especially pronounced in the ceremonies of marriage and burial.

More important, however, was the development of the official service,
the arrangement of the day and the hour of obligatory attendance and
the introduction of preaching: under Muhammed and his early followers,
and until late in the Omajjad period, preaching was confined to
addresses, given as occasion demanded, but by degrees it became part
of the regular ritual. With it was afterwards connected the
intercession for the Caliphs, which became a highly significant part
of the service, as symbolising their sovereignty. It seems to me very
probable that this practice was an adoption, at any rate in theory, of
the Christian custom of praying for the emperor. The pulpit was then
introduced under Christian influence, which thus completely
transformed the chair (_mimbar_) of the ancient Arab judges and rulers
and made it a piece of church furniture; the Christian _cancelli_ or
choir screens were adopted and the mosque was thus developed. Before
the age of mosques, a lance had been planted in the ground and prayer
offered behind it: so in the mosque a prayer niche was made, a
survival of the pre-existing custom. There are many obscure points in
the development of the worship, but one fact may be asserted with
confidence: the developments of ritual were derived from pre-existing
practices, which were for the most part Christian.

But the religious energy of Islam was not exclusively devoted to the
development and practice of the doctrine of duties; at the same time
this ethical department, in spite of its dependency upon Christian and
Jewish ideas, remains its most original achievement: we have pursued
the subject at some length, because its importance is often overlooked
in the course of attempts to estimate the connection between
Christianity and Islam. On the other hand, affinities in the regions