Absolute sovereignty and ruthless omnipotence are his chief attributes while his character is impersonal—that of a monad. Among the ninety-nine beautiful names of God, which Edwin Arnold has used in his poem “Pearls of the Faith,” the ideas of fatherhood, love, impartial justice and unselfishness are absent. The Christian truth “God is love” is to the learned, blasphemy and to the ignorant an enigma. Palgrave, who certainly was not biased against the religion of Arabia and who lived with the Arabs for long months, calls the theology of Islam “the pantheism of force.” No one has ever given a better account of _Allah_, a more faithful portrait of Mohammed’s conception of deity than Palgrave. Every word of his description tallies with statements which one can hear daily from pious Moslems. Yet no one who reads what we quote in all its fullness will recognize here the God whom David addresses in the Psalms or who became incarnate at Bethlehem and suffered on Calvary. This is Palgrave’s statement: “There is no god but God—are words simply tantamount in English to the negation of any deity save one alone; and thus much they certainly mean in Arabic, but they imply much more also. Their full sense is, not only to deny absolutely and unreservedly all plurality, whether of nature or of person, in the Supreme Being, not only to establish the unity of the Unbegetting and Unbegot, in all its simple and uncommunicable Oneness, but besides this the words, in Arabic and among Arabs, imply that this one Supreme Being is also the only Agent, the only Force, the only Act existing throughout the universe, and leave to all beings else, matter or spirit, instinct or intelligence, physical or moral, nothing but pure, unconditional passiveness, alike in movement or in quiescence, in action or in capacity. The sole power, the sole motor, movement, energy, and deed is God; the rest is downright inertia and mere instrumentality, from the highest archangel down to the simplest atom of creation. Hence, in this one sentence, ‘La Ilāh illa Allāh,’ is summed up a system which, for want of a better name, I may be permitted to call the Pantheism of Force, or of Act, thus exclusively assigned to God, who absorbs it all, exercises it all, and to whom alone it can be ascribed, whether for preserving or for destroying, for relative evil or for equally relative good. I say ‘relative,’ because it is clear that in such a theology no place is left for absolute good or evil, reason or extravagance; all is abridged in the autocratic will of the one great Agent: ‘sic volo, sic jubeo, stet pro ratione voluntas’; or, more significantly still, in Arabic, ‘Kemā yesha’o,’ ‘as he wills it,’ to quote the constantly recurring expression of the Koran.