“But Christianity, with its living and loving God, begetter and begotten, spirit and movement; nay more,—­a Creator made creature, the Maker and the made existing in one; a Divinity communicating itself by uninterrupted gradation and degree, from the most intimate union far off to the faintest irradiation, through all that it has made for love and governs in love; one who calls his creatures not slaves, not servants, but friends,—­nay sons,—­nay gods:  to sum up, a religion in whose seal and secret ’God in man is one with man in God,’ must also be necessarily a religion of vitality, of progress, of advancement.  The contrast between it and Islam is that of movement with fixedness, of participation with sterility, of development with barrenness, of life with petrifaction.  The first vital principle and the animating spirit of its birth must, indeed, abide ever the same, but the outer form must change with the changing days, and new offshoots of fresh sap and greenness be continually thrown out as witnesses to the vitality within; else were the vine withered and the branches dead.  I have no intention here—­it would be extremely out of place—­of entering on the maze of controversy, or discussing whether any dogmatic attempt to reproduce the religious phase of a former age is likely to succeed.  I only say that life supposes movement and growth, and both imply change; that to censure a living thing for growing and changing is absurd; and that to attempt to hinder it from so doing by pinning it down on a written label, or nailing it to a Procrustean framework, is tantamount to killing it altogether.  Now Christianity is living, and, because living, must grow, must advance, must change, and was meant to do so:  onwards and forwards is a condition of its very existence; and I cannot but think that those who do not recognize this show themselves so far ignorant of its true nature and essence.  On the other hand, Islam is lifeless, and, because lifeless, cannot grow, cannot advance, cannot change, and was never intended so to do; stand-still is its motto and its most essential condition; and therefore the son of Abd-el-Wahhab, in doing his best to bring it back to its primal simplicity, and making its goal of its starting-point, was so far in the right, and showed himself well acquainted with the nature and first principles of his religion.”

Sec. 7.  Mohammedanism a Relapse; the worst Form of Monotheism, and a retarding Element in Civilization.

According to this view, which is no doubt correct, the monotheism of Mohammed is that which makes of God pure will; that is, which exaggerates personality (since personality is in will), making the Divine One an Infinite Free Will, or an Infinite I. But will divorced from reason and love is wilfulness, or a purely arbitrary will.

Now the monotheism of the Jews differed from this, in that it combined with the idea of will the idea of justice.  God not only does what he chooses, but he chooses to do only what is right.  Righteousness is an attribute of God, with which the Jewish books are saturated.