Thus they are, in the main point of doctrine connected with the Deity, simply Arians as opposed to Athanasians.  History proves that the former was the earlier faith which, though formally condemned in A. D. 325 by Constantine’s Council of Nice, [FN#317] overspread the Orient beginning with Eastern Europe, where Ulphilas converted the Goths; which extended into Africa with the Vandals, claimed a victim or martyr as late as in the sixteenth century [FN#318] and has by no means died out in this our day.

The Talmud had been completed a full century before Mohammed’s time and the Evangel had been translated into Arabic; moreover travel and converse with his Jewish and Christian friends and companions must have convinced the Meccan Apostle that Christianity was calling as loudly for reform as Judaism had done. [FN#319] An exaggerated Trinitarianism or rather Tritheism, a “Fourth Person” and Saint-worship had virtually dethroned the Deity; whilst Mariolatry had made the faith a religio muliebris, and superstition had drawn from its horrid fecundity an incredible number of heresies and monstrous absurdities.  Even ecclesiastic writers draw the gloomiest pictures of the Christian Church in the fourth and seventh centuries, and one declares that the “Kingdom of Heaven had become a Hell.”  Egypt, distracted by the blood- thirsty religious wars of Copt and Greek, had been covered with hermitages by a yens aeterna of semi-maniacal superstition.  Syria, ever “feracious of heresies,” had allowed many of her finest tracts to be monopolised by monkeries and nunneries.[FN#320] After many a tentative measure Mohammed seems to have built his edifice upon two bases, the unity of the Godhead and the priesthood of the pater-familias.  He abolished for ever the “sacerdos alter Christus” whose existence, as some one acutely said, is the best proof of Christianity, and whom all know to be its weakest point.  The Moslem family, however humble, was to be the model in miniature of the State, and every father in Al-Islam was made priest and pontiff in his own house, able unaided to marry himself, to circumcise (to baptise as it were) his children, to instruct them in the law and canonically to bury himself (vol. viii. 22).  Ritual, properly so called, there was none; congregational prayers were merely those of the individual en masse, and the only admitted approach to a sacerdotal order were the Olema or scholars learned in the legistic and the Mullah or schoolmaster.  By thus abolishing the priesthood Mohammed reconciled ancient with modern wisdom.  “Scito dominum,” said Cato, “pro tota familia rem divinam facere”:  “No priest at a birth, no priest at a marriage, no priest at a death,” is the aspiration of the present Rationalistic School.