an emblem of an everlasting truth, not always so well remembered
elsewhere. That gross sensual Paradise of his; that horrible flaming
Hell; the great enormous Day of Judgment he perpetually insists on: what
is all this but a rude shadow, in the rude Bedouin imagination, of that
grand spiritual Fact, and Beginning of Facts, which it is ill for us too
if we do not all know and feel: the Infinite Nature of Duty? That man's
actions here are of _infinite_ moment to him, and never die or end at
all; that man, with his little life, reaches upwards high as Heaven,
downwards low as Hell, and in his threescore years of Time holds an
Eternity fearfully and wonderfully hidden: all this had burnt itself, as
in flame-characters, into the wild Arab soul. As in flame and lightning,
it stands written there; awful, unspeakable, ever present to him. With
bursting earnestness, with a fierce savage sincerity, half-articulating,
not able to articulate, he strives to speak it, bodies it forth in that
Heaven and that Hell. Bodied forth in what way you will, it is the first
of all truths. It is venerable under all embodiments. What is the chief
end of man here below? Mahomet has answered this question, in a way that
might put some of us to shame! He does not, like a Bentham, a Paley,
take Right and Wrong, and calculate the profit and loss, ultimate
pleasure of the one and of the other; and summing all up by addition and
subtraction into a net result, ask you, Whether on the whole the Right
does not preponderate considerably? No; it is not _better_ to do the one
than the other; the one is to the other as life is to death,--as Heaven
is to Hell. The one must in nowise be done, the other in nowise left
undone. You shall not measure them; they are incommensurable: the one
is death eternal to a man, the other is life eternal. Benthamee Utility,
virtue by Profit and Loss; reducing this God's-world to a dead
brute Steam-engine, the infinite celestial Soul of Man to a kind of
Hay-balance for weighing hay and thistles on, pleasures and pains
on:--If you ask me which gives, Mahomet or they, the beggarlier and
falser view of Man and his Destinies in this Universe, I will answer, it
is not Mahomet--!

On the whole, we will repeat that this Religion of Mahomet's is a kind
of Christianity; has a genuine element of what is spiritually highest
looking through it, not to be hidden by all its imperfections. The
Scandinavian God _Wish_, the god of all rude men,--t