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L I B R J^ R Y 
 
fiL 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN 
 
LONDON : PRINTED BY 
 
 SPOTTISVVOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE 
 
 AND PARLIAMENT STREET 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM 
 
 The Bible and The Koran 
 FOUR LECTURES 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. W. R. W. STEPHENS 
 
 PREBENDARY OF CHICHESTER : AUTHOR OF ' THE LIFE OF S. JOHN CHRVSOSTOM ' 
 ' MEMORIALS OF THE SOUTH SAXON SEE ' ETC. 
 
 LONDON 
 
 RICHARD BENTLEY & SON, NEW BURLINGTON STREET 
 
 ||ublisljcvs in (Orbinan) lo ^er ^ajestg \\t (Qiucn 
 1877 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The following Lectures were in substance 
 delivered during Advent, last year, in the 
 Cathedral Church of Chichester. They have 
 been prepared, with some alterations and 
 additions, for publication, in compliance with 
 the wish of some who heard them, and in the 
 hope that they may prove a contribution, 
 however humble, to an intelligent appreciation 
 of the great subject with which they deal. 
 The annual delivery of a set of lectures in 
 the Cathedral is one of the conditions on 
 which my Prebendal Stall has been held since 
 its foundation in the thirteenth century, and 
 
VI PREFACE. 
 
 I selected Christianity and Islam for my 
 subject last autumn, believing the considera- 
 tion of such a subject to be especially salutary 
 and opportune at the present time. If the 
 Eastern Question has its roots to a large 
 extent in religious differences between 
 Mussulmans and Christians, it behoves us 
 all, and more particularly the theological 
 student, to ascertain as exactly as possible 
 what those differences really are ; how far 
 they are deep and vital, how far superficial 
 and incidental, what practical difficulties they 
 place in the way of Christian and Mussul- 
 man living together on terms of amity ; 
 how far, and in w^hat way, these difficulties 
 may be surmounted. 
 
 To the great prophet of Arabia, and to 
 the marvellous work which he accomplished, 
 I have endeavoured to do justice, in oppo- 
 sition to the false and calumnious estimate 
 which in a past age condemned Mahomet 
 
PREFACE. Vll 
 
 himself as a kind of malicious fiend, and his 
 religion as a diabolical invention. On the 
 other hand, I have sought to show that 
 Christianity and Islam are radically diverse 
 in the nature of their origin, in the character 
 of their sacred books, and in their practical 
 effects upon mankind ; that the difference 
 between them is one not of degree but of 
 kind, according to the wise saying of Dr. 
 Arnold, that while other religions showed 
 us ' man seeking after God,' Christianity 
 showed us ' God seeking after man ; ' a maxim 
 which students of the crude science of com- 
 parative religion are too apt to forget. I 
 have endeavoured, lastly, to point out that if 
 there be these real and vital distinctions be- 
 tween the two religions, it is worse than folly 
 to try and ignore them ; that while there 
 ought to be, and might be, peace and good- 
 will between the believers in rival creeds, it 
 should not be placed on a rotten foundation ; 
 
VIU PREFACE, 
 
 the rotten foundation which would be laid by 
 those who see imaginary resemblances, and 
 are blind to real distinctions ; for if indis- 
 criminate antagonism is mischievous, indis- 
 criminate concession is mischievous also, and 
 can only lead to confusion and disaster. 
 
 I subjoin a list of the principal authorities 
 which I have consulted : — 
 
 •■The Koran, translated by Sale, with introduction 
 
 and notes. 
 >. Gibbon, ' Decline and Fall,' ch. 1., li., lii. ; written in 
 
 his most brilliant and masterly style, only too 
 
 much coloured by the sarcasms in which he 
 
 indulges in the treatment of any religious 
 
 subject. 
 Milnian, ' Latin Christianity,' Book IV. ch. i. 
 Dr. White, ' Bampton Lectures ; ' fairly represents 
 
 the narrow estimate of Mahomet prevalent in 
 
 the last century. 
 xSir W. Muir, 'Life of Mahomet' (four vols.); 
 
 learned and impartial, as well as reverent and 
 
 Christian in tone. 
 Weil, ' Mohammed der Prophet ; ' full and learned, 
 
 and more readable than 
 
PREFACE. IX 
 
 Sprcngcr, ' Life of Mohammed ; ' which is equal 1)-, 
 if not more learned, but less impartial and 
 more theorising — ' more Germanico.' 
 f-Bosivorth SmitJi, ' Mohammed and Mohamme- 
 danism ;' able and ingenious, but the partiality 
 of the author for Mohammedanism seriously 
 detracts from the accuracy and value of the 
 work. 
 
 y. H. Nezvvian, Lectures on the Turks, in * His- 
 torical Sketches.' 
 
 E. A. Freeman, 'Lectures on the History and 
 Conquest of the Saracens.' 
 
 G. F inlay, ' History of Greece under Foreign 
 Domination,' vol i. (2nd edition) ; a most in- 
 valuable work. 
 
 W. G. Palgravc, ' Central and Eastern Arabia.' 
 
 Sedillot, ' Histoire Generale des Arabes' (2nd edi- 
 tion) ; this did not come into my hands soon 
 enough to be of much use to me, but it seems 
 full of most interesting matter, put together in 
 a very pleasant way. 
 
 Articles in the ' Christian Remembrancer,' for June 
 
 185 5 ; in the ' North British Review,' for August 
 
 ><i855 ; in the ' British Quarterly,' for January 
 
 XI 872 ; in the ' Quarterly,' for January 1877, but 
 
 this last was too late to be of any service to me. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 PAGK 
 
 The Origin of Christianity and of Moham- 
 medanism. Sketch of the Life and Cha- 
 racter OF Mahomet . . . . \ 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 The Theological Teaching of the Bible and 
 
 THAT of the Koran contrasted . . 52 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 Moral Teaching of the Bible and the Koran 
 
 con'jrasted . . . . -91 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 The Practical Results of Christianity and 
 
 Islam . . . . . .127 
 
1 
 
 HJ. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY AND OF MOHAMMEDANISM. 
 SKETCH OF THE LIFE AND CHARACTER OF IMAHOMET. 
 
 Some said ' He is a good man : ' others said, ' Nay, but he 
 deceiveth the people.' 
 
 It will be my endeavour in this set of lectures 
 to gather up the principal points of contrast 
 between Christianity and Islam, the Bible 
 and the Koran ; between the religion founded 
 by Jesus Christ and the religion founded by 
 Mahomet — between the book which contains, 
 as the Christian believes, the word of God ; 
 and the book which contains, as the Mussul- 
 man no less believes, the words of God con- 
 veyed through the mouth of His prophet. 
 
 I use the word contrast advisedly, in pre- 
 ference to the word comparison. The differ- 
 ence between the two terms is this : — To con- 
 
 B 
 
2 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 trast is to place two things, which have some 
 resemblances to each other, side by side, in 
 order to detect the points of unlikeness. To 
 compare, on the other hand, is to place two 
 things, which present some dissimilarity, side 
 by side, in order to find out the points of 
 likeness. If two things are exactly alike, 
 there is, strictly speaking, no comparison be- 
 tween them ; they are practically identical. 
 If, again, two things are utterly and totally 
 unlike, they cannot fairly be contrasted. It 
 is possible, for instance, and may be instruc- 
 tive, to contrast a man with an ape, because ' 
 amidst many differences there are some re- 
 semblances between the two animals. But 
 to contrast a man with a fish, or still more 
 with some inanimate object, would be an idle 
 task, because where nearly all is difference 
 there are no points to contrast. 
 
 The advantage, then, of contrasting is to 
 bring out (where this is desirable) into pro- 
 minent relief the differences between two ob- 
 jects which in some respects are similar. And 
 I think that an investigation, by this method, 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 3 
 
 of the vital differences between Christianity 
 and Islam is not unprofitable in the present 
 day. _yp to at least the beginning of this 
 century the character of Mahomet and of the 
 work which he accomplished was unfairly 
 depreciated.^ In the pages of Prideaux, of 
 Dr. White, and to some extent even of 
 Gibbon, he is represented as a consciously 
 designing and artful impostor, who pretended 
 to be the recipient of divine revelations merely 
 in order to facilitate his schemes of personal 
 ambition. Jhis view of Mahomet's character 
 has now been abandoned as untenable by 
 all sound critics. But, in the eagerness of a 
 better informed and more enlightened age to 
 redress the balance, the danger is that it 
 may be overweighted in the opposite scale. 
 The character of the great prophet of Arabia 
 and of his religion will now no longer be 
 underrated; the fear is lest by many they 
 should be painted in colours too attractive. J 
 It is difficult to doubt that other motives 
 also, besides the praiseworthy desire of re- 
 pairing past injustice, operate in the same 
 B 2 
 
4 CHRISTIANITV AND ISLAM. 
 
 direction. This is not the time to minutely 
 examine the causes which ahenate many in 
 the present day from the Christian faith. 
 With some it may be tlie bewilderment of 
 the understanding, through the manifold diffi- 
 culties supposed to be experienced in recon- 
 ciling the discoveries of science or criticism 
 with Holy Scripture ; with others it may be 
 that hardening of the spirit against the re- 
 ception of spiritual doctrine, which is one 
 natural consequence of spending life in the 
 midst of material luxury ; with others it may 
 be the aversion of a selfish and impure heart 
 from submission to the severe moral standard 
 of the Gospel ; with others it may be that 
 tendency (natural in an age which has made 
 great advances in knowledge) to independence 
 and conceit which is inclined to dispute the 
 excellence or truth of most things which 
 our forefathers believed and venerated ; with 
 others it may be a mixture of some, or all, 
 of these causes. A fact, however, it remains, 
 that many, in proportion to their disposition 
 to doubt or reject the Gospel of Christ, seem 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 5 
 
 disposed to regard with some favour, even if 
 they do not actually embrace, divers forms of 
 philosophy or religion ; a favour which to the 
 
 . careful and impartial student seems greatly 
 in excess of the intrinsic merits of those 
 systems. Simple Materialism, Pantheism, 
 Positivism, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, 
 even the gross and (one would have thought) 
 palpable imposture of spirit-rapping, have 
 found their advocates and patrons among men 
 who fancy they discover insuperable diffi- 
 culties in accepting the faith of Christ as it 
 was once delivered to the saints. 
 
