“This man, (Al-Ghazali) if ever any have deserved the name, was truly a ‘divine,’ and he may be justly placed on a level with Origen, so remarkable was he for learning and ingenuity, and gifted with such a rare faculty for the skilful and worthy exposition of doctrine. All that is good, noble, and sublime that his great soul had compassed he bestowed upon Mohammedanism, and he adorned the doctrines of the Koran with so much piety and learning that, in the form given them by him, they seem, in my opinion, worthy the assent of Christians. Whatsoever was most excellent in the philosophy of Aristotle or in the Sufic mysticism he discreetly adapted to the Mohammedan theology; from every school he sought the means of shedding light and honour upon religion; while his sincere piety and lofty conscientiousness imparted to all his writings a sacred majesty. He was the first of Mohammedan divines.” —_Dr. August Tholuck._ V HIS CREED AND CREDULITY Although, according to his own testimony in his “Confessions,” Al-Ghazali was troubled from his earliest years with doubt and scepticism, he was not willing to yield to it, and his faith rose triumphant above all his doubts. This is one of the outstanding facts in his biography. He could say with the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews that “faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.” Not only did he find God in nature and in his own conscience and consciousness, but he was a firm believer in revelation. Naturally the only revelation to which Al-Ghazali turned as the basis, the very bed-rock of religious faith, was the Koran, the eternal, uncreated word of God according to Moslem teaching; and also to the life of the Prophet Mohammed, his practices and his precepts handed down in orthodox Tradition—this also was a revelation from God. Whether he ever read the Old and New Testament is a question we consider unanswered. He did not draw his creed from this source. Al-Ghazali gives the distinction very clearly, almost as clearly as the Epistle of James, between faith and works. He was a dogmatic theologian and laid down, as we shall see in this chapter, with punctilious care every point of dogma; but he was also a moralist and a man of high ideals which he sought to attain through prayer and fasting and pilgrimage, and a life of utter devotion to the will of God. His faith was living and practical, not theoretical and scholastic. In his great work, the _Ihya_, he discusses the whole subject of faith, and enumerates the following classes of believers: “He who combines inner belief with outward confession and good works is a true believer and enters Paradise.