mood always will, after prodigious and unnatural proofs of His having
been once present with their founder Mohammed.

And in the meanwhile that absolute and omnipotent Being whom Mohammed,
arising out of his great darkness, had so nobly preached to the Koreish,
receded in the minds of their descendants to an unapproachable and
abysmal distance. For they had lost the sense of His present guidance,
His personal care. They had lost all which could connect Him with the
working of their own souls, with their human duties and struggles, with
the belief that His mercy and love were counterparts of human mercy and
human love; in plain English, that He was loving and merciful at all.
The change came very gradually, thank God; you may read of noble sayings
and deeds here and there, for many centuries after Mohammed: but it
came; and then their belief in God's omnipotence and absoluteness
dwindled into the most dark, and slavish, and benumbing fatalism. His
unchangeableness became in their minds not an unchangeable purpose to
teach, forgive, and deliver men--as it seemed to Mohammed to have been--
but a mere brute necessity, an unchangeable purpose to have His own way,
whatsoever that way might be. That dark fatalism, also, has helped
toward the decay of the Mohammedan nations. It has made them careless
of self-improvement; faithless of the possibility of progress; and has
kept, and will keep, the Mohammedan nations, in all intellectual
matters, whole ages behind the Christian nations of the West.

How far the story of Omar's commanding the baths of Alexandria to be
heated with the books from the great library is true, we shall never
know. Some have doubted the story altogether: but so many fresh
corroborations of it are said to have been lately discovered, in Arabic
writers, that I can hardly doubt that it had some foundation in fact.
One cannot but believe that John Philoponus, the last of the Alexandrian