should say a better kind than that of those miserable Syrian Sects, with
their vain janglings about _Homoiousion_ and _Homoousion_, the head full of

worthless noise, the heart empty and dead! The truth of it is embedded in
portentous error and falsehood; but the truth of it makes it be believed,

not the falsehood: it succeeded by its truth. A bastard kind of
Christianity, but a living kind; with a heart-life in it; not dead,

chopping barren logic merely! Out of all that rubbish of Arab idolatries,
argumentative theologies, traditions, subtleties, rumors and hypotheses of

Greeks and Jews, with their idle wire-drawings, this wild man of the
Desert, with his wild sincere heart, earnest as death and life, with his

great flashing natural eyesight, had seen into the kernel of the matter.
Idolatry is nothing: these Wooden Idols of yours, "ye rub them with oil

and wax, and the flies stick on them,"--these are wood, I tell you! They
can do nothing for you; they are an impotent blasphemous presence; a horror

and abomination, if ye knew them. God alone is; God alone has power; He
made us, He can kill us and keep us alive: "_Allah akbar_, God is great."

Understand that His will is the best for you; that howsoever sore to flesh
and blood, you will find it the wisest, best: you are bound to take it so;

in this world and in the next, you have no other thing that you can do!
And now if the wild idolatrous men did believe this, and with their fiery

hearts lay hold of it to do it, in what form soever it came to them, I say
it was well worthy of being believed. In one form or the other, I say it

is still the one thing worthy of being believed by all men. Man does
hereby become the high-priest of this Temple of a World. He is in harmony

with the Decrees of the Author of this World; cooperating with them, not
vainly withstanding them: I know, to this day, no better definition of

Duty than that same. All that is _right_ includes itself in this of
co-operating with the real Tendency of the World: you succeed by this (the

World's Tendency will succeed), you are good, and in the right course
there. _Homoiousion_, _Homoousion_, vain logical jangle, then or before or

at any time, may jangle itself out, and go whither and how it likes: this
is the _thing_ it all struggles to mean, if it would mean anything. If it

do not succeed in meaning this, it means nothing. Not that Abstractions,
logical Propositions, be correctly worded or incorrectly; but that living

concrete Sons of Adam do lay this to heart: that is the important point.
Islam devoured all these vain jangling Sects; and I think had right to do

so. It was a Reality, direct from the great Heart of Nature once more.
Arab idolatries, Syrian formulas, whatsoever was not equally real, had to

go up in flame,--mere dead _fuel_, in various senses, for this which was
_fire_.

It was during these wild warfarings and strugglings, especially after the
Flight to Mecca, that Mahomet dictated at intervals his Sacred Book, which

they name _Koran_, or _Reading_, "Thing to be read." This is the Work he
and his disciples made so much of, asking all the world, Is not that a

miracle? The Mahometans regard their Koran with a reverence which few
Christians pay even to their Bible. It is admitted every where as the

standard of all law and all practice; the thing to be gone upon in
speculation and life; the message sent direct out of Heaven, which this

Earth has to conform to, and walk by; the thing to be read. Their Judges
decide by it; all Moslem are bound to study it, seek in it for the light of

their life. They have mosques where it is all read daily; thirty relays of
priests take it up in succession, get through the whole each day. There,

for twelve hundred years, has the voice of this Book, at all moments, kept
sounding through the ears and the hearts of so many men. We hear of

Mahometan Doctors that had read it seventy thousand times!
Very curious: if one sought for "discrepancies of national taste," here

surely were the most eminentinstance of that! We also can read the Koran;
our Translation of it, by Sale, is known to be a very fair one. I must

say, it is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome confused
jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness,

entanglement; most crude, incondite;--insupportable stupidity, in short!
Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran. We

read in it, as we might in the State-Paper Office, unreadable masses of
lumber, that perhaps we may get some glimpses of a remarkable man. It is

true we have it under disadvantages: the Arabs see more method in it than
we. Mahomet's followers found the Koran lying all in fractions, as it had

been written down at first promulgation; much of it, they say, on
shoulder-blades of mutton, flung pell-mell into a chest: and they

published it, without any discoverable order as to time or
otherwise;--merely trying, as would seem, and this not very strictly, to

put the longest chapters first. The real beginning of it, in that way,
lies almost at the end: for the earliest portions were the shortest. Read

in its historicalsequence it perhaps would not be so bad. Much of it,
too, they say, is rhythmic; a kind of wild chanting song, in the original.

