And now--can we pass over this new metaphysical school of Alexandria?
Can we help inquiring in what the strength of Islamism lay? I, at
least, cannot. I cannot help feeling that I am bound to examine in what
relation the creed of Omar and Amrou stands to the Alexandrian
speculations of five hundred years, and how it had power to sweep those
speculations utterly from the Eastern mind. It is a difficult problem;
to me, as a Christian priest, a very awful problem. What more awful
historic problem, than to see the lower creed destroying the higher? to
see God, as it were, undoing his own work, and repenting Him that He had
made man? Awful indeed: but I can honestly say, that it is one from
the investigation of which I have learnt--I cannot yet tell how much:
and of this I am sure, that without that old Alexandrian philosophy, I
should not have been able to do justice to Islam; without Islam I should
not have been able to find in that Alexandrian philosophy, an ever-
living and practical element.

I must, however, first entreat you to dismiss from your minds the vulgar
notion that Mohammed was in anywise a bad man, or a conscious deceiver,
pretending to work miracles, or to do things which he did not do. He
sinned in one instance: but, as far as I can see, only in that one--I
mean against what he must have known to be right. I allude to his
relaxing in his own case those wise restrictions on polygamy which he
had proclaimed. And yet, even in this case, the desire for a child may
have been the true cause of his weakness. He did not see the whole
truth, of course: but he was an infinitely better man than the men
around: perhaps, all in all, one of the best men of his day. Many here
may have read Mr. Carlyle's vindication of Mohammed in his Lectures on
Hero Worship; to those who have not, I shall only say, that I entreat
them to do so; and that I assure them, that though I differ in many
things utterly from Mr. Carlyle's inferences and deductions in that