the disdainful laxity of a legislator who accommodates his rule to the recipient, and shows his estimate of the recipient by the accommodation which he adopts.  Did we search history for a contrast, we could hardly discover a deeper one than that between St. Paul’s overflowing standard of the capabilities of human nature and the oracular cynicism of the great false Prophet.  The writer of the Koran does, indeed, if any discerner of hearts ever did, take the measure of mankind; and his measure is the same that Satire has taken, only expressed with the majestic brevity of one who had once lived in the realm of Silence.  “Man is weak,” says Mahomet.  And upon that maxim he legislates....  The keenness of Mahomet’s insight into human nature, a wide knowledge of its temptations, persuasives, influences under which it acts, a vast immense capacity of forbearance for it, half grave half genial, half sympathy half scorn, issue in a somewhat Horatian model, the character of the man of experience who despairs of any change in man, and lays down the maxim that we must take him as we find him.  It was indeed his supremacy in both faculties, the largeness of the passive nature and the splendour of action, that constituted the secret of his success.  The breadth and flexibility of mind that could negotiate with every motive of interest, passion, and pride in man is surprising; there is boundless sagacity; what is wanting is hope, a belief in the capabilities of human nature.  There is no upward flight in the teacher’s idea of man.  Instead of which, the notion of the power of earth, and the impossibility of resisting it, depresses his whole aim, and the shadow of the tomb falls upon the work of the great false Prophet.

The idea of God is akin to the idea of man.  “He knows us,” says Mahomet.  God’s knowledge, the vast experience, so to speak, of the Divine Being, His infinite acquaintance with man’s frailties and temptations, is appealed to as the ground of confidence.  “He is the Wise, the Knowing One,” “He is the Knowing, the Wise,” “He is easy to be reconciled.”  Thus is raised a notion of the Supreme Being, which is rather an extension of the character of the large-minded and sagacious man of the world than an extension of man’s virtue and holiness.  He forgives because He knows too much to be rigid, because sin universal ceases to be sin, and must be given way to.  Take a man who has had large opportunity of studying mankind, and has come into contact with every form of human weakness and corruption; such a man is indulgent as a simple consequence of his knowledge, because nothing surprises him.  So the God of Mahomet forgives by reason of His vast knowledge.

In contrast with the fruit of this he observes that “the prophecy in the Epistle to the Romans has been fulfilled, and that doctrine has been historically at the bottom of a great change of moral practice in mankind.”  The key has been found to set