72 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



says, a relative and not a positive term. He makes a great deal 

 of play out of what he seems to suppose will "be a very painful 

 and surprising consideration to myself, that to a Mohammedan I 

 am an infidel. Of course I am; and I should never expect a 

 Mohammedan, if he were called upon, as I was, to argue before 

 an assembly of his own fellow-believers, to call me anything else. 

 Prof. Huxley is good enough to imagine me in his company on a 

 visit to the Hazar Mosque at Cairo. When he entered that 

 mosque without due credentials, he suspects that, had he under- 

 stood Arabic, " dog of an infidel " would have been by no means 

 the most " unpleasant " of the epithets showered upon him, before 

 he could explain and apologize for the mistake. If, he says, " I 

 had had the pleasure of Dr. Wace's company on that occasion, 

 the undiscriminative followers of the Prophet would, I am afraid, 

 have made no difference between us ; not even if they had known 

 that he was the head of an orthodox Christian seminary." Prob- 

 ably not ; and I will add that I should have felt very little confi- 

 dence in any attempts which Prof. Huxley might have made, in 

 the style of his present article, to protect me, by repudiating for 

 himself the unpleasant epithets which he deprecates. It would, I 

 suspect, have been of very little avail to attempt a subtle explana- 

 tion, to one of the learned mollahs of whom he speaks, that he 

 really did not mean to deny that there was one God, but only 

 that he did not know anything on the subject, and that he 

 desired to avoid expressing any opinion respecting the claims of 

 Mohammed. It would be plain to the learned mollah that Prof. 

 Huxley did not believe either of the articles of the Mohammedan 

 creed — in other words that, for all his fine distinctions, he was at 

 bottom a downright infidel, such as I confessed myself, and that 

 there was an end of the matter. There is no fair way of avoiding 

 the plain matter of fact in either case. A Mohammedan believes 

 and asserts that there is no God but God, and that Mohammed is 

 the prophet of God. I don't believe Mohammed. In the plain, 

 blunt, sensible phrase people used to use on such subjects I be- 

 lieve he was a false prophet, and I am a downright infidel about 

 him. The Christian creed might almost be summed up in the 

 assertion that there is one, and but one God, and that Jesus 

 Christ is his prophet ; and whoever denies that creed says that he 

 does not believe Jesus Christ, by whom it was undoubtedly as- 

 serted. It is better to look facts in the face, especially from a 

 scientific point of view. Whether Prof. Huxley is justified in his 

 denial of that creed is a further question, which demands separate 

 consideration, but which was not, and is not now, at issue. All I 

 say is that his position involves that disbelief or infidelity, and 

 that this is a responsibility which must be faced by agnos- 

 ticism. 