 •^ Now, of all the systems here alluded to, 
 Mohammedanism no doubtpresents the nearest 
 parallel to Christianity, both in its origin and 
 progress. Its beginnings are not lost in the 
 mists of a remote and fabulous antiquity. It 
 was founded, like Christianity, by one person : 
 this person was at first rejected by his own 
 people ; gradually he gathered round him 
 a small band of disciples : out of this germ 
 the faith was propagated which in time 
 won Arabia from idolatry, Persia from Magi- 
 
6 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 anism, and wrested some of the fairest pro- 
 vinces from Christendom itself. The sacred ••- 
 book, the Koran, might, in sublimity of 
 language, and, to some extent, even in the y 
 purity of its teaching theological and practical, 
 bear comparison with the sacred writings of 
 Jews and Christians. Finally, the religion 
 thus established has lasted for some 1,250 
 years, and at the present time maintains its 
 sway over 1 20 millions or more of the human 
 race. It is the only other religion besides 
 Christianity which inspires its votaries with 
 much proselytising zeal ; and in missionary 
 success in some parts of the world, it sur- 
 passes its rival. It makes fresh advances 
 every year in Africa, Australia, and the 
 interior of India which exceed the progress 
 of Christianity in those countries. 
 
 Such are a few of the salient points of 
 resemblance between Christianity and Islam. 
 But my aim, as was remarked at the outset, 
 is not to compare but to contrast ; to discover 
 the differences which underlie the resem- 
 blances, and to estimate their importance. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 7 
 
 Let US begin, then, with the origin of 
 the two reH(jions, and consider the circum- 
 stances under which each was founded, and 
 the character of the respective founders. 
 
 It was an observation of MachiavelH that 
 no man could make himself a prince and found 
 a kingdom without opportunities. What 
 were the opportunities of Mahomet ? To 
 begin with, what was the state of the world 
 when Mahomet appeared ? He was born in 
 the year 570 a.d. The civilised world at 
 that epoch was divided between the two 
 great rival Empires of Rome and Persia. 
 Almost incessant warfare was going on be 
 tween them, and their boundaries were con- 
 stantly fluctuating. Arabia, being on the 
 confines of the rival powers, was subjugated, 
 so far as the fierce Independent spirit of the 
 inhabitants permitted it to be subjugated at 
 all, to each in turn. The religion of the 
 Roman Empire was Christianity; but Christi- 
 anity on the eastern frontier was distracted 
 and corrupted by a variety of conflicting 
 heresies, which disguised its essential charac- 
 
8 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 ter, and exhausted Its vital energy. As the 
 extreniities of the human body are the most 
 quickly chilled owing to their distance from 
 the heart, as the fringe of a garment is the 
 part most liable to be torn and stained owing 
 to its friction with other substances, so the 
 pulse of national Roman life beat but feebly 
 in the eastern extremities ; the eastern fringes 
 of the empire were constantly torn by dissen- 
 sion from the established religion, by revolt 
 against the political government. The asso- 
 ciations of their old nationality were too strong 
 for them. Neither the religion, nor the laws, 
 nor customs of the Roman Empire had ob- 
 tained a firm hold upon them. They were 
 ecclesiastically addicted to heresy — politically 
 addicted to rebellion. 
 
 The religion of Persia, whatever it may 
 originally have been, had turned to dualism, 
 or the worship of two co-ordinate powers — 
 the spirit of good or light, Ormuzd ; the spirit 
 of evil or darkness, Ahriman. But, the Sun 
 being venerated as a symbol of the power of 
 light, a superstitious worship of fire and of 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 9 
 
 the heavenly bodies had practically super- 
 seded, to a great extent, the purer and more 
 philosophic creed. 
 
 As the Arabs were alternately subject 
 politically to their two powerful neighbours, 
 so did they catch some sparks of the religious 
 spirit prevalent in each. Christianity and 
 Magianism each had their votaries in 
 Arabia, and colonies of Jews had settled 
 there more than 600 years before the birth of 
 Mahomet. But the dominant creed of the 
 Arabs was a kind of degenerate Monotheism; 
 the corrupt offspring of the purer faith of 
 their forefather Ishmael. They believed in 
 one Supreme Deity, but subordinate to Him 
 was a host of inferior divine personages who 
 were supplicated as intercessors. This 
 mixed, mongrel religion had its national home 
 and centre in the sacred temple, the Kaaba, 
 in the sacred city of Mecca. Here was the 
 holy black stone, the relic of an earlier temple 
 built by Abraham and Ishmael, a relic, also, 
 as was believed, of Paradise, where it was 
 originally given to Adam. Once it had been 
 
rO CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 white, but had changed its hue either from 
 contact with sinful lips, or from the repeated 
 kisses of the faithful. There was the print of 
 Abraham's footstep ; there was the holy 
 spring, Zemzem, which had burst forth to 
 save Hagar and Ishmael from perishing by- 
 thirst. Thither the devout Arab came to 
 worship the God of Abraham, but also to 
 implore the succour of the 360 intercessory 
 powers whose images were ranged within 
 those sacred walls. Round those holy walls 
 he walked seven times, naked, to signify the 
 putting away of his sins. Seven times did 
 he run to and fro between Mounts Safa and 
 Merwa, to typify Hagar seeking water for 
 her child ; seven times did he throw stones 
 into the valley of Mina, in memory of the 
 stones which Abraham flung at the Devil 
 when disturbed by him in the act of offering 
 up Ishmael ; for in Arabian tradition it is 
 Ishmael, not Isaac, who occupies the fore- 
 most place. 
 
 But, shortly before the rise of Mahomet, 
 a spirit of profound dissatisfaction with the 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM, I I 
 
 national religion had begun to work among 
 the more reflective and discerning of his 
 countrymen. In the introduction to one of 
 the most ancient biographies of Mahomet 
 there is a chapter inscribed ' an account of 
 four men who without revelation perceived 
 the error of idolatry.' This is the substance 
 of it. One day the Koreishites, the tribe 
 which was the guardian of the Kaaba, were 
 celebrating a solemn feast in honour of one 
 of the lesser deities. They bowed the knee 
 before the image, walked round it, and offered 
 sacrifices with customary reverence. But 
 four men secretly held aloof from these acts 
 of devotion, and opened their hearts one to 
 another. 'Verily,' said one, 'our tribe does 
 not know the true religion. They have 
 corrupted the faith of Abraham ; they wor- 
 ship a stone and walk round about it, though 
 it neither sees nor hears, and can neither do 
 them good nor harm. Friends, let us seek 
 the truth for ourselves, for verily we are not 
 in the right path.' So they parted and went 
 hither and thither in quest of the pure faith 
 
12 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 of Abraham. Of the four inquirers, two it is 
 said became Christians ; a third after the 
 preaching of Mahomet embraced Islam, but 
 ultimately he too, on going to Abyssinia, was 
 converted to Christianity, and when he met 
 any disciples of the prophet he was accus- 
 tomed to say : ' We see, and you attempt to 
 see.' The fourth, Zayd by name, renoimced 
 and condemned all the gross superstitions of 
 his countrymen, more especially the custom 
 of sacrificing before images, and the horrible 
 practice of female infanticide ; but he remained 
 in a sceptical condition of mind, ever longing, 
 but never able, to come to the knowledge of 
 the truth. There is a pathetic story of him 
 in his old age : how he was seen leaning with 
 his back against the wall of the Kaaba, and 
 he cried aloud : ' O, ye Koreishites ! by Him 
 in whose hands my soul is, none of you 
 follow the religion of Abraham.' And he 
 continued : ' O Lord, if I knew which form 
 of worship is most acceptable to Thee, I 
 would adopt it ; but I do not know it.' 
 Thus he spake, resting his forehead on the 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 1 3 
 
 palms of his hands. He travelled through 
 Mosul, Mesopotamia, and Syria, seeking 
 repose for his troubled, anxious spirit. In 
 the midst of his wanderings he heard of the 
 growing fame of Mahomet. He started for 
 Mecca, but was murdered on the way. 
 
 I have related this narrative, not as 
 considering it in all its details deserving 
 of much credence, but because its very ex- 
 istence, whether true or not, is a proof and 
 illustration of a spirit of dissatisfaction and 
 doubt prevalent at the time to which it refers. 
 
 To form any just estimate of the prophet 
 of Arabia and of his work, it was necessary 
 to indicate the conditions, political, social, and 
 religious, of his country. 
 
 To sum up, then. Arabia was on the 
 edge of two great rival empires, both weak- 
 ened by protracted and exhausting con- 
 tests. The crisis of the struggle, indeed, was 
 contemporaneous with the preaching of Ma- 
 homet. Heraclius the Roman Emperor 
 overthrew the Persian power in 629. The 
 Roman Empire was itself weakened in the 
 
14 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 border provinces by this exertion ; the Per- 
 sian Empire never recovered. The Arabs 
 had been partially subject to one or other 
 power, but never absorbed politically or 
 religiously by either. 
 
 Gross superstition and licentiousness pre- 
 vailed, but a spirit of discontent and scepti- 
 cism was at work. There was no national 
 unity. Each tribe was a separate independent 
 atom. 
 
