Augustine, I must deny my own conscience, my own reason, I must outrage
my own moral sense, and confess that I have no immutable standard of
right, that I know no eternal source of right, if I deny it to have been
one; if I deny what seems to me the palpable historic fact, that those
wild Koreish had in them a reason and a conscience, which could awaken
to that message, and perceive its boundless beauty, its boundless
importance, and that they did accept that message, and lived by it in
proportion as they received it fully, such lives as no men in those
times, and few in after times, have been able to live. If I feel, as I
do feel, that Abubekr, Omar, Abu Obeidah, and Amrou, were better men
than I am, I must throw away all that Philo--all that a Higher
authority--has taught me: or I must attribute their lofty virtues to
the one source of all in man which is not selfishness, and fancy, and
fury, and blindness as of the beasts which perish.

Why, then, has Islamism become one of the most patent and complete
failures upon earth, if the true test of a system's success be the
gradual progress and amelioration of the human beings who are under its
influence? First, I believe, from its allowing polygamy. I do not
judge Mohammed for having allowed it. He found it one of the ancestral
and immemorial customs of his nation. He found it throughout the Hebrew
Scriptures. He found it in the case of Abraham, his ideal man; and, as
he believed, the divinely-inspired ancestor of his race. It seemed to
him that what was right for Abraham, could not be wrong for an Arab.
God shall judge him, not I. Moreover, the Christians of the East,
divided into either monks or profligates; and with far lower and more
brutal notions of the married state than were to be found in Arab poetry
and legend, were the very last men on earth to make him feel the eternal
and divine beauty of that pure wedded love which Christianity has not
only proclaimed, but commanded, and thereby emancipated woman from her