innovation, was himself denounced as a Mohammedan; and in certain countries of Europe, not asserted until the seventeenth century, except in secret, and under the threatening shadows of the stake and the scaffold. Unlike other religions, it did not refuse salvation to those who rejected its dogmas. In the presence of the allurements of the seraglio, it still represented continence as the most precious jewel of a believer; but, perceiving the vices provoked by the unnatural restraints of monastic life, it prohibited celibacy, and, for two centuries after the death of the Prophet, the faquir, the santon, and the dervish were unknown. By adopting to a certain extent the primitive code of antiquity, eliminating the evil and retaining the good it contained, it appealed strongly to religious sentiment and national pride, rendered still more binding the virtues of public faith and private hospitality, and, by its repudiation of idolatry in all its forms, concentrated the mind of the devotee upon the compassion, the justice, the infinite grandeur and majesty of God. A marked peculiarity of Islam is the absence of the female element from its ritual. Even now, in the days of its degeneracy, women have no place in the calendar of its saints; and yet we are aware that among all former, and many contemporaneous, religions the employment of priestesses was common, and female deities were favorite objects of adoration. The Virgin of the Koran--though her immaculate conception was conceded seven hundred and sixty-one years in advance of the decision of the Council of Basel--is, in all other respects, an ordinary mortal, and is far from possessing the dignity and importance of the famous Isis, that fascinating goddess who, banished from the banks of the Nile, was exalted, crowned with her starry emblems, in equal majesty and superior beauty, upon a more gorgeous throne in the imperial city of Catholic Rome. Mohammed was not exempt from the prejudices entertained by his countrymen towards the sex. The sentimental gallantry and respectful homage tendered its members by Western nations is unknown to the suspicious and sarcastic Oriental. The Prophet declared that the majority of persons he saw in hell during his nocturnal journey were women. But if the power of woman to act directly upon the fortunes of Islam was disdained, her indirect influence in that direction was enormous and undeniable. The harems of the polygamous conquerors at once absorbed the noblest and fairest maidens of the households of the vanquished. The children of these mothers became, without exception, Moslems; and, after the lapse of a generation, the lingering traces of other beliefs disappeared, and nothing but a reconquest and a fresh immigration, or a miraculous interposition of Providence, could have restored the land, so recently subjugated, to its pristine faith.