 The opportunity, then, was favourable for 
 the action of some master mind which should 
 first of all weld the jarring elements of life 
 in Arabia itself into a compact body ; then 
 proceed to annex to it the great neighbouring 
 Empire of Persia, already prostrate by its 
 rival; and finally to subdue the weakened 
 fringes of that very rival, the Roman Empire. 
 
 And this was the work of Mahomet. By 
 bringing men to believe in himself as a 
 divinely inspired prophet, he established a 
 theocracy wherever that belief was accepted ; 
 he united his followers under a political and 
 religious system all in one, for the Koran was 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 1 5 
 
 to them alike their code of civil law and 
 their oracle of theological truth. 
 
 Having now examined the nature of the 
 field in which the prophet of Arabia planted 
 his creed, we will turn for a few minutes to 
 the contemplation of the man himself, from 
 the soil to the sower and to the manner in 
 which the seed was sown. 
 
 The sketch must of necessity be com- 
 pressed, but I will try not to omit any inci- 
 dents of real importance. 
 
 Who, then, was Mahomet ? Mahomet, the 
 son of Abdallah, and the grandson of Abd-al- 
 Muttallib, belonged to the tribe of the Koreish, 
 the guardians of the Kaaba, and to the 
 family of Hashem, the most honourable 
 family within that tribe. 
 
 His father died a short time before his 
 birth. His mother was of a nervous and 
 superstitious temperament. She fancied that 
 about the time of the child's birth she was 
 surrounded by an extraordinary halo of light ; 
 and it may have been partly owing to this 
 circumstance that he was named by his 
 
1 6 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 grandfather, Mohammed, or ' the Renowned.' 
 This meaning of the word should be remem- 
 bered, since it was afterwards turned, as will 
 be seen, to curious account. For the sake of 
 convenience, I follow the more usual Euro- 
 pean form of the name, and write it Mahomet. 
 The birth took place at Mecca, on or 
 about August 20, 570 A.D. The child was 
 nursed according to Meccan custom, not by 
 his mother, but by a Bedouin woman, and 
 was reared by her in the desert. When four 
 years old, he had the first of those epileptic 
 fits to which he was liable during all the 
 earlier half of his life. Such fits were re- 
 garded with superstitious awe by the Arabs, 
 as the supposed effects of diabolical pos- 
 session ; and, on the recurrence of an attack 
 when he was five years old, the Bedouin 
 nurse took the young Mahomet back to his 
 mother, and could not be persuaded to re- 
 sume her charge. His mother died when he 
 was six, and his grandfather when he was 
 eight ; but he was carefully and kindly brought 
 up by his uncle, Abu Talib, for the duties of 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 1 7 
 
 a kinsman were scrupulously observed among 
 the Arabs. When he was twelve years old, 
 he accompanied his uncle on a caravan jour- 
 ney to Syria. The story that near Bostra, 
 he made the acquaintance of a Christian 
 monk, tarried with him, and returned under 
 his charge to Mecca, may be true ; but it 
 occurs In the midst of such strange tales of 
 incredible wonders that it cannot be accepted 
 as a certain fact. How much of Mahomet's 
 acquaintance with the Gospel history may 
 have been due to this connection, supposing 
 such to have been formed, It Is easy to sur- 
 mise, but impossible in the absence of inform- 
 ation to determine. Much more may 
 probably have been learned at the great 
 annual fair held at Ocatz, three days' journey 
 from Mecca, during the sacred month before 
 the pilgrimage to the Kaaba. Here a mixed 
 concourse of Arabs, Christian and Jewish, 
 as well as Pagan, assembled, partly for trade, 
 partly for amusement, partly to engage in 
 poetical and martial contests for prizes. 
 Here, according to tradition, Mahomet heard 
 
 C 
 
1 8 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 Coss, Bishop of Najran, preach on the great 
 facts and doctrines of the Gospel. Here his 
 poetical imagination and patriotic spirit may 
 have been stimulated ; here he may have first 
 conceived the idea of a religion which should 
 combine truths extracted from many diverse 
 sources. 
 
 Time went on, and Mahomet became 
 entitled to the enjoyment of a small patri- 
 mony, consisting of a house, five camels, 
 a flock of sheep, and a slave. He showed 
 little aptitude for practical business, but was 
 fond of the quiet and innocent occupation of 
 tending sheep, in which he was afterwards 
 wont to compare his early life with the lives 
 of Moses and of David. When twenty-five 
 years old, however, he was entrusted, through 
 his uncle's recommendation, with the conduct 
 of a caravan to Damascus, the property of 
 the wealthy widow Khadijah. He discharged 
 his errand to the complete satisfaction of his 
 employer, who rewarded him with her hand 
 in marriage. She was fifteen years older 
 than her husband ; but he remained thoroughly 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 1 9 
 
 faithful to her, and did not wed another till 
 after her death. 
 
 For fifteen years after his marriage — that 
 is, up to the age of forty — Mahomet wor- 
 shipped the gods of his fathers, but he 
 became increasingly meditative, restless, de- 
 jected. He was courteous in company, but 
 spoke little, and with downcast eyes. Gra- 
 dually he withdrew altogether from worldly 
 business, save such pastoral occupation as 
 milking the goats, or tending the sheep. 
 He spent much time in fasting and prayer in 
 his favourite retreat, a cave on the bare and 
 rugged side of Mount Hira, occasionally 
 even being absent from home all night. 
 
 His mind became agitated by doubts 
 respecting the truth of the religion of his 
 forefathers. His seasons of seclusion were 
 more frequent, more prolonged. He re- 
 nounced the customs which savoured of 
 idolatry. 
 
 There are several short chapters in the 
 Koran which probably belong to this period. 
 They read like the expression of an earnest, 
 c 2 
 
20 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 anxious, inquiring spirit, which has grasped 
 some truths, and is searching for more. The 
 vanity of worldly ambition ; the sin of covet- 
 ousness and slander; the inseparable con- 
 nection between happiness and virtue, misery 
 and vice ; the error of supposing that ad- 
 versity is always a sign of God's displeasure, 
 or prosperity of His favour ; the duty of pro- 
 viding for the fatherless, and of almsgiving ; 
 the certainty of future rewards and punish- 
 ments, according to each man's deeds — these 
 are doctrines insisted upon with the earnest- 
 ness of profound conviction, mingled with 
 prayers for further enlightenment and guid- 
 ance.^ 
 
 He was wrought to a high pitch of mental 
 tension, and felt constrained to preach, but he 
 had no commission ; he could not point to any 
 credentials to enforce the authority of his mes- 
 sages. By some, indeed, he was respected as a 
 poet or a genius ; but by others he was scorned 
 and derided as a soothsayer, a madman, a fool. 
 He began himself to doubt what he was, a 
 
 ^ Suras 103, 100, 99, and i. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 21 
 
 prophet or a Kahin, inspired by God or by 
 an evil spirit. His wife, his cousin Waraca, 
 and a few other intimate friends beheved in 
 his divine inspiration. Such pure conceptions 
 of the Deity, and such a lofty standard of 
 moral teaching and moral conduct, could not, 
 they thought, be the offspring of diabolical 
 influence. When he was yet in the agony 
 of suspense and depression, sometimes 
 even meditating self-destruction, light pierced 
 the clouds. As he was wandering among 
 the solitudes of Mount Hira, he beheld 
 within two bows' length the dazzling figure of 
 the angel Gabriel, and listened with rapture 
 to the memorable command : ' Cry, cry aloud 
 in the name of the Lord ; the most merciful 
 God who hath taught the use of the pen to 
 record revelation.' ^ Mahomet hastened home, 
 solaced and encouraged by the assurance 
 that the long-desired commission from on 
 high had come ; but for some period, of 
 which the length is uncertain, it was unheeded 
 by all. At last, as he lay one day on the 
 
 ^ Sura 96. 
 
22 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 ground recovering from one of his fits, and 
 wrapped up in a mantle, he again heard the 
 voice of the heavenly messenger uttering the 
 words : ' O thou that art covered with a 
 mantle arise, and preach and magnify the 
 Lord, and depart from all uncleanness.' ^ 
 
 This is the real starting-point of Islam. 
 From this date Mahomet's confidence in him- 
 self as the accredited messenger of God never 
 wavers, and all the utterances in the Koran 
 are introduced by the words ' speak,' or ' say,' 
 to intimate that they were put into the mouth 
 of the prophet by his Divine Master. The 
 people, indeed, still demanded some visible 
 evidence of his authority. Let him cause a 
 spring of water to gush forth, or a grove of 
 palms to rise in the desert, or let him ascend 
 to heaven and bring down a book, and they 
 would believe him. But these sceptical 
 taunts no longer harassed the prophet's mind. 
 He could proudly and calmly reply that he 
 was but a man, not empowered to work 
 miracles, but that the divine beauty of his 
 
 1 Sura 74. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 23 
 
 message was its own evidence. It came 
 from God ; and, if men did not listen to it, 
 destruction would as surely overtake them 
 as it overtook the cities in the plain. 
 
 The work of conversion, however, was 
 slow in its progress. In the course of three 
 years Mahomet had gained about forty 
 disciples, consisting chiefly of his own rela- 
 tions, friends, and dependents. As in the 
 early days of Christianity, so in the early 
 days also of Islam, many converts were 
 obtained from the slave class. The slaves 
 in Arabia were most susceptible of conversion, 
 not only from their position, but also because, 
 being for the most part foreigners, many of 
 them had received a tincture in early life of 
 Jewish or Christian teaching, which rendered 
 them at least averse from idolatrous super- 
 stitions. But, as Mahomet's influence in- 
 creased, jealousy and alarm began to be 
 awakened in the tribe of the Koreish. They 
 were the guardians of the sacred temple, and 
 this heretical son was beginning to shake the 
 fidelity of his countrymen to the ancestral 
 
24 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 faith, of which that temple was the visible 
 shrine. Some of Mahomet's followers had 
 retired for prayer one day to a valley near 
 Mecca, when a party of unbelieving neigh- 
 bours unexpectedly passed by. Taunts 
 and retorts led to blows. Saad, one of 
 Mahomet's party, struck an opponent with a 
 camel goad ; and this, it was commonly said, 
 was the first blood shed in Islam. 
 
