The rapid and extensive spread of El Islam, considered by the Faithful a remarkable instance of divine aid, is to be accounted for without the intervention of a Deity. The Arabs poured forth from their great centre, till the whole surplus population was exhausted. Everywhere they appeared as liberators of slaves, especially in Turkey and Persia, where an artificial and over-refined state of society had produced tyrannical despots, an innumerable and insatiable nobility, and a people robbed and spoiled. Another circumstance favoured the growth of “the Religion of the Heavens and the Earth.” Whether we consider the Arabs to have been the aborigines of their native wilds, or, as the modern theory is, we derive them from the Highlands of Æthiopia, it is certain that their great success lay amongst a kindred people speaking cognate languages. From the earliest times, indeed, Arabia had sent forth several extensive streams of emigration. Essentially an Asiatic form of belief, El Islam could not progress beyond the barriers opposed to it by geography. Not having a St. Paul to modify, to change it, the Saving Faith broke upon the rock of a new race. But this I claim for El Islam. The recurring purpose which runs through the world is chiefly manifested by the higher esteem in which man holds man. David made him little lower than the angels. Christianity, a system of asceticism, confirmed this estimate: we are fallen beings, fallen not through our own fault; condemned to eternal death, not by our own demerits; ransomed by a Divine Being, not through our own merits. El Islam, on the contrary, raised man from this debased status, and with the sound good sense which characterizes the creed inspired and raised him in the scale of creation by teaching him the dignity of human nature. Thus modern Spiritualism is giving a shock to Christianity, whereas El Islam has power to resist it. But, however El Islam prospered amongst the kindred races, it fell flat elsewhere. No power of propagandism availed in China. In Southern Spain the faith maintained itself for a long time; its letter and spirit, however, were almost lost. The Zegris and Abencerrages were European knights, not Eastern. And when pushed forward into a Northern people, a single destructive defeat sufficed to set for it bounds which it has never attempted to cross. In Hungary and Austria again, with a tenfold power, it failed to establish a footing; and when “Holy Russia” became sufficiently united to be powerful, El Islam was cast out like a corpse.