mistaken teacher, and that many of his mistakes and imperfections were the
result of circumstances, of temperament, and constitution; and that there
must be elements both of truth and goodness in the system of which he was the
main author, to account for the world-wide phenomenon, that whatever may be
the intellectual inferiority (if such is, indeed, the fact) of the Muslim
races, the influence of his teaching, aided, it is true, by the vast impulse
given to it by the victorious arms of his followers, has now lasted for
nearly thirteen centuries, and embraces more than one hundred millions of our
race-more than one-tenth part of the inhabitants of the globe.

It must be acknowledged, too, that the Koran deserves the highest praise for
its conceptions of the Divine nature, in reference to the attributes of
Power, Knowledge, and universal Providence and Unity-that its belief and
trust in the One God of Heaven and Earth is deep and fervent-and that, though
it contains fantastic visions and legends, teaches a childish ceremonial, and
justifies bloodshedding, persecution, slavery, and polygamy, yet that at the
same time it embodies much of a noble and deep moral earnestness, and
sententious oracular wisdom, and has proved that there are elements in it on
which mighty nations, and conquering though not, perhaps, durable-empires can
be built up. It is due to the Koran, that the occupants in the sixth century
of an arid peninsula, whose poverty was only equalled by their ignorance,
become not only the fervent and sincere votaries of a new creed, but, like
Amru and many more, its warlike propagators. Impelled possibly by drought and
famine, actuated partly by desire of conquest, partly by religious
convictions, they had conquered Persia in the seventh century, the northern
coasts of Africa, and a large portion of Spain in the eighth, the Punjaub and
nearly the whole of India in the ninth. The simple shepherds and wandering
Bedouins of Arabia, are transformed, as if by a magician's wand, into the
founders of empires, the builders of cities, the collectors of more libraries
than they at first destroyed, while cities like Fostât, Baghdad, Cordova, and