1185. Your _argument_ in the above extract does not satisfy me so well as your _admission_. From the inability of the great mass of minds satisfactorily to comprehend the high mysteries of the Koran, you infer that the ‘eternal salvation or condemnation of mankind does not depend on such theological questions.’ Certainly, the salvation of mankind in the mass does not depend on these or any other theological questions; if by this be meant depending on the ability to _comprehend_ such questions, because the points involved in these questions, so far as they are mysteries, are proposed not to _reason_ as _comprehending_, but to _faith_ as _receiving_. But do you mean to be understood as saying, that when the Koran is put into any man’s hand, and when Allah through the Koran opens to that man his _revealed_ way of salvation, the individual thus approached may accept what is level with his _reason_, but reject what is proposed to his _faith_ and _above_ his reason, and that yet notwithstanding such rejection he may reasonably hope to be saved? If so, I ask you by what right you argue thus? Who is Allah, and what is man? When he tells you the way in which he will save you, not the mass of mankind or the heathen to whom the Koran has never come, but _you yourself_, what right have you to say that _your_ salvation does not depend on your faith’s reception of those very things which are above your reason’s comprehension? How do you know but that the whole efficacy of the plan _proposed to you_, depends on your receiving the great facts and truths propounded to your _faith_? ‘Faith _itself_, I admit,’ you may contend, ‘does not save any man; it is the Mediator that saves.’ But you have no right to say, or think, or hope that he will or can save _you_ with the Koran in your hand, in any other way than that which in the Koran he proposes to your _faith_. And if when he demands your _faith_ in what surpasses your reason, you withhold that faith, and plead the sufficiency of what he has incidentally made level with your _reason_, do you not thereby show that you have not the spirit which he requires, and that you are yet none of his? In the Koran he has not only revealed to you his mission and sanctification, but also proposed to you his mediation as a propitiation for your sin; and he has told you that ‘you must be _born again_,’ not only of water, but also ‘of the spirit;’ that except you be converted and become as a ‘little child, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven;’ and that ‘he that _believeth_ and is baptized shall be saved, but he that _believeth not_ shall be _damned_:’ ‘_believeth_’ not a _part_ only, but the _whole_ of the Koran then intrusted to its Ulemas. Here he explicitly demands your faith in the whole Koran. But suppose it had been otherwise, suppose he had simply opened to you _a_ way by which he could _certainly_ save _you_, without saying any thing about _faith_, as the one great and necessary receiver