after the arbitrary value which the all-regulating will of the great
despot may choose to assign or impute to them. In a word, he burns one
individual through all eternity, amid red-hot chains and seas of molten
fire, and seats another in the plenary enjoyment of an everlasting
brothel, between forty celestial concubines, just and equally for his own
good pleasure, and because he wills it.

"Men are thus all on one common level, here and hereafter, in their
physical, social, and moral light,--the level of slaves to one sole
master, of tools to one universal agent. But the equalizing process does
not stop here: beasts, birds, fishes, insects, all participate of the same
honor or debasement; all are, like man, the slaves of God, the tools and
automata of his will; and hence Mahomet is simply logical and
self-consistent when in the Koran he informs his followers that birds,
beasts, and the rest are 'nations' like themselves, nor does any intrinsic
distinction exist between them and the human species, except what
accidental diversity the 'King,' the 'Proud One,' the 'Mighty,' the
'Giant,' etc., as he styles his God, may have been pleased to make, just
as he willed it, and so long as he may will it."

"The Wahhabee reformer," continues Mr. Palgrave, "formed the design of
putting back the hour-hand of Islam to its starting-point; and so far he
did well, for that hand was from the first meant to be fixed. Islam is in
its essence stationary, and was framed thus to remain. Sterile like its
God, lifeless like its First Principle and Supreme Original, in all that
constitutes true life,--for life is love, participation, and progress, and
of these the Koranic Deity has none,--it justly repudiates all change, all
advance, all development. To borrow the forcible words of Lord Houghton,
the 'written book' is the 'dead man's hand,' stiff and motionless;
whatever savors of vitality is by that alone convicted of heresy and
defection.

"But Christianity, with its living and loving God, begetter and begotten,
spirit and movement; nay more,--a Creator made creature, the Maker and the
made existing in one; a Divinity communicating itself by uninterrupted
gradation and degree, from the most intimate union far off to the faintest
irradiation, through all that it has made for love and governs in love;
one who calls his creatures not slaves, not servants, but friends,--nay
sons,--nay gods: to sum up, a religion in whose seal and secret 'God in