is quite unknown to history, and the spirit which breathes through his book is the spirit of Christianity, not of Islâm.' If the writer is correct that the spirit which breathes through my book is the spirit of Christianity, then I can only say that the highest Christianity is in nowise different from the highest Islâm. The teachings of Mohammed, the sermons of Ali and of the Prophet's daughter Fâtima, the sayings and precepts of the apostles of his house, the writings. of philosophers like Avicenna, of men like Ibn Abi Daûd the Mutazalite and the Sheikh-ut-Tibrisi form the foundation of my work. All these are sealed books to our critic. The 'spirit' which breathes in my book is the spirit which I have endeavoured to catch from these masters.

He says that 'the boon' of monogamy I owe to Christianity. He does not know, or has forgotten, that the Mutazalite doctors in the reign of Al-Mâmûn advocated and upheld monogamy at a time when practical polygamy was rife in Christendom, and that there are hundreds and thousands of Moslems in the present day who entertain the same feelings and views as myself.

The fact that Mecca is not the centre of Moslem civilisation is made a subject of comment! As well might one say that the village of Nazareth, if it exists, or Jerusalem, where only the presence of the Turk prevents contending Christians from tearing each other to pieces, is not the centre of Christian civilisation-or, for the matter of that, Rome.

I now come back for a moment to the general thesis that Christianity means progress; that it represents peace and security to life, religion, and property and honour; ensures respect and equality to women, places slavery under a ban, and denounces war. History disproves all these allegations. History equally disproves the accusations levelled against Islâm, as I shall now proceed to show.

On the one side, this critic confounds 'Christianity' with the natural progress which centuries of practically uninterrupted development have worked in human thought in the direction of law and order, literature and science; on the other, he confuses the influence of religion with racial characteristics and tendencies, he attributes the misdeeds of nations and individuals to the faith they professed. If religions are to be judged by the conduct of their professors, the answer would be unanswerable. For on that ground no religion, not even Brahmanism, has so much to answer for as Christianity. From the moment Christianity became the dominant religion it has never ceased to persecute. From the days of Constantine until the present hour there is one long continuous record of inhumanity, cruelty, and injustice committed in the name of religion. Would it be fair or just to ascribe these dark and revolting deeds to the teachings of Jesus or the philosophy which is now professed by so many of the

cultured in Europe, and is designated, for want of a better expression, Christianity? I have no desire to tread in the footsteps of my critic. I have not the slightest intention to offend the susceptibilities or wound the religious feelings of any class or people. When I speak of Christianity, I do not mean the simple precepts of the Founder, which are common to all moral creeds, or the philosophy to which I have referred; I speak of the system which embodied for ages the moral sense of Christendom, and still forms the religion of many-which consecrated persecution and war, and perpetuated slavery and the bondage of woman. Christianity, like Islâm, is a varying factor; both assume varied types and standards with varying individuals; and not only with individuals, but with nations, times, as well as climates. To think that any religion retains a uniform standard is the fault of superficial observers. But no candid student will deny that the Christianity of many saints and divines who have been canonised, or whose names are still held sacred in Christendom, was directly responsible for the crimes which sully the pages of Christian history, crimes committed not in particular localities,' but wherever the name of Christ was invoked, or his image or that of his mother worshipped. Look not at the mote in your brother's eye, look at the beam in your own,' is often forgotten in the excess of religious zeal.

From the very moment,' says Lecky, 'the Church obtained civil power under Constantine, the general principle of coercion was admitted and acted on both against the Jews and the heretics and Pagans. They were tortured with every refinement of cruelty, they were burnt at a slow-consuming fire to enable them to think of the charity and humanity of the Church of Christ. Father after Father wrote of the holiness of persecution. Would it be just to say that because Jesus said 'Compel them to come in,' He was responsible for the misdeeds of Christians, though the atrocious doctrines relating to persecution were founded thereon? How far its crimes against humanity were at any time confined to 'particular localities' will sufficiently appear from a review of the condition of the various places of importance in Christendom.

In Constantinople, even under a sovereign like Justinian, public or private virtue had no recognition in the social conceptions. Seditious outbreaks and sanguinary tumults, in which the servants of the Church always took a most prominent part, were the order of the day.

On these occasions every law, human or divine, was trampled under foot; churches and altars were polluted by atrocious murders, no place was safe from depredations, children were torn from the arms of their parents and subjected to revolting outrages in broad daylight.'

1 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vii. 82, ed. 1838.

In Jerusalem, which ought to have been hallowed ground, the Christians pillaged, burnt, and murdered in the name of an Incarnate Deity, and defiled the sepulchre of Christ with blood.

What occurred in Alexandria is best described by Draper. Northern Africa and Spain was one vast scene of persecution, strife, and bloodshed. Even Dozy gives us some idea of the sufferings of the Jews under Christian domination. Milman's account of the Christianity of the first eight or nine centuries, though given with the lightest touch, does not justify the glorification habitual with partisans.

'When the Khalif Omar,' says Draper (the Khalif Omar whom the Quarterly Reviewer holds up to obloquy as the destroyer of libraries), 'took Jerusalem A.D. 637 he rode into the city by the side of the Patriarch Sophronius, conversing with him on its antiquities. At the hour of prayer he declined to perform his devotions in the Church of the Resurrection, in which he chanced to be, but prayed on the steps of the Church of Constantine-" For," he said to the Patriarch, "had I done so the Mussulmans in a future age might have infringed the treaty under colour of imitating my example." In the capture by the Crusaders, the brains of young children were dashed out against the walls, infants were pitched over battlements, men were roasted on fires, some were ripped up to see if they had swallowed gold, the Jews were driven into their Synagogue and there burnt; a massacre of nearly 70,000 persons took place; and the Pope's legate was seen partaking in the triumph.'

