Maccovius and the Synod of Dort:—­Good works are an obstacle to salvation.  God does by no means will the salvation of all men:  he does will sin and he destines men to sin, as sin?  What would they think of the Inadmissible Grace, the Perseverance of the Elect, the Supralapsarian and the Sublapsarian and, finally, of a Deity the author of man’s existence, temptation and fall, who deliberately pre-ordains sin and ruin?  “Father Cohen” carries out into the regions of the extreme his strictures on the one grand vitalising idea of Al-Islam, “There is no god but God;"[FN#336] and his deduction concerning the Pantheism of Force sounds unreal and unsound, compared with the sensible remarks upon the same subject by Dr. Badgers[FN#337] who sees the abstruseness of the doctrine and does not care to include it in hard and fast lines or to subject it to mere logical analysis.  Upon the subject of “predestination” Mr. Palgrave quotes, not from the Koran, but from the Ahadis or Traditional Sayings of the Apostle; but what importance attaches to a legend in the Mischnah, or Oral Law, of the Hebrews utterly ignored by the Written Law?  He joins the many in complaining that even the mention of “the love of God” is absent from Mohammed’s theology, burking the fact that it never occurs in the Jewish scriptures and that the genius of Arabic, like Hebrew, does not admit the expression:  worse still, he keeps from his reader such Koranic passages as, to quote no other, “Allah loveth you and will forgive your sins” (iii. 29).  He pities Allah for having “no son, companion or counsellor” and, of course, he must equally commiserate Jehovah.  Finally his views of the lifelessness of Al-Islam are directly opposed to the opinions of Dr. Leitner and the experience of all who have lived in Moslem lands.  Such are the ingenious but not ingenuous distortions of fact, the fine instances of the pathetic fallacy, and the noteworthy illustrations of the falsehood of extremes, which have engendered “Mohammedanism a Relapse:  the worst form of Monotheism,"[FN#338] and which have been eagerly seized upon and further deformed by the authors of popular books, that is, volumes written by those who know little for those who know less.

In Al-Rashid’s day a mighty change had passed over the primitive simplicity of Al-Islam, the change to which faiths and creeds, like races and empires and all things sublunary, are subject.  The proximity of Persia and the close intercourse with the Graeco-Romans had polished and greatly modified the physiognomy of the rugged old belief:  all manner of metaphysical subtleties had cropped up, with the usual disintegrating effect, and some of these threatened even the unity of the Godhead.  Musaylimah and Karmat had left traces of their handiwork:  the Mutazilites (separatists or secessors) actively propagated their doctrine of a created and temporal Koran.  The Khariji or Ibazi, who rejects and reviles Abu Turab (Caliph Ali), contended passionately with the Shi’ah who reviles and