to whoever should re-invent
and prove himself worthy to wear it. Two men certainly then dreamed of
its acquisition, both men of supreme genius, and holding the elements of
success in their hands. Nor can it be doubted that either of them would
have achieved his ambition but for the appearance against them of a
material power greater than their own, and which then, for the first
time, began to make itself felt as paramount in Asia. That power was
England, and the ambitions she thwarted there were those of Bonaparte
and Mehemet Ali.

It is not, I believe, sufficiently understood how vast a scheme was
overthrown by the Battle o