All the doctrines preached by Mohammed are discoverable in the great body of Catholic theology. Not one came from outside. The Fatherhood of God, the truth that God is Personal, that He is the Creator of all things; that He is supremely good; that the human soul is immortal; that it may attain eternal beatitude or sink to eternal wretchedness; that the souls of men are equal in the sight of God; and that a man should regard all other men as his brethren: such a complete “corpus” of doctrine Mohammed did not find among the Jews (for they were exclusive—Immortality was not an original tenet with them let alone the dual fate of man); he did not find it taught in Buddhism, which despairs and knows nothing of God, let alone of the Immortal individual soul. Mohammedanism drew of necessity from _our_ culture. There was nothing else for it to draw from. The Græco-Roman world overshadowed all its origins. It is the failure to appreciate the magnitude of his own ancestry, which thus makes Mr. Wells misunderstand the nature of the first amazing growth of Islam. Or, rather, he understands one-half of that magnitude, its burdensome complexity; but he does not understand the wealth of mind out of which alone such complexity could come. That is why he does not know that Islam submerged and degraded a higher thing. We have the ruins of column and capital to prove it; but I do not think that Mr. Wells would understand, say, Timgad. We have the _Veni Creator Spiritus_ and the _Vexilla Regis_ and all that comes between them; but I doubt whether Mr. Wells would understand what that great poetry is or the profound theology that nourished it. He exaggerated (though it is difficult to exaggerate) the material decline of the early Dark Ages. For instance, they kept up their roads. Islam could never make a road.