 Meanwhile Mahomet waxed bolder. He 
 took up his abode in the house of a convert 
 named Arcam, hard by the Kaaba, and there 
 he preached, especially at the time of pilgrim- 
 age, to all who would resort to him, and 
 seldom without some success. The house 
 of Arcam was the cradle of Islam, as the 
 ' Upper Chamber ' in Jerusalem was the 
 cradle of Christianity. The burden of 
 Mahomet's message was the same to all : 
 ; the absolute unity of God ; the authority of 
 His prophet ; the moral duties of prayer, alms- 
 giving, and fasting; the certainty of a future 
 state of happiness or woe. The hostility of 
 the Koreish grew more fierce. They seized 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 25 
 
 the converted slaves, and tried to force them 
 to recantation by imprisonment, or exposure 
 to the scorching mid-day sun without food 
 or drink upon the gravel of the Meccan 
 valley. Many yielded under repeated applica- 
 tion of this torture, but there were others 
 whose constancy was inflexible. No words 
 could be wrung from the slave Bilal in his 
 agony, but ' Ahad! Ahad! one, one, only God.' 
 
 Mahomet himself was secure under the 
 protection of his uncle Abu Talib. Abu 
 Talib was not a believer in his nephew's 
 mission, but the sacred duty of the kins- 
 man prevailed over all other considerations. 
 ' Beware of killing him,' he said to the leaders 
 of the hostile movement ; ' if ye do, verily I 
 shall slay the chiefest among you in his 
 stead.' 
 
 For his disciples Mahomet devised a safer 
 means of escape from persecution and possible 
 perversion. By his advice a small party 
 of them sought an asylum in the Christian 
 kingdom of Abyssinia, and their hospitable 
 reception encouraged a larger body to 
 
26 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 follow their example the year after. This 
 Hegira, or flight to Abyssinia, stands in 
 relation to Islam as the flight of our infant 
 Saviour into Egypt stands to Christianity. 
 It saved the new religion from being crushed 
 in its infancy; and the success of the plan 
 possibly suggested the great Hegira, or mi- 
 gration to Medina, some years later. The 
 departure of his converts, however, oppressed 
 Mahomet with a sense of loneliness and iso- 
 lation, under which his spirits and faith seem 
 for a short time to have given way. Amidst 
 some conflict of evidence something like an 
 inclination to make terms with his opponents 
 seems discoverable. He appears to have 
 uttered words which sounded at least like a 
 concession of some intercessory power to the 
 subordinate deities. But the lapse was of short 
 duration ; he was probably soon refreshed 
 by good tidings from Abyssinia (like St. Paul, 
 in his loneliness at Corinth, by the good news 
 which Timothy brought from Thessalonica), 
 and the tone of the Koran waxes louder, and 
 sterner than ever, in its denunciation of 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 27 
 
 Idolatrous worship. ' Why,* it is scornfully- 
 asked, 'implore help from images which have 
 no power to move even the husk of a date- 
 stone ? ' 
 
 The malignity, however, of the Koreish 
 increased in proportion. They tried again 
 to induce Abu Talib to abandon his nephew. 
 The uncle remonstrated with Mahomet for 
 his obstinate persistence in heresy. ' If they 
 brought the sun to my right hand and the 
 moon to my left,' replied the nephew, ' to 
 force me from my undertaking, I would not 
 desist from it until the Lord made manifest 
 my cause, or I perished in the attempt' 
 But, while inflexible in his purpose, the 
 thought of desertion by his kind protector 
 overcame his feelings, and he burst into tears. 
 The heart of Abu Talib also melted. ' Come 
 back,' he said, *son of my brother,' as 
 Mahomet had turned to depart ; * go in peace, 
 and say whatsoever thou wilt, for by the 
 Lord I will not in any wise give thee up for 
 ever.' 
 
 The Koreish were now thoroughly alarmed, 
 
28 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 and, to complete their discomfiture, two new- 
 converts were won by Mahomet — Hamza and 
 Omar ; men of high position, ability, and in- 
 fluence. Omar had formerly been among his 
 bitterest adversaries. As a last resource the 
 Koreish placed the whole family of Hashem 
 under a ban. The solemn deed of excom- 
 munication was hung up in the Kaaba. The 
 Hashemites were assigned an isolated quarter 
 in the suburbs, and all intercourse with 
 them was strictly forbidden. They managed, 
 indeed, to get provisions in by stealth, but 
 were often reduced to great straits for food. 
 The spirit, however, of Mahomet faltered not. 
 At the season of the pilgrimage to the 
 Kaaba he would boldly enter the precincts 
 and preach, promising temporal dominion and 
 future paradise to all who would become his 
 disciples. But his day was not come, and the 
 people jeered. 
 
 The blockade lasted three years (616-619 
 A.D.). At length some of Mahomet's friends 
 heard that the parchment on which the deed 
 of excommunication was written had been 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. ''9 
 
 almost devoured by insects. An examina- 
 tion of the document proved the truth of the 
 report. It was represented to the Koreish 
 as a divine judgment cancelHng their un- 
 brotherly act. Some of the Koreish relented, 
 and five of their chief men let the Hashemites 
 out of durance, and made themselves respon- 
 sible for their safety. Fresh troubles, how- 
 ever, were in store for Mahomet. His wise 
 and loving wife Khadijah died, and very 
 soon afterwards his faithful protector, his 
 uncle Abu Talib. Another uncle, also an un- 
 believer, but with a feebler sense of the duties 
 of a kinsman, promised him protection ; but it 
 did not last long, and the situation of Mahomet 
 was again critical. 
 
 But new light began to dawn from Medina. 
 Powerful Jewish tribes dwelt there, and in their 
 contentions with Arab neighbours they were 
 wont to say : ' A great prophet shall one day 
 rise among us ; him shall we follow, and then 
 we shall overcome you.' Some pilgrims from 
 Medina were attracted by the preaching of 
 Mahomet at Mecca. They said among them- 
 
30 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 selves : ' This surely is the prophet with whom 
 the Jews threaten us ; let us then be the first to 
 follow him.'^ They declared to Mahomet 
 their conviction of the truth of his claims : they 
 promised to enlist their fellow tribesmen in his 
 cause, and to report progress to Mahomet at 
 the next pilgrimage. 
 
 A year of anxiety and suspense wore 
 away," and in the spring of 621 a.d. the 
 pilgrims came again. At an appointed spot, 
 the secluded glen of Akaba near Mina, 
 Mahomet sought his friends, and to his relief 
 was greeted by twelve men, disciples, who 
 plighted their faith to him in the simple 
 formula : ' We will not worship any but the 
 one God : we will not steal, nor commit adul- 
 tury, nor kill our young children; neither 
 will we slander in any wise, and we will not 
 disobey the prophet in anything that is right.' 
 The pilgrims departed, and Mahomet re- 
 turned to Mecca. He still patiently waited 
 
 ^ The dramatic details of this account by Ibn Ishac may 
 not be trustworthy, but they forcibly illustrate feelings which 
 most probably were realities. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 3 1 
 
 his opportunity for decisive action; but the 
 Koran begins to take a wider scope, a sterner, 
 a more defiant tone. The contest between 
 Heraclius and Persia was coming to a 
 crisis ; the Koran confidently predicts the 
 triumph of the Roman Emperor.^ Ven- 
 ofeance is declared as imminent to those who 
 will not believe;^ a dearth at Mecca is inter- 
 preted as a judgment on unbelief, and a call 
 to repentance. Solemn imprecations are in- 
 voked by the prophet on himself if the Koran 
 be not a true revelation.^ 
 
 And now another pilgrimage came round, 
 622 A.D., another meeting in the lonely glen. 
 It was an hour before midnight when Maho- 
 met waited there in a flutter of hope. Pre- 
 sently by twos and threes his converts might 
 be seen stealing from behind the dark rocks 
 into the moonlight, until Mahomet beheld a 
 muster of seventy-three devoted believers in 
 his mission. They spoke in low tones for 
 fear of spies. ' Stretch out thy hand, O Ma- 
 
 ^ Sura 30. - Sura 21. 
 
 ^ Suras 23, 69. 
 
32 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 hornet,' said Bara, the aged chief of the party ; 
 and he stretched it out, and Bara struck his 
 own upon it, as the manner was when one 
 took an oath of fideHtv to another, and all the 
 rest did the like. Mahomet chose out twelve 
 of the chief men, saying : ' Moses chose twelve 
 leaders from among his people. Ye shall be 
 sureties for the rest as were the Apostles of 
 Jesus, and I will be surety for my own 
 people.' And all answered, ' So be it.' Thus 
 was ratified the second pledge of Akaba. 
 
 And now Mahomet felt that the hour was 
 come. The memorable command was Issued 
 to his disciples in Mecca : * Depart unto 
 Medina, for the Lord hath given you brethren 
 and a home in that city.' Gradually the 
 believers stole away. The Koreish were 
 startled day by day to see house after house 
 deserted. In about two months none re- 
 mained in Mecca save the prophet himself, 
 his faithful friend Abu Bakr, and his nephew 
 Ali. Abu Bakr urged flight, but Mahomet 
 delayed : ' the command,' he said, ' had not 
 yet come from the Lord.' Abu Bakr, how- 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 33 
 
 ever, was determined to be ready when it did 
 come. Two swift camels were bought, and 
 kept tied and highly fed in the yard of his 
 house. A private hoard of money was con- 
 cealed about his person. The Koreish 
 meanwhile were known to be plotting mis- 
 chief, and at last Mahomet declared that the 
 decisive hour had arrived. He and Abu 
 Bakr stole away by night, and took refuge in 
 a cave on Mount Thaur, a few miles to the 
 south of Mecca, in order to delude their 
 pursuers, Medina being 250 miles to the 
 north. As they were crouching in the cave, 
 Abu Bakr looking up saw light through a 
 crack in the rock. ' What if the enemy were 
 to spy us out ! ' he exclaimed ; ' we are but two.* 
 ' There is a third,' replied the dauntless 
 prophet, * God Himself.' 
 
