hortations to all
men to accept the true faith and bring forth good works, and thus
make sure of an acceptable account in the day of judgment. The
former make God's irreversible will all in all. The latter seem to
place alternative conditions before men, and to imply in them a
power of choice. But this is a contradiction inseparable from the
discussion of God's infinite sovereignty and man's individual
freedom. The inconsistency is as gross in Augustine and Calvinism
as it is in the Arabian lawgiver and the creed of the Sunnees. The
Koran, instead of solving the difficulty, boldly cuts it, and does
that in exactly the same way as the thorough Calvinist. God has
respectively elected and reprobated all the destined inhabitants
of heaven and hell, unalterably, independently of their choice or
action. At the same time, reception of the true faith, and a life
conformed to it, are virtually necessary for salvation, because it
is decreed that all the elect shall profess and obey the true
faith. Their obedient reception of it proves them to be elected.
On the other hand, it is foreordained that none of the reprobate
shall become disciples and followers of the Prophet. Their
rejection of

3 Churchill, Mount Lebanon, vol. i. ch. xv.

4 Sale's Translation of the Koran, ch. vii.

him, their wicked misbelief, is the evidence of their original
reprobation. As the Koran itself expresses it, salvation is for
"all who are willing to be warned; but they shall not be warned
unless God please:"5 "all who shall be willing to walk uprightly;
but they shall not be willing unless God willeth."6

But such fine drawn distinctions are easily lost from sight or
spurned in the eager affray of affairs and the imminent straits of
the soul. While in dogma and theory the profession of an orthodox
belief, together with scrupulous prayer, fasting, alms, and the
pilgrimage to Mecca, or the absence of these things, simply
denotes the foregone determinations of God in regard to the given
individuals, in practice and feeling the contrasted beliefs and
courses of conduct are held to obtain heaven and hell. And we
find, accordingly, that Mohammed spoke as if God's primeval
ordination had fixed all things forever, whenever he wished to
awaken in his followers reckless valor and implicit submission.
"Whole armies cannot slay him who is fated to die in his bed." On
the contrary, when he sought to win converts, to move his hearers
by threatenings and pers