The personal failings of Mohammed seem to have brought into his creed a blight of cruelty, bigotry, and self-indulgence, which has rendered half-useless its higher and nobler features. The religion which legalises the slaughter and plunder of all unbelievers and consigns woman to the harem may have been a comparative blessing to the wild Arabs of Mohammed’s own day, or to the Negro of the modern Soudan: to the civilised world it was a mere curse—the substitution of an inferior for a higher creed and life. Even to the Arab of the seventh century it was but half-beneficial: if it stayed him from drunkenness, human sacrifices, and infanticide, it merely directed his bloodthirstiness against foreign instead of domestic foes, and gave a divine sanction to many of his lower instincts. [Sidenote: Failings of Islam.] Wherever Mohammedanism has taken root, it has led at first to rapid and enthusiastic outbursts of vigour, but it seems gradually to sap the energy of the nations which adopt it, and leads, after a few generations of greatness, to a stagnation and decay, which the Moslem in his self-satisfied bigotry is too blind to perceive. The creed only thrives while militant. When it has won its victory, it sinks into dull apathy. Islam is a good religion to die by, as its fanatics have shown on a thousand battle-fields, but not a good religion to live by. Good and evil elements are too hopelessly mixed in it, just as in Mohammed’s Koran, that miscellaneous receptacle of all his revelations: high thoughts about the Godhead or the fate of man are mingled with the mere opportunist orders of the day, or with licences for the personal gratification of the Prophet.[35] Footnote 35: The Koran consists of all Mohammed’s inspired sayings, taken down at the time on wooden tablets, palm-leaves, or blade-bones, by his followers, and consigned in confusion to a chest, from which they were afterwards drawn out at random, and strung together, not according to their date or their contents, but simply in order of length. But whatever were the failings of Mohammed and of Mohammed’s creed, they had one fearful efficiency, the power to turn their sectaries into wild fanatics, careless of life or death upon the battle-field. Life meant to them the duty of smiting down the Infidel, and the privilege of spoiling him: death, the yet greater joys of a paradise of gross sensual delights. What the first mad rush of a horde of Moslem fanatics, drunk with religious frenzy, was like, modern Europe had half forgotten, though our crusading forefathers knew it well enough. But the generation which has seen the half-armed Arabs of the Soudan face the steadiest troops in the world equipped with quick-firing rifles and artillery, and almost carry the day against them, has had good reason to revise its view about the power of Mohammedan fanaticism.