ties which European Powers have found in their efforts -efforts which to be sure have been neither zealous nor persistent to obtain reforms in the Ottoman Empire, are largely due to the fact that the Sacred Law has a higher claim on Muslim obedience than any civil enactment proceeding from the secular monarch.

Such a system will obviously give little scope for the development of a legal profession. Advocacy is unknown in Musulman countries. The parties conduct their respective cases before the Kadi1. They may produce to him opinions signed by doctors of the law in favour of their respective contentions, but the only notion the Musulman (i.e. the non-Occidentalized Musulman) can form of an advocate in our sense of the word is a paid, and presumably false, witness.

The community suffers politically. The duty of unquestioning obedience, and the habit of blind submission to authority, dominate and pervade the Musulman mind so completely that its only idea of government is despotism. Nothing approaching to a free ruling assembly, either primary or representative, has sprung up in a Musulman country; and it would need almost an intellectual revolution to make such a system acceptable or workable there 2.

Finally, it is a consequence of the system described that there is an absolute identity of State and Church. The Church is the State, but it is a highly secular State, wanting many of the attributes we associate with the Church. It commands as a matter of course the physical force of the State, and needs no special anathemas of its own. Its priests, so far as it can be said to have priests, are lawyers, and its lawyers are priests, and its students graduate from the University into what is one

1 Whether this system tends to facilitate the bribing of judges, almost universal in countries ruled by a Musulman monarch, quaere.

? I do not mean to suggest that races like those of Arabia, Syria, and Persia, may not under the contact and stimulus of European literature and thought again develop an intellectual life of their own. But it can hardly be a life on the orthodox lines of Islam. The first thing to be hoped for is that Syria and Asia Minor may get rid of the Turk, who has never shown himself fit for anything but fighting.

and the same profession. As the Church is pre-eminently a militant Church, born and nursed in war, its head, the Khalif, is also of right supreme temporal sovereign. The Pope is Emperor, and the Emperor is Pope. They are not two offices which one man may fill, as the Emperor Maximilian wished to be chosen Pope. They are one office. And accordingly when any spiritual pretender arises, claiming to be a prophet of God, he becomes forthwith, ex necessitate terminorum, a temporal ruler, like the Mahdi of the Sudan at the present moment (1888). The only exception to this absolute identification of Church and State (which is of course a fact making most powerfully for despotism) is to be found in the incompetency of the Khalif to pronounce upon the interpretation of the sacred law. This attribute of the Pope is lacking. The spiritual head of the Musulman world, for this purpose, and therewith also its legal head, is a lawyer, the Sheik-ul-Islam, to whom it belongs to deliver authoritative interpretations of questions arising on the law, i.e. on the Koran and the Traditions. Such an opinion is called a Fetwa. Against it even a Khalif cannot act without forfeiting his right to the obedience of his subjects, so when any Sovereign claiming to be Khalif wishes to do something of questionable legality, he takes care to procure beforehand from the Sheikul-Islam a fetwa covering the case. Being in the Khalif's power, the Sheik rarely hesitates, yet he is in a measure amenable to the opinion of his own profession, and might be reluctant to venture too far. So too the Khalif, though he might depose a recalcitrant Sheik (were such a one ever to be found), and replace him by a more pliant instrument, must also have regard to public sentiment, a power always formidable in the sphere of religion, and the more formidable the more the mind of a people is removed from the influence of habits properly political, and is left to be coloured by religious feeling.

Islam these owes features of its religion, its law and its politics to its source in a divine revelation complete,

final, and peremptory. But it is not the only religion that has a like source. The Musulmans class three religious communities as Peoples of the Book. The other two are the Jews and the Christians. Of the Jews I have spoken already. Their system, as it stood at the time of our Lord's appearing, resembled in many points that which Islam subsequently created, though there was never in it any complete identification of the spiritual and the secular power, because it had a regular hereditary priesthood, which, though for a time acting as leader and ruler, had no permanent coercive secular authority. The Jewish system had, moreover, in the words of the Prophets and in the Psalms influences complementary to the Mosaic law and the Traditions, and corrective of any evils which might spring from undue respect for the latter. Moreover, the historical development of that system was checked by external conquering forces, which ultimately deprived it of the chance of becoming a temporal power.

