XV l. 12. tit. 2. 62. 2-5. de Toledo. Sagrada. t. 6. afforded them even a chance of change, and in joining any invaders as their deliverers. The persecution which the Jews endured from the Wisi-Goth Kings, was more atrocious than any to which that persecuted race had yet been exposed:... the fiendish system of extirpation, which has since been pursued against them in the same country, was little more than a renewal of the execrable laws enacted by Sisebuto, Suinthela, Recesuinto, and Egica. If they were detected in observing any custom or Fuero Juzgo ceremony of their religion, they were to be killed upon the spot, Ley 3-11. or stoned, or burnt;... .. and finally, upon an absurd accusation that they had conspired with the Jews of Africa and other provinces to rise against the Christians and destroy them, they were all condemned to slavery, and their children above the age of Morales. 12. seven taken from them, and baptized. The laws respecting Concil. 175 slaves were iniquitous in the highest degree. At one time they España were not admitted as witnesses, and the law which disqualified .8. p. 234. them, classed them with thieves, murderers, and poisoners. If Fuero Juzgo in spite of this law their evidence was taken, it was not to be ï. 1. believed, though it had been forced from them by torture. When it was found that this disqualification too frequently Do.-4.4. obstructed the course of justice, they were allowed to be heard in trifling actions, and upon any deadly fray, provided no free witnesses could be found. In questions of adultery, treason, Do.—l. 10. coining, murder, and poisoning, they might be tortured to extort evidence against their masters: he who gave it under the torture suffered with the criminal, but if he gave it without compulsion, he escaped; this law must often have occasioned the condemnation of the innocent. If a slave who had been transferred Do.—1.6. accused his former master, that master had the privilege of re-purchasing him to punish him at pleasure. A law was Do.-L. 5. made to keep the children of slaves slaves like their parents, because, said the legislator, there is a great confusion of lineage l. 2. t. 4. t. 4. l. 4. t. 4. l. 15. 1. 9. t.l.l. 14.-16. t. 2 l. 2. t. 4. l. 18. when the son is not like the father, and as the root is even so must the branch be. By a still greater injustice, if a runaway slave of either sex married a free person, under pretence of being free, the children of that marriage became slaves to the owner of Fuero Juzgo. the fugitive. If a woman married her slave, or one who having been her slave had been emancipated, both were to be burnt. Do.-1. 3. The very sanctuary was forbidden them; they used to fly to the churches, that the clergy might hear their complaints and compel their merciless owners to sell them; but even this refuge was taken away, and it was enacted that they should be given up to Do.. 5.7. punishment. There was a penalty for harbouring fugitive slaves ; and whosoever admitted one into his house, though the runaway called himself free, and did not immediately carry him before a judge for examination, was to receive a hundred stripes and pay the owner a pound; the neighbours were liable to the same penalties, if they did not supply his neglect ; all persons therefore were bound to examine a suspicious stranger, and torture him to find out who he was. If they omitted to do this, men or women, of whatever race, family, or rank, were to suffer two hundred stripes, churchmen and officers of justice three hundred, and Bishop or Lord who was thus guilty, either for compassion or for a bribe, was to forfeit three pounds to the King, and do penance during thirty days, like one who had been excom municated. The monstrous severity of this law proves how frequently these unhappy people fled from their masters, and the legislator complains that there was neither city, castle, burgh, nor village, in which runaway slaves were not concealed. Such were the laws of the Spanish Goths respecting slavery! where such a system was established, the first invader could not but be victorious, because he found recruits in every house. The kingdom deserved to fall, and it fell. t. I. l. 20. The Mahommedans made many proselytes in Spain as well as every where else where they established themselves. But the growth and decline of all Maḥommedan empires are necessarily connected with the civil and religious institutions of Islamism, and may be traced to them. In forming a new religion, Mahommed aimed at making its ritual less burthensome, its morality more indulgent, and its creed more rational than those of other nations. It was not however enough to appeal to the reason, nor even to the passions of mankind, without at the same time profiting by their credulity. To the Jews he announced himself as the Messiah, the conqueror in whom their prophecies centered; to the Christians as the Paraclete who was to accomplish the yet unfulfilled system of revelation. The mere robber would soon have been. crushed, the mere philosopher