This may be a great point; much perhaps has been lost in the Translation
here. Yet with every allowance, one feels it difficult to see how any

mortal ever could consider this Koran as a Book written in Heaven, too good
for the Earth; as a well-written book, or indeed as a _book_ at all; and

not a bewildered rhapsody; _written_, so far as writing goes, as badly as
almost any book ever was! So much for national discrepancies, and the

standard of taste.
Yet I should say, it was not unintelligible how the Arabs might so love it.

When once you get this confused coil of a Koran fairly off your hands, and
have it behind you at a distance, the essential type of it begins to

disclose itself; and in this there is a merit quite other than the literary
one. If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other

hearts; all art and author-craft are of small amount to that. One would
say the primarycharacter of the Koran is this of its _genuineness_, of its

being a _bona-fide_ book. Prideaux, I know, and others have represented it
as a mere bundle of juggleries; chapter after chapter got up to excuse and

varnish the author's successive sins, forward his ambitions and quackeries:
but really it is time to dismiss all that. I do not assert Mahomet's

continualsincerity: who is continually" target="_blank" title="ad.不断地，频繁地">continuallysincere? But I confess I can make
nothing of the critic, in these times, who would accuse him of deceit

_prepense_; of consciousdeceit generally, or perhaps at all;--still more,
of living in a mere element of consciousdeceit, and writing this Koran as

a forger and juggler would have done! Every candid eye, I think, will read
the Koran far otherwise than so. It is the confused ferment of a great

rude human soul; rude, untutored, that cannot even read; but fervent,
earnest, struggling vehemently to utter itself in words. With a kind of

breathlessintensity he strives to utter himself; the thoughts crowd on him
pell-mell: for very multitude of things to say, he can get nothing said.

The meaning that is in him shapes itself into no form of composition, is
stated in no sequence, method, or coherence;--they are not _shaped_ at all,

these thoughts of his; flung out unshaped, as they struggle and tumble
there, in their chaotic inarticulate state. We said "stupid:" yet natural

stupidity is by no means the character of Mahomet's Book; it is natural
uncultivation rather. The man has not studiedspeaking; in the haste and

pressure of continual fighting, has not time to mature himself into fit
speech. The panting breathless haste and vehemence of a man struggling in

the thick of battle for life and salvation; this is the mood he is in! A
headlong haste; for very magnitude of meaning, he cannot get himself

articulated into words. The successive utterances of a soul in that mood,
colored by the various vicissitudes of three-and-twenty years; now well

uttered, now worse: this is the Koran.
For we are to consider Mahomet, through these three-and-twenty years, as

the centre of a world wholly in conflict. Battles with the Koreish and
Heathen, quarrels among his own people, backslidings of his own wild heart;

all this kept him in a perpetual whirl, his soul knowing rest no more. In
wakeful nights, as one may fancy, the wild soul of the man, tossing amid

these vortices, would hail any light of a decision for them as a veritable
light from Heaven; _any_ making-up of his mind, so blessed, indispensable

for him there, would seem the inspiration of a Gabriel. Forger and
juggler? No, no! This great fiery heart, seething, simmering like a great

furnace of thoughts, was not a juggler's. His Life was a Fact to him; this
God's Universe an awful Fact and Reality. He has faults enough. The man

was an uncultured semi-barbarous Son of Nature, much of the Bedouin still
clinging to him: we must take him for that. But for a wretched

Simulacrum, a hungry Impostor without eyes or heart, practicing for a mess
of pottage such blasphemous swindlery, forgery of celestial documents,

continual high-treason against his Maker and Self, we will not and cannot
take him.

Sincerity, in all senses, seems to me the merit of the Koran; what had
rendered it precious to the wild Arab men. It is, after all, the first and

last merit in a book; gives rise to merits of all kinds,--nay, at bottom,
it alone can give rise to merit of any kind. Curiously, through these

incondite masses of tradition, vituperation, complaint, ejaculation in the
Koran, a vein of true direct insight, of what we might almost call poetry,