In the world of spirit a religion is a real, organic, living, acting entity. It animates, it subdues, it pervades, it colours, it guides men’s minds and hearts. They breathe it. They feed upon it. They are what it makes them. Now our religion is characterized by liberty. It leaves men to construct their own polities, and to devise for themselves the laws they are to live by. It obliges them to understand that they are the arbiters and the architects of their own fortunes. It leaves them free, from age to age, to battle about, and to construct their own theology, with the certainty that whether the same or different forms are used, it will always in the end be adjusted to the ideas of the age, and even of the individual. It appeals to men’s own ideas of God, which vary as knowledge advances; and to the sense mankind have of what is just, and merciful, and lovely, and of good report. It does not define these things, for it supposes that the ideas of them are in man. It makes the light that is within the measure of duty. One of the general results of such a religion is, that it renders men capable, and desirous, too, of thinking. It produces within them an habitual desire to see things as they are, and to conform their feelings and their conduct to realities. The system which is most diametrically opposite to this is that which the Oriental has adopted. He has no liberty of any kind. He must think, and feel, and live in accordance with, and every detail of his inner and outer life must be conformed to, what were the ideas of the Arab barbarians of twelve centuries ago. This is the procrustean bed on which the mind of every Oriental is laid. This, then, is what my friend’s nineteenth-century Christianity, or, if you prefer it, his nineteenth-century ideas and feelings, have been brought into contact with—the ideas and feelings of Arab barbarians of twelve centuries ago. It would be somewhat surprising if he did not perceive something of lunacy in the minds of such people.