In no department of ethics is the contrast between Christian and Mohammedan morals sharper than in the sphere of domestic morality. Sex relations which the Christian Church condemns as sin, and which the Christian civil law makes a crime, are by the Mohammedan moral consciousness pronounced natural and right, or at least ethically indifferent. The New Testament absolutely prohibited polygamy, although from primitive times the moralists of the East had had in general no condemnation for the custom; but the Koran accepted the system without scruple. In doing so, however, it placed salutary restraints upon the unregulated license which had hitherto characterized the institution. It limited the number of wives of the faithful to four,[663] and surrounded divorce with wholesome restrictions. Family ethics were further lifted to a higher level by the positive prohibition of infanticide,[664] a practice which constituted one of the worst evils of Arab society in pre-Islamic times. The positive enactments of the Koranic code in this department of morals accomplished what was effected indirectly in the same domain by Christianity through its teachings of the sanctity of human life. [Sidenote: The prohibition of gambling and the use of intoxicating liquors] Among the other prohibitions of the moral code of Islam are two worthy of special notice for the reason that, being made largely effective by the sanctions of religion, they have exercised an incalculable influence upon the Mohammedan world. These are the provisions of the Koran forbidding in the most positive terms gambling and the use of alcoholic drinks.[665] These prohibitions have had a great and undeniable influence in preserving Mohammedan civilization, in the extended reach of lands over which it has spread, from those inveterate twin evils of gambling and drunkenness which constitute one of the deepest stains on Christian civilization. [Sidenote: Animal ethics] It has been maintained that the place given duties to lower animals is a crucial test of a moral code.[666] Tried by this standard, the code of Islam must be accorded a high place among the ethical systems of the world. In the department of animal ethics it is on a level with that of the old Hebrew Testament. Indeed, the tender solicitude of the code for dumb animals is one of its most admirable features. The whole animal creation is here brought within the pale of ethics. Thus at the outset Islam took up a position respecting man’s duty toward the animal world which Christianity is only just now tardily assuming. [Sidenote: A concrete and practical morality]