 A goat-herd in the employ of Abu Bakr 
 brought them supplies of milk, and on the 
 third day they were informed that the 
 Koreish had abandoned the search after 
 them as fruitless. The daughter of Abu 
 Bakr brought them the two swift camels, and 
 
 D 
 
34 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 a guide. Mahomet mounted the swifter of the 
 two, Al Caswa, thenceforward his favourite, 
 and with his friend reached Medina in safety 
 in June 622 a.d., where he was greeted with 
 honour by his new alHes, and congratulations 
 by his old disciples. 
 
 The Hegira is the epoch in the prophet's 
 career from which his worldly success dates, 
 but it marks the beginning also of a grave 
 deterioration in his moral character. The 
 earnest preacher of a pure theology and a 
 strict righteousness, undaunted in the day of 
 his weakness and danger, becomes in the day 
 of his power a fanatical despot, and is at 
 times cruel with the cruelty peculiar to fana- 
 ticism. The single aim of propagating his 
 faith overrides at times all considerations of 
 justice and mercy, and it is often hard to 
 draw the line between religious zeal and per- 
 sonal ambition. 
 
 After the flight to Medina the Koran is 
 pitched in a tone of pitiless animosity against 
 the unbelieving Koreish ; and the severity 
 of its utterances was matched by deeds of 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 35 
 
 corresponding violence. The prophet would 
 lead the prayers in the mosque, and then 
 conduct a predatory raid upon some caravan 
 of the miscreant tribe. He became a poly- 
 gamous pope, and the mosque was his St. 
 Peter's and the Vatican in one. Here he 
 preached, here he received embassies, here 
 he planned his campaigns. The Koran, about 
 the fifth year of the Hegira, becomes little 
 better than a military gazette. It announces 
 victories, bestows commendation on the 
 valiant, and incites to further deeds of 
 prowess. A fresh revelation was produced 
 to meet every emergency, removing all ob- 
 stacles to the advance of the faithful which 
 might arise from a too scrupulous deference 
 to ancient customs, or even to the principles of 
 common humanity and justice. By special 
 divine permission, the sanctity of the month 
 Rajan was violated, which from immemorial 
 antiquity in Arabia had been consecrated to 
 peace ; ^ by special permission captives were 
 executed.^ Obnoxious unbelievers in Medina 
 
 1 Sura 2. ^ Suras 47, 48. 
 
 D 2 
 
36 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 were assassinated with the connivance, if not 
 by the command, of the prophet, and a bless- 
 ing was publicly pronounced in the mosque 
 by himself on the assassins. By special reve- 
 lation the destruction of some date trees, 
 which interfered with some military operation 
 of the prophet's, was authorised. By special 
 revelation the marriage of the prophet with 
 another man's wife was sanctioned, and he 
 was exempted from confining himself to four 
 wives, the limit placed by himself on the poly- 
 gamy of his disciples. The deeds of cruelty 
 which darkened the career of Mahomet 
 at Medina culminated in the cold-blooded 
 massacre of all the men belonging to a hostile 
 Jewish tribe, the Ban! Coreltza, and the 
 subjugation of all the women to slavery. To 
 cite the words of Gibbon : ' Seven hundred 
 Jews were dragged In chains to the market- 
 place of the city, they descended alive into 
 the grave prepared for their execution and 
 burial, and the apostle beheld with an in- 
 flexible eye the slaughter of his helpless 
 enemies.* 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 37 
 
 In spite of these repulsive cruelties few- 
 will refrain from a feeling of sympathy with 
 the prophet, when the dream of his life was 
 accomplished and his beloved and native 
 city Mecca opened her gates to him. Few 
 will refrain from admiration as they contem- 
 plate him gravely and majestically pointing 
 with his staff to the idols which lined the 
 walls of the Kaaba, commanding their de- 
 struction one by one, and exclaiming as the 
 largest fell with a crash : ' Truth has come, and 
 falsehood vanishes away.' Few can contem- 
 plate without interest mingled with awe, the 
 last days and dying moments of the man who 
 had achieved so great and wonderful a work. 
 Two years only after his reception at Mecca, 
 in the sixty-third year of his age, he was 
 smitten with a mortal fever. He anticipated 
 his end : ' The choice hath been offered me,' he 
 said, ' of longer life, with Paradise hereafter, 
 or of meeting my Lord at once ; I have chosen 
 to meet my Lord.' He crawled from his 
 bed one night to select a spot for his burial. 
 For several days he still conducted, but with 
 
38 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 feeble and fainting strength, the public prayers 
 in the mosque. At last he transferred this 
 duty to his faithful friend Abu Bakr. Yet 
 once more there was a flash of vital energy ; 
 he even mounted the pulpit, and, in tones 
 which reached far beyond the outer doors, he 
 called upon the people, like Samuel, to witness 
 that he had not defrauded any, nor taught 
 anything but what God had put in his mouth. 
 This final exertion probably hastened his 
 death. He returned to his bed ; he knew 
 the end was near. ' Oh Lord, I beseech 
 Thee assist me in the ao^onies of death,' 
 he was heard to murmur ; and presently in 
 broken whispers, ' Lord pardon my sins 
 .... eternity in Paradise .... pardon, 
 yes ! I come . . c . among my fellow citizens 
 on High.' These were the last words of the 
 prophet of Arabia. 
 
 The contrast between the origin of Chris- 
 tianity and Islam is made perhaps sufficiently 
 plain by such a sketch even as I have at- 
 tempted of the career of Mahomet. Yet it 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 39 
 
 may be instructive to complete and clench this 
 contrast by summing up a few salient points. 
 Contrast then, first of all, the essentially 
 human character of the career of the founder of 
 Islam with the essentially superhuman cha- 
 racter of the life of the Founder of Chris- 
 tianity. Mahomet did not lay claim to the^/~^ 
 power of working miracles ; such as have 
 been ascribed to him bear on the very face 
 of them the marks of being the dress with 
 which the real personality has been clothed 
 by the adoration of a later age. Strip it off, 
 and the true man stands out clear, consistent, 
 and intelligible. Mfou see a bold reformer 
 who in early life rises to the conception of a 
 purer theology and morality than the mass of 
 his countrymen, who gradually persuades him- 
 self that he is the depositary of divine revela- 
 tions, commissioned to unite the manifold and [/ 
 conflicting elements of national life under one 
 simple rigid religious system. There is no- 
 thing miraculous in his career, except so far 
 as all genius rises above the ordinary level 
 
40 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 of character, and produces extraordinary- 
 effects. 
 
 But in the life of our Blessed Lord, the 
 superhuman is of its essence. His birth 
 is superhumanly announced, superhumanly 
 effected. ' He came by a new and living way ! ' 
 Prophecy upon prophecy, uttered ages before 
 His coming, are fulfilled in the circumstances 
 of His life, even to the most minute par- 
 ticulars. Superhuman He is in deed and in 
 speech every day, although inexpressibly 
 lowly in manner of life. Superhuman He is 
 above all in the hour of death and in the 
 resurrection from the grave. And these 
 circumstances do not belong to the accidents, 
 but to the essence, of the life. Take them 
 away, especially for instance the Incarnation 
 and the Resurrection, and the whole fabric of 
 the life, so to say, falls to pieces. We cannot 
 deal with the history of that life as we x:an 
 with the history of Mahomet or of Christian 
 saints, round whom a parasitical growth of the 
 miraculous has accumulated, concealing the 
 real shape beneath. We cannot expunge the 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 4 1 
 
 miraculous from the life of Jesus, and leave a 
 consistent and intelligible residuum. The 
 experiment has been tried, but it breaks 
 down. 
 
 The rationalising process which would 
 divest our Lord's life of the miraculous, 
 brings out an irrational result. It leaves us 
 a hazy and shadowy figure, totally inadequate 
 to stand for the founder of a religion which 
 has produced such results as the Rationalist 
 is constrained to admit that Christianity has 
 produced. The phenomena of Christianity 
 remain, but without an explanation. They 
 hang, as it were, in the air, without a found- 
 ation to support them. 
 
 Take another point : — the moral de-/<*^ 
 clension of Mahomet, parallel with the ad-^^ 
 vance of his career. The period when he 
 stands on the highest moral level is early in 
 life. The meditative, musing, retiring shep- 
 herd lad, pondering amidst the solitude of 
 his native hills, feeling his way to a purer 
 theology and higher morality than his fore- 
 fathers, then racked by doubts and fears 
 
42 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 concerning his mission, then, when convinced 
 of it, calmly and tenaciously adhering to his 
 aim, amidst persecution and distress : this 
 is an interesting, an elevating, and beautiful 
 picture to look at. But of the pure, inno- 
 cent, kindly youth, very much is effaced in 
 the picture of mingled fanaticism and sen- 
 suality which Mahomet presents to us in 
 later years. It is perfectly true that he re- 
 tained, to the last, many of the simple, frugal 
 habits which were characteristic of his earlier 
 life. To the last he loved to tend the flock 
 and to milk the goats. He was playful and 
 tender in his treatment of children and of his 
 intimate friends. Neither in dress, nor in 
 fare, nor the appointments of his house, did 
 he affect any of the luxury and splendour of 
 an Oriental despot. But the retention of 
 these innocent customs cannot redeem his 
 character from the stains of sensuality and 
 cruelty occasionally very great. Facts are 
 stubborn things, and facts are conclusive on 
 these points. The best excuse for these blots 
 is that Mahomet became a fanatic ; and that 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 43 
 
 fanaticism unhinores both the mental and 
 moral equilibrium. To the fanatic the end 
 is everything ; and he relentlessly pursues it, 
 without misgivings and without remorse. 
 His moral sense at last becomes so confused 
 and perverted that he gets to think whatever 
 he does in promotion of his one great end 
 must be right. 
 
