But there is another thing to be said about the Mohammedan Heaven and
Hell. This namely, that, however gross and material they may be, they
are an emblem of an everlasting truth, not always so well remembered
elsewhere. That gross sensual Paradise of his; that horrible flaming
Hell; the great enormous Day of Judgment he perpetually insists on: what
is all this but a rude shadow, in the rude Bedouin imagination, of that
grand spiritual Fact, and Beginning of Facts, which it is ill for us too
if we do not all know and feel: the Infinite Nature of Duty? That man's
actions here are of _infinite_ moment to him, and never die or end at
all; that man, with his little life, reaches upwards high as Heaven,
downwards low as Hell, and in his threescore years of Time holds an
Eternity fearfully and wonderfully hidden: all this had burnt itself, as
in flame-characters, into the wild Arab soul. As in flame and lightning,
it stands written there; awful, unspeakable, ever present to him. With
bursting earnestness, with a fierce savage sincerity, halt,
articulating, not able to articulate, he strives to speak it, bodies it
forth in that Heaven and that Hell. Bodied forth in what way you will,
it is the first of all truths. It is venerable under all embodiments.
What is the chief end of man here below? Mohammed has answered this
question, in a way that might put some of _us_ to shame! He does not,
like a Bentham, a Paley, take Right and Wrong, and calculate the profit
and loss, ultimate pleasure of the one and of the other; and summing all
up by addition and subtraction into a net result, ask you, Whether on
the whole the Right does not preponderate considerably? No; it is not
_better_ to do the one than the other; the one is to the other as life
is to death,--as Heaven is to Hell.
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