On the other hand, the continuous stress of militarism was in ordinary course much more favourable to fanaticism than to free thought; and to fanaticism the Koran, like the Bible, was and is a perpetual stimulant. It was as a militant faith that Islam maintained itself; and in such a civilisation the Sacred Book, which claimed to be the highest of all lore, and was all the while so easy a one, giving to ignorance and conceit the consciousness of supreme knowledge without any mental discipline whatever, was sure of abundant devotees.[388] In an uninstructed community--and of course the mass of the Saracen population was uninstructed[389]--the cult of the Sacred Book needs no special endowment; it can always be depended on to secure revenues for itself, even as may the medicine-man in an African tribe. To this day the propagation of the Koran is subscribed for in Turkey as the Bible Society is subscribed to among ourselves, ignorance earning thus the felicity of prescribing for human welfare in the mass, and at the same time propitiating Omnipotence, at the lowest possible outlay of study and reflection. Enthusiasms which can thus flourish in the twentieth century were of course abundant in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh;[390] and thus we find that when a caliph was suspected by the pietists of caring too little for their lore, he ran the risk of being rebelled against with a speed and zeal in the ratio of their conviction of divine knowledge. Islam, unlike the State churches of Greece, Rome, and England, has democratic rootage in the practice of setting ordinary laymen to recite the prayers and preach the sermons in the mosques: it, in fact, resembles Methodism more than any of the established Christian churches in respect of its blending of clerisy and laity. Such a system, when thoroughly fanaticised, has enormous powers of turbulence; and in Moorish Spain we find them early exercised. Abderrahman I, whose policy of tolerance towards Jews and Christians transcended all previous Christian practice, and thus won for his realm a great stimulus in the way of variety of culture-elements and of industry, had kept the religious class in due control; but his well-meaning son Hisham was priest-ridden to the last degree; and when his successor Hakam showed an indisposition to patronise pietists to the same extent they raised revolt after revolt (806-815), all put down by massacre. Mr. Lane-Poole notes (p. 73) the interesting fact that the theologers were largely of Spanish stock, the natives having in general embraced Islam. Thus the fanaticism of the Berbers was reinforced by that of the older population, which, as Buckle showed, was made abnormally devout, not by inheritance of character, but by the constant effect of terrorising environment, in the form of earthquakes.