 How far fanaticism itself, or at least the 
 tendency to it, may be due to peculiarities of 
 physical temperament is too deep and com- 
 plicated a subject to enter upon here. It 
 belongs, indeed, rather to the physiologist 
 than to the historian. It will suffice to re- 
 mark that in the case of Mahomet there were 
 certainly many symptoms common to his 
 epileptical or hysterical fits, and to his fits of 
 supposed inspiration. Both were generally 
 preceded by great depression of spirits, and 
 accompanied by a cold perspiration, a tink- 
 ling or humming noise in the ears, a twitch- 
 ing of the lips, stertorous breathing, and 
 convulsive movements of the limbs, at 
 times communicated by a kind of electric 
 
44 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 sympathy even to the camel on which he 
 rode. 
 
 The Dervish and Fakir testify to the 
 common Oriental notion that a kind of frenzy 
 or ecstasy must be the natural concomitant 
 of the reception of divine revelation. 
 
 The most essential mark of high Christian 
 character is enthusiasm, deep, fervent indeed 
 and intense, but sober in its manifestation. 
 This is only the faint reflex, where it is found, 
 of the character of the Founder of Christianity. 
 A calm, consistent enthusiasm, to be about 
 / His Heavenly Father's business, and to finish 
 the work which was given Him to do, con- 
 stitutes the divine, the matchless beauty of 
 that life. Serenely He moves on, neither with 
 fanatical haste nor stoical resolution, but in 
 the unwaverinof enthusiasm of love to His 
 appointed end — the cross on Calvary, the 
 triumph over death and sin, the accepted 
 sacrifice, the return to the place whence He 
 came. The earthly life rises in grandeur, 
 majesty, and beauty as it advances, not be- 
 cause it is not faultless at the beginning, but 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 45 
 
 because, as it approaches the consummation of 
 the great act to which all the prelude has 
 been working up, it naturally takes a deeper, 
 a more awful tone. It is in the final scene 
 that the superhuman character of the great 
 Actor and of the great tragedy itself, as well 
 as the clear perception of its momentous con- 
 sequences on the human race, is most deeply 
 impressed upon us.^ Then it is more than 
 ever that we bow our heads, and exclaim 
 with the centurion : * Truly this was the Son 
 of God.' 
 
 Take another point. In the beginning of/ -^ j 
 his career Mahomet was a preacher of righte- ^^ 
 ousness and of the unity of God, regardless 
 of opposition and danger. He relied simply 
 on the intrinsic merits of his message to 
 make its own way. But, as time went on, he 
 appealed to the pride, ambition, and love of 
 enterprise and plunder inherent in the Arab 
 
 ^ The popular ' Life of Jesus Christ,' by Dr. Farrar, 
 seems, in our humble judgment, to labour under a fatal 
 defect in failing to bring out this upward, onward, continuous 
 movement : it presents a series of brilliant pictures, instead 
 of presenting one great picture. 
 
46 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 to promote the propagation of this faith. 
 War, the natural occupation of the Arab, 
 became invested with a sacred character. 
 ReHgious zeal and military ardour coalesced 
 in the followers of Mahomet to a deg-ree not 
 equalled in the Scotch Covenanters, or the 
 Ironsides of Cromwell. The joys of paradise 
 were dangled before the eyes of the Maho- 
 metan warrior as an incitement to his valour ; 
 the horrors of hell were ever urged as a 
 deterrent from faint-heartedness and sloth. 
 In Mahomet's first encounter with the Roman 
 army, one of his soldiers complained of the 
 intolerable heat. ' Hell is much hotter,' was 
 the indignant reply of the apostle. His flight 
 to Medina was a direct renunciation of purely 
 moral and spiritual influence in favour of 
 more material and carnal aids. His entrance 
 into Medina savours more of the political 
 than religious leader. The chief m.en of the 
 town went out to meet him, and conducted 
 him into it with pomp, riding by his side, and 
 arrayed in glittering armour. The disciples 
 of Mahomet have from that day to this relied 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 47 
 
 largely upon force for the propagation of the 
 faith. 
 
 Diametrically opposite to this was the , 
 method of the Founder of the Christian re- 
 ligion. The opportunity of His coming was 
 favourable for the assertion of pretensions to 
 temporal dominion. The Jews were fretting 
 under the yoke of foreign conquerors. The 
 least spark would have sufficed to kindle the 
 flame of insurrection. They had persuaded 
 themselves that their Messiah would appear 
 as the champion of their freedom, to restore 
 their long-lost national independence, and to 
 extend the dominion and glory of their em- 
 pire far beyond the limits reached in the 
 golden days of King Solomon. 
 
 The Apostles, even, and familiar friends of 
 Jesus, were infected with this material view of 
 the Messiah's kingdom. We see it in the 
 request of St. James and St. John to sit ' the 
 one on His right hand, the other on His left, in 
 His kingdom.' We see it again in the obser- 
 vation of the two disciples walking to Em- 
 maus : ' We trusted that it had been He 
 
48 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 which should have redeemed Israel,' implying 
 that His death on the cross was in their view 
 the final- frustration of the national hopes. 
 We see it for the last time in the question of 
 the Apostles after the Resurrection : ' Lord, 
 wilt Thou at this time restore the kingdom to 
 Israel?' It was the steadfast opposition 
 offered by Christ to this view of His kingdom, 
 coupled with His searching exposure of 
 national sins, which, humanly speaking, cost 
 Him His life. Had He ever acceded to the 
 Devil's suo^orestion to command stones to 
 become bread in the sense of using His divine 
 power to obtain material and earthly advan- 
 tages, or had He yielded to that other tempta- 
 tion to fall down and worship Satan as the 
 price of earthly kingdoms — that is, had He 
 resorted to artifice, to intrigue, to violence — it 
 is plain that He would have been supported 
 by the Jews, and that a worldly kingdom 
 mieht have been His. Into such snares of the 
 Devil the founder of Islam fell. The power 
 of Mohammedanism as one of the religions of 
 the world dates from the day when Mahomet, 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 49 
 
 fiying from his enemies, was received by his 
 partisans at Medina with all the honours of a (^ 
 worldly prince. The power of the Gospel 
 dates from the day when its Founder su7^- 
 rendered Himself to His enemies, saying : ' If ^ 
 ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, I am He ; ' when 
 He refused to summon legions of angels to 
 His rescue, and was abandoned by all His 
 earthly friends. The power of Islam dates 
 from an appeal to the sword of the flesh : the 
 power of Christianity dates from the day when 
 Christ bade His disciple put up the sword 
 into his sheath, because ' all they that took the 
 sword should perish by the sword.' In the 
 steady decay of all countries under Moslem 
 rule we see the fulfilment of that prophecy. 
 The immediate strength of Mohammedanism 
 is that which ultimately everywhere becomes 
 its weakness — its appeal to material aids for 
 extension and support ; its appeal in some 
 degree also to the material and sensual rather 
 than to the spiritual element in the nature of 
 the convert. 
 
 Lastly, the character of Mahomet, how- 
 E 
 
50 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 ever much, owing to the elevation of his 
 genius, it rises above the ordinary type of his 
 countrymen, is yet as a whole thoroughly 
 Oriental, thoroughly Arabian. Oriental 
 dreaminess, Oriental frenzy. Oriental endur- 
 ance and fortitude. Oriental sensuality. Ori- 
 ental despotism, Arabian enterprise, Arabian 
 vindictiveness, Arabian subtlety, all have 
 their place along with higher and nobler 
 qualities in the composition of the great pro- 
 phet's character. 
 
 The pure character of the Founder of 
 Christianity does not bear the mark of any 
 nationality. * It was constructed,' as has 
 been beautifully said, ' at the confluence of 
 three races, the Jewish, the Roman, and the 
 Greek ; each of which had strong national 
 peculiarities of its own. A single touch, a 
 single taint of any one of those peculiarities, 
 and the character would have been national, 
 not universal ; transient, not eternal. It 
 might have been the highest character in his- 
 tory, but it would have been disqualified for 
 being the ideal. Supposing it to have been 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 51 
 
 human, whether it were the effort of a real 
 man to attain moral excellence or a moral 
 imagination of the writers of the Gospels, the 
 chances were infinite against its escaping any 
 tincture of the fanaticism, formalism, and 
 exclusiveness of the Jew, of the political pride 
 of the Roman, of the intellectual pride of the 
 Greek. Yet it has entirely escaped them all.' ^ 
 Most true words ! To those who would fain 
 expunge the miraculous from the life of Jesus 
 we may well reply there is one miracle which 
 we defy you to remove, and that is the cha- 
 racter of Jesus Himself In the literal sense 
 of the expression, ' in Christ Jesus there is 
 neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, 
 Barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free.' He 
 was the Son of Man because His character 
 was not the offspring of any one race, or 
 caste, or class of men ; and we may say 
 boldly that no one could be such a Son of 
 Man unless He was also what Jesus declared 
 Himself to be, the Son of God. 
 
 ^ ' Lectures on the Study of History,' by Professor Gold- 
 win Smith, p. 137. 
 
 E 2 
 
52 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 THE THEOLOGY OF THE BIBLE AND THAT OF 
 THE KORAN CONTRASTED. 
 