would have been neglected, and he who had attempted to preach the incommunicable nature of Deity either among Pagan or Christian Idolaters, would hardly have escaped death as a blasphemer. God is God, was a tenet to which none would have listened without the daring addition that Mahommed was his prophet. The impiety of one reasonable doubt would have shocked and terrified those who believed the impudence of an asserted mission. Reason was too weak to stand alone, and clung to fanaticism for support. No traces of a disordered mind are discoverable either in the life or in the doctrines of Mahommed. The pure theism which he preached he probably believed; but his own claims proceeded from ambition, not from self-deceit. Persevering in his object, he varied the means, and never scrupled at accommodating his institutions to the established prejudices of the people. At first Jeru*salem was chosen to be the metropolis of his religion, and the point toward which all the faithful should turn their faces in prayer. This privilege he transferred to Mecca, and though he destroyed the Idols of the Caaba, he suffered the black stone which was the great object of idolatrous worship, to retain its honours. Those founders or reformers of religion who were inspired, and those who believed themselves to be so, have spared neither the prejudices, nor passions, nor feelings, nor instincts, which opposed them. Mahommed attempted no such conquest over human nature: he did not feel himself strong enough to conquer. His conduct displayed the versatility of a statesman, not the inflexibility of an honest fanatic. The Moslem, in proof of their religion, appeal to the plenary and manifest inspiration of the Koran. They rest the divinity of their holy Book upon its inimitable excellence; but instead of holding it to be divine because it is excellent, they believe its excellence because they admit its divinity. There is nothing in the Koran which affects the feelings, nothing which elevates the imagination, nothing which enlightens the understanding, nothing which ameliorates the heart: it contains no beautiful narrative, no proverbs of wisdom or axioms of morality; it is a chaos of detached sentences, a mass of dull tautology. Not a solitary passage to indicate the genius of a poet can be found in the whole volume. Inspired by no fanaticism, of a meagre mind, and with morals of open and impudent profligacy, Mahommed has effected a revolution which in its ruinous consequences still keeps in barbarism the greatest and finest part of the old world. His were common talents, and it is by common talents that great revolutions have most frequently been effected; when the train is ready there needs no lightning to kindle it, any spark suffices. That his character was not generally mistaken, is evident from the number of imitators who started up: there is also reason to suspect that it was as well understood by many of his friends as by his enemies. Ali indeed believed in him with all the ardour of youth and affection; but they who were convinced by the sword are suspicious converts, and among these are Abbas and Amrou and Caled, the holiest heroes of Islamism. Ambition and the hope of plunder soon filled his armies, and they who followed him for these motives could teach their children what they did not believe themselves. The political and moral system of the Impostor, if system it may be called, is such as might be expected from one who aimed only at his own aggrandizement, and had no generous views or hopes beyond it. That his language and his institutions have spread together is not to be attributed to him: this great political advantage necessarily arises when nations are either civilized or converted by force, and it is only by force that this religion has been propagated; its missionaries have marched in armies, and its only martyrs are those who have fallen in the field of battle. Mahommed attempted nothing like a fabric of society: he took abuses as he found them. The continuance of polygamy was his great and ruinous error; where this pernicious custom is established, there will be neither connubial, nor paternal, nor brotherly affection; and hence the unnatural murders with which Asiatic history abounds. The Mahommedan imprisons his wives, and sometimes knows not the faces of his own children; he believes that despotism must be necessary in the state, because he knows it to be necessary at home: thus the domestic tyrant becomes the contented slave, and the atrocity of the ruler and the patience of the people proceed from the same cause. It is the inevitable tendency of polygamy to degrade both sexes; wherever it prevails, the intercourse between them is merely sexual. Women are only instructed in wantonness, sensuality becomes the characteristic of whole nations, and humanity is disgraced by crimes the most loathsome and detestable. This is the primary and general cause of that despotism and degradation which are universal throughout the East: not climate, or the mountaineers would be free с |