of humiliating themselves before the Almighty." One can imagine the effect of such a spectacle upon the mind of a good Mussulman, who held that, in the language of the 5th Sura, "they are verily infidels who say that God is the third of three, for there is no God but one God;" but who, nevertheless, believed that Christ was the Word proceeding from God, that he worked miracles, and that his birth was a supernatural occurrence.

Such, briefly and imperfectly described, were the Arabs in Spain; and the period of their domination over that country, was the most brilliant and benignant in the history of Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire; while their disastrous defeat at the Battle of Tours, and their subsequent expulsion from the Peninsula, may be regarded as one of the greatest calamities that has ever befallen the Western World, and as having retarded its civilisation for a number of centuries. It resembled the extinction of a great light shining in the midst of profound darkness. Moslem rule in Spain commenced in the eighth, and terminated in the fifteenth century. We have seen what splendid fruits it bore. In the meantime what was the condition of the rest of Europe? It may be described in the words which Byron has put into the mouth of Dante:

The seventh and eighth centuries were admittedly the darkest period of the Dark Ages; and if we go back to the one or two immediately preceding them, we find the state of society, as described by ecclesiastical writers, to have been almost anarchical, besides being perfectly hideous in its shameless immorality:

"There was scarcely a reign," writes Mr. Lecky, on the authority of Gregory of Tours, "that was not marked by some atrocious domestic tragedy. There were few sovereigns who were not guilty of at least one deliberate murder. Never, perhaps, was the infliction of mutilation, and prolonged and agonising forms of death, more common. We read, among other atrocities, of a bishop being driven to a distant land of exile upon a bed of thorns; of a king burning together his rebellious son, his daughter-in-law, and their daughters; of a queen condemning a daughter she had had by a former marriage to be drowned, lest her beauty should excite the passions of her husband; of another queen endeavouring to strangle her daughter with her own hands; of an abbot compelling a poor man to abandon his house, that he might commit adultery with his wife, and being murdered, together with his partner, in the act; of a prince who made it an habitual amusement to torture his slaves with fire, and who burned two of them alive, because they had married without his permission; of a bishop's wife, who, besides other crimes, was accustomed to mutilate men and to torture women, by applying red-hot irons to the most sensitive parts of their bodies; of great numbers who were deprived of their ears and noses, tortured through several

days, and at last ournt alive or broken slowly on the wheel. Brunehaut, at the close of her long, and in some respects great, though guilty career, fell into the hands of Clotaire, and the old queen, having been subjected for three days to various kinds of torture, was led out on a camel for the derision of the army, and at last bound to the tail of a furious horse, and dashed to pieces in its course. And yet this age was, in a certain sense, eminently religious. All literature had become sacred."*

Could these things have occurred if the Arab conquerors of Spain had overrun and subjugated France, Italy, and Britain? I venture to think not. For if, but for Mohammed, as Mr. Bosworth Smith has remarked, "the Dark Ages would have been doubly, nay, trebly dark; because the Arabs, who alone by their arts and sciences, by their agriculture, their philosophy, and their virtues, shone out amidst the universal gloom of ignorance and crime; who gave to Spain and to Europe an Averroes and an Avicenna, the Alhambra and the Al-kazar, would have been wandering over their native deserts." What vast benefits might they not have conferred, what immense ameliorating influences would they not have exerted upon the countries I have named, if their arms had been only victorious over those of the semibarbarians who fought under the banners of Charles Martel? Accurately speaking, the believers in Islam were the true disciples of Christ, while the nominal Christians were his enemies, and "crucified him afresh," by doing everything which he forbade, and leaving undone everything which he enjoined. Christianity upheld and perpetuated slavery, which is "condemned by the whole spirit of the Koran, condemned by the traditions, condemned by the doctors of the Mohammedan law."+ In Christendom, however, it lasted for 800 years after Constantine; "and between his reign and that of Charlemagne," observes Mr. Lecky, "the number of men who were subject to it was probably greater than in the pagan empire." By nearly all the most eminent fathers of the Church, by Ignatius, Cyprian, Hilary of Poitiers, Basil, Ambrose, Isidore, and Bernard, the institution of slavery was defended and upheld. Augustine declared it to have been introduced into the world as the penalty of sin;‡ and Thomas d'Aquinas sustained that nature had destined certain men to be slaves, and invoked the divine law in favour of such servitude. All through the Middle Ages, slaves *History of European Morals, Vol. II., p.p. 237-8-9.

+ Mohammed and Mohammedanism, by R. Bosworth Smith, p. 331.

Prima ergo servitatis causa peccatum est, ut homo homini conditionis vinculo subderetur, quod non fit nisi Deo judicante apud quem non est iniquitas.-De Civitate Dei, lib. XIX., cap. 15.

. Hoc

|| Inde probatur esse aliquos omnino servos secundum naturam etiam et lex divina præcepit, ut in Deuteronomio patet.-De Regimine Principum, lib. II., cap. 10.

formed part of the chattel property of innumerable churches and monasteries; and successive councils confirmed the rights of their possessors; while one, that of Lerida, held in 524, forbade clerical slave-owners to scourge those who had run away, as they were in the habit of doing; while another, that of Toledo, in 589, ordered bishops to sell the children of the kept mistresses of ecclesiastics; and this order was renewed by a council held in the same city in 633. Again, by the ninth Council of Toledo, held in 655, it was decreed that the illegitimate children of the priests, from those of the bishops down to those of the sub-deacons, should be the slaves in perpetuity of the churches of their respective fathers. During a period of five centuries, namely, from 558 to 1022, nearly every gift of land from the sovereigns of France to the various religious bodies expressly included the slaves of both sexes, who were attached to the soil, and who were classed with the cattle upon it; and as late as the year 1789 we find Bailly, in his Theologia Dogmatica et Moralis, vindicating slavery as an institution of divine origin.

