,
as if the doctrine of the Imamat might to some extent reconcile the
thoughtful Shia'h to the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation and
Mediation of Jesus Christ, to His office as the perfect revealer of God's
will; and as our Guide in life; but alas! it is not so. The mystic lore
connected with Shia'h doctrine has sapped the foundation of moral life and
vigour. A system of religious reservation, too, is a fundamental part of
the system in its mystical developments, whilst all Shia'hs may lawfully
practise "takia," or religious {84} compromise in their daily lives. It
thus becomes impossible to place dependence on what a Shia'h may profess,
as pious frauds are legalised by his system of religion. If he becomes a
mystic, he looks upon the ceremonial and the moral law as restrictions
imposed by an Almighty Power. The omission of the one is a sin almost, if
not quite, as bad as a breach, of the other. The advent of Mahdi is the
good time when all such restrictions shall be removed, when the utmost
freedom shall be allowed. Thus the moral sense, in many cases, becomes
deadened to an extent such as those who are not in daily contact with these
people can hardly credit. The practice of "takia," religious compromise,
and the legality of "muta'h" or temporary marriages, have done much to
demoralise the Shia'h community. The following words of a recent author
descriptive of the Shia'h system are in the main true, though they do not
apply to each individual in that system:--

"There can be no stronger testimony of the corrupting power and the
hard and hopeless bondage of the orthodox creed, than that men should
escape from it into a system which established falsehood as the supreme
law of conduct, and regarded the reduction of men to the level of swine
as the goal of human existence."[76]

The Mutazilites, or Seceders, were once an influential body. They do not
exist as a separate sect now. An account of them will be given in the next
chapter.

In the doctrine of the Imamat, common to all the offshoots of the Shia'h
sect, is to be found the chief point of difference between the Sunni and
the Shia'h, a difference so great that there is no danger of even a
political union between these two great branches of Islam. I have already
described, too, how the Shia'hs reject the Sunnat, though they do not
reject Tradition. A good deal of ill-blood is still kept up by the
recollection--a recollection kept alive by the