[Illustration: A MOORISH GENTLEMAN IN MOORISH DRESS.] On entering the Harem all men are equal, all privileges of rank must be waived. The most despotic Oriental ruler has no power over his fellows there. Even the Hereditary Sheríf of Mecca must be as courteous to his servants or his slaves as he would be to the Sultan of Turkey were he present. Everybody is come to worship his Creator, the Ruler Supreme over empires and republics, and so all distinctions of rank are laid aside. The Prophet, wise in his generation beyond all men, was the first to protect the helpless against despotism by ruling the conduct of human affairs through the principle of religious equality. But for his laws the lower classes of the East would have been at the mercy of their co-religionists of the higher castes. If the Prophet alternately cajoled and coerced the superstitious to be virtuous and meek by the promise of a material Paradise and by the fear of a material Hell, what then? He sought merely to achieve his end through the weaknesses of the natural man, knowing that there is nothing that men covet more than the permanent pleasures which satiate human passions, and nothing that they had rather shun than a punishment which endures for ever. The spirit of his teaching and his laws, however, was anything but material. It made for unity and fraternity and equality, and the consequence was that in the early days of the Faith his followers were inspired by the noblest aspirations of the mind and heart. And as for the corporeal joys of Paradise they knew that these were not the highest their Prophet had promised to them, for they hoped to attain to that most blessed degree of heavenly felicity which is reserved for the Faithful who are found worthy to behold God’s face from the rising of the sun till the going down of the same. The case is otherwise with the majority of the Muhammadans of to-day. For their country and their countrymen they take too little thought, each one of them beseeching God to shower His favours on himself or herself alone. The priests of the Golden Age of the Faith sat on a camel or stood on a high hill and preached, not on form but on spirit. Their watchword was unity--unity of religion under the banner of faith and charity. To-day, on the contrary, the Mullás of Mecca mount a pulpit and air their erudition, that is, their knowledge of the traditions, as they interpret them according to their respective schools, and end with a few wandering, lifeless sentences in condemnation of all heretics, in contempt of this life, and in praise of the world to come. A philosopher would consider their sermons ridiculous. The freethinkers of the times of ’Omar and ’Alí had no sound excuse for raising their voices against the priests, who were then the guides of the mind as well as those of the conduct. But the wonder now is that a Faithful can be found to obey the behests of these tradition-ridden miracle-mongers, who do nothing to lessen the breach