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!--