[Sidenote: Relations with the State. Christianity leaves humanity free to expand.] In the type of Mussulman government which (though not laid down in the Koran) is founded upon the spirit of the faith and the precedent of the Prophet the civil is indissolubly blended with the spiritual authority, to the detriment of religious liberty and political progress. The _Ameer_, or commander of the faithful, should, as in the early times, so also in all ages, be the _Imam_, or religious chief; and as such he should preside at the weekly cathedral service. It is not a case of the Church being subject to the State, or the State being subject to the Church. Here (as we used to see in the papal domains) the Church is the State, and the State the Church. They both are one. And in this we have another cause of the backwardness and depression of Mohammedan society. Since the abolition of the temporal power in Italy we have nowhere in Christian lands any such theocratic union of Caesar and the Church, so that secular and religious advance is left more or less unhampered; whereas in Islam the hierarchico-political constitution has hopelessly welded the secular arm with the spiritual in one common scepter, to the furthering of despotism, and elimination of the popular voice from its proper place in the concerns of State. [Sidenote: The Koran checks progress.] And so, throughout the whole range of political, religious, social, and domestic relations, the attempt made by the founder of Islam to provide for all contingencies, and to fix every thing aforehand by rigid rule and scale, has availed to cramp and benumb the free activities of life and to paralyze the natural efforts of society at healthy growth, expansion, and reform. As an author already quoted has so well put it, "_The Koran has frozen Mohammedan thought; to obey it is to abandon progress_."[79] [Sidenote: Is Islam suitable for any nation?] Writers have indeed been found who, dwelling upon the benefits conferred by Islam on idolatrous and savage nations, have gone so far as to hold that the religion of Mohammed may in consequence be suited to certain portions of mankind--as if the faith of Jesus might peaceably divide with it the world. But surely to acquiesce in a system which reduces the people to a dead level of social depression, despotism, and semi-barbarism would be abhorrent from the first principles of philanthropy. With the believer, who holds the Gospel to be "good tidings of great joy, _which shall be to all people_,"[o] such a notion is on higher grounds untenable; but even in view of purely secular considerations it is not only untenable, but altogether unintelligible. As I have said elsewhere: