and teacher. But their creed contained nothing which could keep up that
belief in the minds of succeeding generations. They had destroyed the
good with the evil, and they paid the penalty of their undistinguishing
wrath. In sweeping away the idolatries and fetish worships of the
Syrian Catholics, the Mussulmans had swept away also that doctrine which
alone can deliver men from idolatry and fetish worships--if not outward
and material ones, yet the still more subtle, and therefore more
dangerous idolatries of the intellect. For they had swept away the
belief in the Logos; in a divine teacher of every human soul, who was,
in some mysterious way, the pattern and antitype of human virtue and
wisdom. And more, they had swept away that belief in the incarnation of
the Logos, which alone can make man feel that his divine teacher is one
who can enter into the human duties, sorrows, doubts, of each human
spirit. And, therefore, when Mohammed and his personal friends were
dead, the belief in a present divine teacher, on the whole, died with
them; and the Mussulmans began to put the Koran in the place of Him of
whom the Koran spoke. They began to worship the book--which after all
is not a book, but only an irregular collection of Mohammed's
meditations, and notes for sermons--with the most slavish and ridiculous
idolatry. They fell into a cabbalism, and a superstitious reverence for
the mere letters and words of the Koran, to which the cabbalism of the
old Rabbis was moderate and rational. They surrounded it, and the
history of Mohammed, with all ridiculous myths, and prodigies, and lying
wonders, whereof the book itself contained not a word; and which
Mohammed, during his existence, had denied and repudiated, saying that
he worked no miracles, and that none were needed; because only reason
was required to show a man the hand of a good God in all human affairs.
Nevertheless, these later Mussulmans found the miracles necessary to
confirm their faith: and why? Because they had lost the sense of a
present God, a God of order; and therefore hankered, as men in such a