402 



THE BAYAZI. 



the highest mental and moral expression; the 

 higher the conception the higher will be the intel- 

 lectual status, and vice versa ; even the same 

 race constantly modifies its hold for better or 

 for worse. I do not believe that the sages of 

 Greece and Rome were polytheists or idolaters, 

 although they may have sacrificed cocks to Escu- 

 lapius. Under almost all mythologies, even the 

 Hindu, there is an underlying faith in monothe- 

 ism. But the God of the Jews, of the Christians, 

 and of the Moslems, differs in kind as well as in 

 degree, even as the God of Calvin would not be 

 the God of Channing. A late writer has pub- 

 lished several pages of very good writing and very 

 bad reasoning, upon the contrast of the Deity, as 

 worshipped by Christianity and by El Islam. His 

 error has been to assume Wahhabiism for the 

 typical form of the latter. I might as well work 

 out the theory that the Anabaptist Protestant is 

 the Christian par excellence. Like the article on 

 the Tali m id which lately created so much attention, 

 it is an able bit of special pleading and no more. 



Amongst Moslems, Paradise is supposed to cm- 

 brace the extent of the earth and firmament, and 

 the late Sayyid used quaintly to remark, that 

 his scanty orthodox subjects would people it but 

 poorly. The Bayazi, unlike others of the Saving 