 ' Fecisti nos ad Te, et inquietum est cor nostrum donee 
 requiescat in Te.' — AUGUST. Confess, i. 
 
 Before attempting to draw out the contrasts 
 between the teaching of the Bible and that of 
 the Koran, it may be instructive to notice the 
 differences between the two in their outward 
 form ; in construction and style. 
 
 What we call 'the Bible,' is in fact a col- 
 lection of many books. The common use 
 of the word Bible to designate the sacred 
 volume dates, I believe, from the thirteenth 
 century ; and we still very often speak of the 
 * Sacred writings,' the ' Holy Scriptures,' 
 terms which in the earliest ages of the Church 
 were almost exclusively employed. But the 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 53 
 
 name Bible ' the Book,' has become the most 
 famihar, and is perhaps the most precious 
 to us, not only as implying the sovereign 
 supremacy of that book over all other books, 
 but also because it expresses the great truth 
 that although ' the Book ' be made up of many 
 parts uttered at ' sundry times and in divers 
 manners,' yet is it after all essentially one : 
 inasmuch as the thread of one divine purpose 
 and design runs through the whole. The 
 writings range over a vast space of time, and 
 are cast into a variety of forms — the plain 
 prose of narrative, the poetry of prophecy or 
 praise, the direct teaching of precepts, of 
 exhortation, of reproof, or the more indirect 
 of parable, allegory, or vision. But the 
 ultimate aim of each and all is the same — to 
 conduct men along the stream of God's truth 
 winding its way to the Gospel, as the last 
 and fullest revelation of His love, and to lead 
 them to fall down before Jesus Christ and 
 Him crucified, as the central figure in that 
 final dispensation. 
 
 One consequence of the writings which 
 
54 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 compose the Bible being cast into such mani- 
 fold shapes is that the Book becomes in a 
 manner 'all things to all men.' It fits into 
 every fold, so to say, of the human mind and 
 the human heart. It can speak to ' all 
 nations, kindreds, and tongues,' and win 
 converts from all. 
 
 In the Bible, then, there is singleness of 
 aim, but variety of expression. In the 
 Koran, on the contrary, there is no continuity 
 of design, but great uniformity in expression. 
 On the one hand it is fragmentary and in- 
 coherent ; on the other monotonous and level. 
 
 The Koran consists of 114 chapters or 
 Suras, each of which pretends to be a verbatim 
 copy of a distinct revelation made to Mahomet. 
 The revelations were written on palm leaves 
 or mutton blade-bones, as Mahomet recited 
 them to his disciples, and were after his 
 death collected into one volume, but without 
 the least regard to chronological order, first 
 by his great friend and immediate successor, 
 Abu Bakr, and afterwards by the Caliph 
 Othman. There is not much more connec- 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 55 
 
 tion between them than between the several 
 grains in a heap of sand, or the several beads 
 on a necklace. There is in the Koran no 
 movement onwards, as in the Bible, from a 
 definite starting point to a definite goal in the 
 history of God's dealings with man. There is 
 no sequence, no coherence between the parts. 
 The perusal, therefore, may be compared, not 
 to the unrolling of a scroll, but to the pick- 
 ing up of scattered leaves, on each of which 
 some "distinct oracle is inscribed. 
 
 But while there is no continuity, there is, 
 on the other hand, very little variety. Ap- 
 proximate chronological arrangements of the 
 several Suras have been made by Sir W. 
 Muir and others, based on a careful com- 
 parison of their contents and style ; and from 
 this some variations in their character may be 
 discovered, corresponding with the tone of 
 the prophet's mind, and the circumstances of 
 his life, when they were delivered. But still 
 there is nothing which approaches the many- 
 coloured texture of our sacred volume. 
 Having been all produced within the com- 
 
56 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 pass of little more than twenty years, and 
 delivered through one medium, the Koran 
 presents the exact reverse of the ' sundry 
 times and divers manners ' of the Bible. It 
 is all of one time and one manner, and the 
 monotonous reiterations with which the book 
 abounds are exceedingly tedious and dull. 
 Poetry, which sometimes rises to grandeur, 
 alternates with exceedingly dull didactic prose 
 or puerile legend. Of parables there are but 
 few specimens ; and these are for the most 
 part borrowed from Biblical sources, and 
 spoiled in transplantation. In the character- 
 istic words of Gibbon, ' the European infidel 
 will peruse with impatience the endless inco- 
 herent rhapsody of fable, and precept, and 
 declamation, which seldom excites a sentiment 
 or an idea, which sometimes crawls in the 
 dust, and is sometimes lost in the clouds.' 
 This language is perhaps rather over- 
 strained, and seems to betray the irritation 
 of one who had but recently risen from the 
 irksome task ; but it is substantially true never- 
 theless, and the only other (so-called) sacred 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 57 
 
 book that I have attempted to read which 
 exceeds the Koran in tediousness is the Book 
 of Mormon. That book is much more nearly 
 the audacious travesty of the Bible, which 
 the Koran is not uncommonly called, than the 
 Koran itself. The term 'travesty' indeed is 
 not fairly applicable to the Koran, since it 
 does not appear that Mahomet was well 
 acquainted, if at all, with the canonical books 
 of the Old and New Testaments. There is 
 no evidence in the Koran of deliberate inven- 
 tion ; it is rather a badly digested compilation 
 of materials, derived from a variety of sources, 
 true and false, historical and mythical. The 
 Book of Mormon, on the other hand, is a 
 direct, though very tame and feeble, travesty 
 of the Bible in style; and though much of the 
 didactic matter is borrowed from the sacred 
 volume, that which affects to be historical is 
 pure and simple fabrication, 
 
 A book, however, which has so long 
 remained an object of veneration to so many 
 millions of the human race as the Koran has 
 remained, must possess some intrinsic merits, 
 
58 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 some singular power of fascination. These 
 are to be found partly in the great truths 
 which it inculcates (of which more presently), 
 and in the tone of high authority in which 
 they are inculcated, but also partly in the 
 style in which they are expressed. Here, 
 again, the contrast with the Bible is striking 
 and instructive. In the Bible, the matter 
 exceeds in value by a hundredfold the 
 manner in which that matter is expressed. 
 But in the Koran it is to a great extent the 
 other way. Although the exact meaning of 
 a writer must always suffer some detriment 
 by the translation of his thoughts into a 
 language different from that in which they 
 were first conceived and expressed, yet pro- 
 bably there is no book in the world which 
 has lost less by translation than the Bible. 
 This is more especially true of our English 
 translation. The more delicate shades of 
 meaning sometimes disappear, no doubt, in 
 the English translation of the Bible, as they 
 must in the translation of any book ; but the 
 beauty of the original is rivalled, is often 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 59 
 
 indeed surpassed, by the beauty of the trans- 
 lation. And this is not surprising, when we 
 consider that the Greek of the New Testa- 
 ment, and, though only in some portions and 
 in a less degree, the Hebrew of the Old 
 Testament, belong to periods when those 
 languages were in a state of decadence ; 
 whereas the English of the translation re- 
 presents the golden era of our national tongue, 
 the era of its greatest fertility, and vigour, 
 and grandeur — the era of Spenser, of Shake- 
 speare, and of Hooker. 
 
 The Koran, on the other hand, was 
 originally written in the purest Arabic. 
 Mahomet continually appeals to its extra- 
 ordinary superhuman beauty and purity, as 
 an evidence of the divine source from which 
 he declared it to flow. He challenged un- 
 believers to produce, even with the aid of 
 genii, any passage worthy to be compared 
 with a single chapter in the Koran. Those 
 who are acquainted with Arabic inform us 
 that in its purest type it is in the highest 
 degree copious, musical, and elegant ; and 
 
6o THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 that these qualities all meet in the Koran. 
 Consequently there is scarcely any book in 
 the world which loses so much by translation. 
 The charm of its graceful, harmonious, rhyth- 
 mical, sonorous sentences utterly evaporates, 
 and the matter, stripped of its gay attire, 
 appears to the ordinary reader insufferably 
 dull and commonplace. 
 
 Nothing, however, more forcibly illustrates 
 the poverty of the Koran, viewed as what it 
 claims to be, a complete revelation of theo- 
 logical and moral truths, than its inability to 
 stand the test of translation. If it was really 
 a complete treasury of divine truth, the shape 
 of the treasure-house would be of little im- 
 portance compared with the jewels it en- 
 shrined. But such is not the case ; and it is 
 to the consideration of these contents that we 
 now turn : from the form of the book to the 
 book itself. 
 
 The Koran may fairly be judged by the 
 definition of its purport as laid down in its 
 own pages. At the close of the twelfth 
 Sura we read : ' The Koran is not a newly 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 6 1 
 
 invented fiction : but a confirmation of those 
 Scriptures which have been revealed before 
 it, and a distinct unfolding of everything 
 necessary in respect either of faith or prac- 
 tice, and a direction and mercy unto them that 
 believe.' In other words, the Koran claims 
 to be a complete supplement to all preced- 
 ing revelation, to be the final statement of 
 God's will both concerning dogmatic be- 
 lief and practical conduct. 
 
 In the remainder of this lecture it is pro- 
 posed to examine the theological teaching 
 of the Koran by the light of this claim. 
 Does it only confirm the teaching of the Bible 
 respecting the nature of the Divine Being, or 
 does it tell us anything which, supposing it to 
 be true, seems an important addition to the 
 knowledge of Mankind concerning the rela- 
 tion of God to man, and of man to God ? 
 