What, however, shall we say of Christianity? Why has the course of its history been so unlike that of Islam? Why has its origin in a divine revelation not impressed upon it features like those we have been considering? I must be content to indicate, without stopping to describe, a few, and only a few, of the more salient causes.

The Christian revelation as contained in the Old and New Testaments is not, except as regards sections of the Mosaic law, a series of commands. It is partly a record of events, partly a body of poems, partly a series of addresses, discourses, and reflections, speculative, hortatory, or minatory, and mostly cast in a poetic form, and partly a collection of precepts. These precepts are all, or nearly all, primarily moral precepts, which are addressed to the heart and conscience, and they proceed from teachers who had no compulsive power, so that such authority as the precepts possess is due only to their intrinsic worth, or to the belief that they express the Divine will. Especially in the case of

the New Testament (though the same thing is essentially true of the Prophets) the precepts are directed not so much to the enjoining of specific right acts fit to be done as to the creation of a spirit and temper out of which right acts will naturally flow. Had the Pentateuchal law been taken over bodily into Christianity, things might have been different, though the other elements of the revelation would have kept its influence in check. But fortunately among the forces that were at work in the primitive Church, there were some strongly anti-Judaic, so any evil that might have been feared from that quarter was averted.

It is impossible to make a code out of the New Testament. The largest collection of positive precepts, delivered with the most commanding authority, is that contained in the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters of St. Matthew's Gospel. But these are so far from being laws in the ordinary sense of the word that no body of Christians has ever yet come near to obeying them. Indeed hardly any body of Christians has ever seriously tried to do so. They are obviously addressed to the heart and intended not so much to prescribe acts as to implant principles of action.

Similarly the Epistles are either moral exhortations and expositions of duty or else metaphysical discussions. Neither out of them can any code be framed which a lawgiver could attempt to enforce. Even on the external observances of religion and constitution of the Church, so little is said, and said in such general terms, that Christians have been occupied during the last four centuries in debating what it was that the authors of the Epistles meant to enjoin.

After the canonical Scriptures come the Fathers of the Church, whose writings were at one time universally, and by a large part of Christendom still are, deemed to enjoy a high measure of authority. They may be compared to those early Musulman writers from whom the traditions of Islam descend, or to the early recorders

of and commentators on those traditions. The Fathers, however, did not generally affect to lay down positive rules, but were occupied with exhortation and discussion. Neither out of their treatises could a body of law be framed, nor did any one think of doing this till long after their day. Even then it was as guides in doctrine and discipline, not as the source of legal rules, that they were usually cited.

Christianity began its work not only apart from all the organs of secular power, but in the hope of creating -indeed for a time, in the confidence that it would create -a new society wherein brotherly love should replace law.

Before long it incurred, as a secret society, the suspicion and hatred of the secular power, and had indeed so much to suffer that one might have expected its professors to conceive a lasting distrust of that power in its dealings with religion. This, however, did not happen. So soon as the secular monarch placed his authority at the disposal of the Church, by this time organized as a well-knit hierarchy, the Church welcomed the alliance, and began ere long to invoke the help of carnal weapons. This was the time when she might in her growing strength have been tempted to impose her precepts upon the community in the form of binding rules. But the field was already occupied. She was confronted and overawed by the majestic fabric of the Roman law. In the East that law continued to be upheld and applied by the civil authorities. In the West it suffered severe shocks from the immigration of the barbarian tribes; but as it was associated with Christian society, the Church clung to it, and was in no condition for some centuries to try to emulate or supersede it. When the time of her dominance came in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, she did indeed build up a parallel jurisdiction of her own, with courts into which laymen as well as clerks were summoned, and she created for these courts that mass of decrees, almost rivalling the Civil