Jesuits secured dominion over souls. Any one who has realised the
enormous influence which Arab thought exerted upon Spanish
Christianity so late as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, will
not regard the conjecture as unfounded.

When a man's profession or position prevented him from practising
these mystical exercises, he satisfied his religious needs by
venerating persons who were nearer to the deity and whose intercession
was effectual even after their death and sometimes not until they were
dead: hence arose the veneration of saints, a practice as alien as
pantheistic dogma to primitive Islam. The adoption of Christian saint
worship was not possible until the person of Muhammed himself had been
exalted above the ordinary level of humanity. Early Muhammedans
observed that the founder of Christianity was regarded by popular
opinion as a miracle worker of unrivalled power: it was impossible for
the founder of Islam to remain inferior in this respect. Thus the
early biographies of the prophet, which appeared in the first century
of Muhammedanism, recount the typical miracles of the Gospels, the
feeding of multitudes, healing the sick, raising the dead and so
forth. Two methods of adoption may be distinguished. Special features
are directly borrowed, or the line of advance is followed which had
introduced the worship of saints and relics to Christianity a short
time before. The religious emotions natural to any people produced a
series of ideas which pass from one religion to another. Outward form
and purport may be changed, but the essential points remain unaltered
and are the living expression of that relation to God in which a
people conceives itself to stand. Higher forms of religion--a fact as
sad as it is true--require a certain degree not only of moral but of
intellectual capacity.