When Saladin recaptured the city, he released all Christians, gave them money and food, and allowed them to depart with a safeconduct. But he was only a Moslem!

It would be a wearisome task to refer in detail to facts which must be familiar to all students of history. The slaughters of the Arians and the Paulicians, of the Albigenses and the Huguenots, of the Moslems and the Jews; the sacks of Magdeburg and of Rome, the horrors of the Thirty Years' War, are too well known to require being retold. We also know how when Protestantism became a power, it used the forces at its command for persecuting its opponents. The massacres by Elizabeth's soldiers and Cromwell's Puritans are written in indelible characters. And can anything be more revolting, more horrible or heartrending than the slaughter of the unoffending Aztec and Peruvian races of America in the name of Christ?

The old Moslem lawyers had divided the world into two regions-the Dâr-ul-Harb and the Dâr-ul-Islâm, the counterpart of heathendom and Christendom. The reviewer sees nothing objectionable in the distinction made by Christianity, but he is wroth with that made by Moslem legists. The Christian divines, however, proceeded on larger lines. In the fifteenth century his Holiness the Pope granted a special charter, by which the non-Christian

world was allotted to the Portuguese and Spaniards in equal shares, and they were allowed to convert all non-Christians and heretics found there in any way they chose! And history records how liberally they construed the power. In the seventeenth century the humanity of Christendom had progressed so much that Grotius, the founder of international law in Europe, formally excepted the Moslems from the enjoyment of the jus gentium. Thus, according to juridical as well as canonical law, they were excluded from the comity of nations, and war against them was sanctified by the Church.

Let us now see how Islâm professed to deal with non-Moslems. By the charter granted to the monks of St. Catherine near Mount Sinai and to all Christians, Mohammed undertook himself, and enjoined upon his followers, to protect the Christians, to defend their churches, the residences of their priests, and to guard them from all injuries. They were not to be unfairly taxed; no bishop was to be driven out of his bishopric, no Christian was to be forced to reject his religion, no monk to be expelled from his monastery, no pilgrim to be detained from his pilgrimage; nor were the Christian churches to be pulled down for the sake of building mosques or houses for the Moslems. A nominal tribute was the only compensation they were required to pay for the observance and enjoyment of their faith. Could so much be said of other creeds? Under Christianity even the payment of tribute did not protect the non-Christian subject from molestation. The passage in the Koran, Let there be no compulsion in religion," testifies to the principle of toleration and charity inculcated by Islâm. 'What wilt thou force men to believe, when belief can only come from God?'

A more candid examination of facts than has hitherto been habitual would show which creed has most to answer for in the application of the sword and the stake in the process of the salvation of souls, or the professors of which creed were the most guilty of fraud and force in extending the dominion of their respective faiths.

The cause which led to the Moslems becoming involved in war with neighbouring tribes and nations have been fully discussed by me in my writings, and nothing the reviewer has said has detracted, in my opinion, from the force of my observations. I would only add, that after the conquest of Ctesiphon the Caliph Omar promulgated a peremptory command that under no circumstances should the Moslems cross the Tigris towards the East, and that that river should ever form the boundary between the Persian and the Saracenic empires. Upon this basis a peace was concluded. The successive breaches of faith by the Persians, which, like the British advance in India, compelled the Saracens to move from the Tigris to the Elburz, and from the Elburz to Transoxiana, may be studied even in the pages of Muir, by no means a friendly historian.

I do not for a moment wish to say that the later Moslems were

never actuated with the spirit of cupidity, or that none of their wars were cruel or persecuting. But their persecutions have been chiefly internecine, and have owed their origin to dynastic reasons. The wars of the early Moslems were either defensive, as under Mohammed, or to exact reparation or to prevent predatory raids or hostile invasions. The Quarterly reviewer, like many others of the same school, gloats over the deplorable Bani-Koraizha incident, and makes it the subject of a violent diatribe against Mohammed. The real circumstances connected with this matter must be told once more in order to refute the attack.

A treacherous tribe, united to the Moslems by the most sacred compact, in the hour of Islâm's greatest agony prove traitors, and very nearly bring about the massacre of the Moslems. They are condemned to the usual punishment of the times by an arbiter selected by themselves. The order is allowed to take its course. Let us judge the feelings of those men who very nearly proved the victims of the treacherous conduct of the Bani-Koraizha by the feelings which actuated most Christians in the dark days of the Indian Mutiny, not only against the rebels who had foully and brutally murdered women and children, but all who were supposed to have risen against constituted authority.

The assertion that security for life, religion, property, honour is due to Christianity provokes a smile. Security for religion forsooth! The fires of Smithfield, and the drastic methods adopted by the different sections of Protestants towards each other and towards the Roman Catholics to induce conformity are not such old histories as to escape our memory. From the dissolution of the Roman Empire until well nigh the close of the sixteenth century, when Christianity was most dominant over the conscience and conduct of its professors, the condition of the people was most deplorable. Rights they had none; there was no security of either life or property, much less of honour. One has only to read a school history of the times to discover how utterly unfounded is the claim here advanced for Christianity. It is enough to recall one incident of a freeman's life in those days. When his daughter married she had first to submit to an infamous outrage and rarely indeed would the Christian lord of the manor waive the atrocious privilege of barbarism.

Nor is the high position assigned to women in some countries in modern times due to Christianity. In the early ages, the Church of Christ placed the sex under a ban. They were excluded from society; they were prohibited from appearing in public or going to feasts and banquets; they were condemned to lifelong household drudgery. And this state of things, as I had occasion to point out in an article in the September number of this Review for 1891, continued for centuries. The gloomy interval which elapsed between the overthrow of the Western Empire and the rise, under the influence of culture