459 MAHOMEDANISM IN THE INDIAN ARCHIPELAGO* 
peans in the Indian Archipelago have been just what the 
Turks have been in Europe, and the consequences of the 
policy pursued by both may fairly be quoted as parallel cases. 
Crawfurd. 
The Truth and Power that is in Mahomedanism. 
But there is another thing to be said about the Mahomedan 
Heaven and Hell. This namely, that, however gross and 
material they may be, they are an emblem of an everlasting 
truth, not always so well remembered elsewhere. That gross 
sensual Paradise of his ; that horrible flaming Hell; the great 
enormous Day of Judgment he perpetually insists on: what 
is all this but a rude shadow, in the rude Bedouin imagina¬ 
tion, of that grand spiritual Fact, and Beginning of Facts, 
which it is ill for us too if we do not all know and feel: the 
Infinite Nature of Duty? That man’s actions here are of 
infinite moment to him, and never die or end at all; that 
man, with his little life, reaches upwards high as Heaven, 
downwards low as Hell, and in his threescore years of Time 
holds an Eternity fearfully and wonderfully hidden: all this 
had burnt itself, as in flame-characters, into the wild Arab 
soul. As in flame and lightning, it stands written there ; 
awful, unspeakable, ever present to him. With bursting 
earnestness, with a fierce savage sincerity, half-articulating, 
not able to articulate, he strives to speak it, bodies it forth in 
that Heaven and that Hell. Bodied forth in what way you 
will, it is the first of all truths. It is venerable under all 
embodiments. What is the chief end of man here below ? 
Mahomet has answered this question, in a way that might 
put some of us to shame! He does not, like a Benfham, a 
Paley, take Right and Wrong, and calculate the profit and 
loss, ultimate pleasure of the one and of the other; and sum¬ 
ming all up by addition and subtraction into a net result, ask 
you. Whether on the whole the Right does not preponderate 
considerably? No; it is not better to do the one than the 
other; the one is to the other as life is to death,—as Heaven 
is to Hell. The one must in nowise be done, the other in no¬ 
wise left undone. You shall not measure them; they are in¬ 
commensurable: the one is death eternal to a man, the other 
is life eternal. Benthamee Utility, virtue by Profit and Loss ; 
reducing this God’s-world to a dead brute Steam-engine, the 
infinite celestial Soul of Man to a kind of Hay-balance for 