Let us look at the position of women in Moslem Spain and in modern Europe, and compare the morality of the two conditions of society. "If," remarks Mr. Bosworth Smith," the two social touchstones of a religion are the way in which, relatively to the time, it deals with the weaker sex, and the way in which it regards the poor and the oppressed, Mohammed's religion can stand the test." Christian historians of Spain under the Arabs are astonished at the contrast presented by the consideration and respect paid to woman by the Moslems in that country, and by the comparatively inferior position assigned to her by the Spaniards during the same epoch. Strange phenomenon," writes A. M. Sané, in his preface to the Historia Cabelleresca de los Moros de Granada of Ginès Pérez de Hita, "one sees at the same time, and almost in the same places, a neighbouring nation, living under the empire of a religion which declares woman to be the companion and the equal of man, and which only accords to the latter such rights over her as spring from a tender protection; condemning her to sequestration, and to the most austere reserve; keeping a vigilant watch over her, and, while, doubtless, loving her with the same infatuation, exhibiting far less esteem for her, because more mistrustful and jealous of her than the Orientals. How those beautiful Castilians must have envied the fortunate existence of the wives and daughters of the Moors! The brilliant destiny of the Axas, the Patunas, the Cohaidas, and the Galianas-celebrated beauties whose renown filled the cities

.

of Spain-must have often excited the jealousy of the Christians, and caused them to sigh in the seclusion of the veritable harems in which they were confined." It is not too much to assert that, if Europe had fallen under the dominion of the Arab, our civilisation would never have been defiled to the same extent as it now is, by "the sin of great cities." This is, unhappily, in its modern developments, pre-eminently the sin of communities calling themselves Christian. "There has arisen in society," observes Mr. Lecky, in accents of pathetic eloquence, "a figure which is certainly the most mournfuland, in some respects, the most awful, upon which the eye of the moralist can dwell, that unhappy being-whose very name is a shame to speak; who counterfeits with a cold heart the transports of affection, and submits herself as the passive instrument of lust; who is scorned and insulted as the vilest of her sex, and doomed, for the most part, to disease and abject wretchedness and an early death— appears in every age as the perpetual symbol of the degradation and the sinfulness of man. She remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people." And there is not a country in Christendom in which women of this kind may not be computed by hundreds of thousands; nor are they anywhere more relatively numerous than in Great Britain, or more depraved than in the rural districts. If I refrain from adducing evidence on this point, it is because the theme is one which obviously cannot be discussed in detail in the pages of a magazine. But for the purposes of comparison and contrast, let anyone read Messrs. Henry Mayhew and B. Hemyng's account of the pure lives led by the women of Arabia, and the "lofty system of morals distinguishing the Bedouins of the desert," and he cannot fail to be struck by the superiority they present to females of the same class in England. "No region in the world," these writers assert, "presents spectacles of happier homes than the plains of Arabia, with their tents and wandering tribes. Women are comparatively free, being tolerated even in religious differences, which implies a high estimate of their intellectual qualities. Modesty with them is regarded as

the finest grace of the sex. It is genuine and unassailable."

Not to dwell too long, however, upon so delicate and difficult a subject, let us pass on to point out what the rule of the Crescent over the Latin races, supposing the Spanish Arabs to have been victorious at Tours, might and would have saved Europe in the way of religious discord, persecution, and bloodshed. Mohammedanism,

one."

as expounded by the Prophet, is essentially a tolerant religion. Dispute not," said he to his followers, "against those who have received the Scriptures, that is Jews and Christians, except with gentleness; but say unto them, we believe in the Revelation which hath been sent down to us, and also in that which hath been sent down to you; and our God and your God is And again, in two, at least, of the Suras he has written: "Verily, they who be here, and the Jews, and the Sabeites, and the Christians,-whoever of them believeth in God and in the last day, and doth that which is right, on them shall come no fear, neither shall they be put to grief."* Now look, on the other hand, at the blood-stained history of persecution in Christendom, and remember, also, that the words addressed to the Prior of Yuste, by Charles V., when he retired to that monastery, were such as every "good Catholic" would have approved of, not merely then, but at any time between the fifth and seventeenth centuries.† "Father," said the monarch, "if anything could drag me from this retreat, it would be to aid in chastising these heretics. For such creatures as those now in prison, however, this is not necessary, but I have written to the Inquisition to burn them all; for none of them will ever become true Catholics, or are worthy to live." And being unworthy to live, he looked upon it as a pious deed to consign them, as he imagined, to endless torments in the flames of an everlasting place of torture. Equally ferocious and equally sanguinary was the language held by the illustrious Bossuet, in his sermon Sur la bonté et la rigueur de Dieu, where, speaking of the siege of Jerusalem, he exclaims, "Divine justice required an infinite number of victims. It wished to see eleven hundred thousand men mown down at the siege of a single city." Evidently the god worshipped by a man who could write thus blasphemously, must have been the "divinity of hell" whom Othello apostrophised.

From the persecution of the Arians by the Athanasians, in 325, when it was made a capital offence to possess the writings of Arius, down to the proscription, flogging, and banishment of Polish Uniates by Russian Catholics belonging to the Greek Church, a few years ago, the religious history of Christendom has been scarcely ever free from the taint of blood; men calling themselves Christians, butchering each other "for the love of God!"

* Rodwell's Koran, Sura the 5th, p. 546.

+ Stirling's Cloister Life of Charles V.

Protestants have been equally intolerant, it may be added, when they had the

power.