The Meccan Apostle wisely retained the compulsory sacrament of circumcision and the ceremonial ablutions of the Mosaic law; and the five daily prayers not only diverted man’s thoughts from the world but tended to keep his body pure.  These two institutions had been practiced throughout life by the Founder of Christianity; but the followers who had never seen him, abolished them for purposes evidently political and propagandist.  By ignoring the truth that cleanliness is next to godliness they paved the way for such saints as Simon Stylites and Sabba who, like the lowest Hindu orders of ascetics, made filth a concominant and an evidence of piety:  even now English Catholic girls are at times forbidden by Italian priests a frequent use of the bath as a sign post to the sin of “luxury.”  Mohammed would have accepted the morals contained in the Sermon on the Mount much more readily than did the Jews from whom its matter was borrowed.[FN#321] He did something to abolish the use of wine, which in the East means only its abuse; and he denounced games of chance, well knowing that the excitable races of sub-tropical climates cannot play with patience, fairness or moderation.  He set aside certain sums for charity to be paid by every Believer and he was the first to establish a poor-rate (Zakat):  thus he avoided the shame and scandal of mendicancy which, beginning in the Catholic countries of Southern Europe, extends to Syria and as far East as Christianity is found.  By these and other measures of the same import he made the ideal Moslem’s life physically clean, moderate and temperace.

But Mohammed, the “master mind of the age,” had, we must own, a “genuine prophetic power, a sinking of self in the Divine not distinguishable in kind from the inspiration of the Hebrew prophets,” especially in that puritanical and pharisaic narrowness which, with characteristic simplicity, can see no good outside its own petty pale.  He had insight as well as outsight, and the two taught him that personal and external reformation were mean matters compared with elevating the inner man.  In the “purer Faith,” which he was commissioned to abrogate and to quicken, he found two vital defects equally fatal to its energy and to its longevity.  These were (and are) its egoism and its degradation of humanity.  Thus it cannot be a “pleroma”:  it needs a Higher Law.[FN#322] As Judaism promised the good Jew all manner of temporal blessings, issue, riches, wealth, honour, power, length of days, so Christianity offered the good Christian, as a bribe to lead a godly life, personal salvation and a future state of happiness, in fact the Kingdom of Heaven, with an alternative threat of Hell.  It never rose to the height of the Hindu Brahmans and Lao-Tse (the “Ancient Teacher"); of Zeno the Stoic and his disciples the noble Pharisees[FN#323] who believed and preached that Virtue is its own reward.  It never dared to say, “Do good for Good’s sake;"[FN#324] even now it does not declare with Cicero,