less
holy?"

Sec. 6. The Criticism of Mr. Palgrave on Mohammedan Theology.

Mr. Palgrave, who has given the latest and best account of the condition
of Central and Southern Arabia,[398] under the great Wahhabee revival,
sums up all Mohammedan theology as teaching a Divine unity of pure will.
God is the only force in the universe. Man is wholly passive and impotent.
He calls the system, "A pantheism of force." God has no rule but arbitrary
will. He is a tremendous unsympathizing autocrat, but is yet jealous of
his creatures, lest they should attribute to themselves something which
belongs to him. He delights in making all creatures feel that they are his
slaves. This, Mr. Palgrave asserts, is the main idea of Mohammedanism,
and of the Koran, and this was what lay in the mind of Mohammed. "Of
this," says he, "we have many authentic samples: the Saheeh, the
Commentaries of Beydawee, the Mishkat-el-Mesabeeh, and fifty similar
works, afford ample testimony on this point. But for the benefit of my
readers in general, all of whom may not have drunk equally deep at the
fountain-heads of Islamitic dogma, I will subjoin a specimen, known
perhaps to many Orientalists, yet too characteristic to be here omitted, a
repetition of which I have endured times out of number from admiring and
approving Wahhabees in Nejed.

"Accordingly, when God--so runs the tradition,--I had better said the
blasphemy--resolved to create the human race, he took into his hands a
mass of earth, the same whence all mankind were to be formed, and in which
they after a manner pre-existed; and, having then divided the clod into
two equal portions, he threw the one half into hell, saying, 'These to
eternal fire, and I care not'; and projected the other half into heaven,
adding, 'And these to paradise, and I care not.'

"Commentary would here be superfluous. But in this we have before us the
adequate idea of predestination, or, to give it a truer name,
pre-damnation, held and taught in the school of the Koran. Paradise and
hell are at once totally independent of love and hatred on the part of the
Deity, and of merits and demerits, of good or evil conduct, on the part of
the creature; and, in the corresponding theory, rightly so, since the very
actions which we call good or ill deserving, right or wrong, wicked or
virtuous, are in their essence all one and of one, and accordingly merit
neither praise nor blame, punishment nor recompense, except and simply