 The Koran, then, to begin with, teaches 
 a pure, rigid, austere monotheism ; a belief 
 in one absolute God, not as a philosophic 
 abstraction, but a living Being, exercising a 
 vital energy upon the world which He has 
 
62 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 made. The finest passages in the Koran 
 are, undoubtedly, those in which the majesty, 
 and power, and wisdom, of this infinite Being 
 are set forth. Even through the veil of trans- 
 lation some of the grandeur of the original is 
 discernible. For example : ' God ! there is no 
 God but He : the living, the self-subsisting : 
 neither slumber nor sleep layeth hold of 
 Him. To Him belongeth whatever is in 
 Heaven or on Earth. Who is he that can 
 intercede with Him, but through His good 
 pleasure. He knoweth that which is past, and 
 that which is to come unto men, and they 
 shall not comprehend anything that He 
 knoweth but so far as He pleaseth. His 
 throne is extended over Heaven and Earth, 
 and the preservation of both is no burden 
 unto Him.' 
 
 Or aofain : ' It is He who hath created the 
 Heavens and the Earth in truth, and whenso- 
 ever He saith unto a thing " Be," it is. With 
 Him are the keys of the secret things, none 
 knoweth them besides Himself: He knoweth 
 that which is on the dry land and in the sea : 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 63 
 
 there falleth no leaf but He knoweth it : 
 neither is there a Qrrain in the dark parts of 
 the earth, nor a green thing, nor a dry thing, 
 but it is noted in His clear book. It is He 
 who causeth you to sleep by night, and 
 knoweth what ye merit by day : He also 
 awaketh you therein, that the preordained 
 term of your lives may be fulfilled : then 
 unto Him shall ye return, and He shall de- 
 clare unto you that which ye have wrought.' 
 
 The wonders of the natural world as evi- 
 dences of the existence and power of a Creator 
 are frequently dwelt upon in language of 
 considerable fervour and force, and at times, 
 doubtless in the original language, of high 
 poetical beauty, e.g. : ' Now in the creation of 
 Heaven and Earth, and in the vicissitudes of 
 day and night ; in the ship which saileth in 
 the sea laden with things profitable for man- 
 kind ; in the rain which God sendeth from 
 Heaven, quickening thereby the dead earth, 
 and replenishing the same with all sorts of 
 cattle ; in the changes of the winds, and in 
 the clouds that are compelled to do service 
 
64 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 between Heaven and Earth, there are signs 
 to men of understanding.' 
 
 The omnipresence and omniscience of 
 God, and the unerring justice of His future 
 judgment upon men, are declared with 
 earnestness and eloquence. ' There is no 
 private discourse among three persons, but 
 He is the fourth of them ; nor among five, 
 but He is the sixth of them ; neither among 
 a smaller nor a larger, but He is with them 
 wheresoever they be ; and He will declare 
 unto them that which they have done on the 
 day of resurrection ; for God knoweth all 
 things.' ' The Lord knoweth the secrets of 
 men's hearts, and there is nothing in Heaven 
 or on earth but it is written in a clear book.' 
 And again, in one of the earliest Suras: ' When 
 the earth shall tremble with her quaking, and 
 the earth shall cast forth her burthens, and 
 man shall say, " What aileth her ? " in that 
 day shall she unfold her tidings, because the 
 Lord shall have inspired her ; in that day 
 shall mankind advance in ranks, that they 
 may behold their works, and whoever shall 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 05 
 
 have wrought good of the weight of a grair 
 shall behold it ; and whoever shall have 
 wrought evil of the weight of a grain shall 
 behold it.' 
 
 We may freely acknowledge the beauty 
 and the truth of these and similar passages, 
 and yet heartily concur in the judgment of 
 Gibbon that the loftiest of such strains in the 
 Koran ' must yield to the sublime simplicity 
 of the Book of Job,' and we may well add 
 the Book of Psalms. The mercy and bene- 
 ficence of God, especially as manifested in 
 His bountiful provision for the physical wants 
 of man, and, on the other hand, the too fre- 
 quent pride and ingratitude of man in de- 
 manding, or expecting as a right, advantages 
 which are conceded only as free and un- 
 merited favours, are topics frequently and 
 powerfully handled, but, again we must say, 
 at a distance vastly below the treatment of 
 such subjects in the Psalms and Prophets of 
 Holy Writ. On the other hand the absolute 
 predestination of men to happiness or misery 
 is repeatedly affirmed with a degree of harsh- 
 
 F 
 
66 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 ness which it is difficult to reconcile with the 
 attribute of perfect mercy assigned in other 
 passages, and which finds no parallel in the 
 pages of the Bible, where God is represented 
 as a Being, Who, in the beautiful words of 
 our Collect, ' declares His almighty power 
 most chiefly in showing mercy and pity.' 
 
 Take, for instance, such a passage as this : 
 * This is a revelation of the most mighty, 
 the merciful God, that thou mayest warn a 
 people whose fathers were not warned, and 
 who live in negligence : our sentence hath 
 justly been pronounced against the greater 
 part of them, wherefore they shall not be- 
 lieve. We have set a bar before them and 
 a bar behind them : and we have covered 
 them with darkness, wherefore they shall not 
 see. It shall be equal unto them whether 
 thou preach unto them, or do not preach unto 
 them : they shall not believe.' Or again, yet 
 more boldly : * Whomsoever God shall please 
 to direct. He will open his breast to receive 
 the faith of Islam ; but whomsoever God 
 shall please to lead into error. He will render 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. d*] 
 
 his breast straight and narrow as though he 
 were dimbing up to Heaven :' i.e., attempt- 
 ing an impossible thing. 
 
 Place side by side with such passages as 
 these the strongest language to be found in 
 the Bible concerning the impossibility of 
 opening the ears or eyes of some men to the 
 reception of divine truth, and the difference 
 will be at once apparent. In the Koran this 
 impenetrable hardness is represented as the 
 inevitable consequence of an everlasting, 
 immutable decree of God : in the Bible as 
 the inevitable consequence of perverseness 
 and obduracy on the part of man's free will : 
 the working of a natural law whereby powers 
 which are long disused become at last 
 incapable of acting. He who persistently 
 refuses to see or hear God's truth becomes at 
 last unable to see or hear it, just as he who 
 should refuse to move his arm would in time 
 lose all power to move it. This is the im- 
 port of such passages as ' from him that hath 
 not shall be taken away even that which he 
 hath ; ' or, ' as they did not like to retain God 
 
 F 2 
 
68 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 in their knowledge, God gave them over to a 
 reprobate mind.' Or ... . ' because they 
 received not the love of the truth that they 
 might be saved, for this cause God shall send 
 them strong delusions that they should be- 
 lieve a lie.' The same meaning underlies 
 those passages also where it is more boldly 
 said that God ' hardened the heart of Pharaoh ; ' 
 or, 'He hath blinded their eyes and hardened 
 their heart;' or, 'whom He will He hardeneth.' 
 A study of the connection in which those 
 passages occur will always show that such 
 hardening or blinding is not arbitrary or initia- 
 tory on the part of God. On the contrary it is 
 the judicial penalty of long-continued resistance 
 to God's long-suffering efforts to soften the 
 heart and to open the eyes. The design, the 
 desire of God is that ' all men should be saved, 
 and come to the knowledge of the truth : ' but 
 man is free : he is not coerced into goodness. 
 God does not reverse His moral laws to save 
 a man in spite of himself, any more than He 
 reverses His physical laws. If a man wilfully 
 puts his hand into the fire, it will be burned ; 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. ' 69 
 
 if he sins, he will ultimately suffer for it ; if 
 he shuts his mental eyes to the light of God's 
 truth, he will not see it. 
 
 The power of God, especially in regard 
 to predestination, being brought out into such 
 strong prominence in the Koran, it is not 
 surprising that fear and passive resignation, 
 rather than love and active devotion, appear 
 to be the prevailing attitude of the Moham- 
 medan mind towards Him. This is indicated 
 by the very name of their religion, ' Islam,' 
 or ' resignation to the will of God ; ' and by the 
 designation of the faithful as ' Mussulman ' or 
 * Moslem,' 'the resigned.' It was the aim of the 
 founder of the sect of the Wahabees in the last 
 century to restore the faith of Mahomet in its 
 purity and integrity, as taught in the Koran. 
 The absolute power of the Deity is expressed 
 by the Wahabees in the simple formula ' La 
 Ilah ilia Allah.' The words themselves seem 
 harmless and true : literally rendered, they 
 merely signify ' There is no God but one God ;' 
 but their full import, we are assured, amounts 
 to a great deal more. It amounts to a de- 
 
V 
 
 70 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 claration that this one Supreme Being- is * the 
 only force in the world, and that all things 
 else, matter or spirit, instinct or intelligence, 
 physical or moral, are nothing but pure, un- 
 conditional passiveness, alike in movement or 
 in quiescence, in action or in capacity.' ^ Such 
 is the God of the sect which prides itself on 
 having revived the teaching of the Koran in 
 its utmost purity. Such, then, is the God of 
 the Koran, the God whom we are there 
 taught to believe was the God whom Abra- 
 ham worshipped in spirit and in truth, of 
 whom the true knowledge had been lost, 
 which it was the mission of Mahomet to 
 restore. Whether the God of Abraham is 
 more fully and faithfully presented to us in 
 the pages of the Koran or in the pages of 
 the Bible, I leave the readers of these pas- 
 sages which I have contrasted, and others 
 like them, to decide. Had Mahomet really 
 known the Bible, it seems almost incredible 
 that he should have imagined himself the 
 depositary of a new and special revelation 
 
 ' W. G. Palgrave, ' Central Arabia,' vol. i. p. 365, cc. viii. 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 7 1 
 
 concerning the attributes of the Divine Being ; 
 for all, and more than all, which he affects to 
 disclose was to be found already revealed 
 in the Books of Genesis, of Job, and of the 
 Psalms alone. The intervention of the Angel 
 Gabriel would have been a superfluous waste 
 of divine power. But it appears to be very 
 doubtful whether Mahomet could read ; and, 
 if he could, yet more doubtful whether he 
 ever perused the canonical books of the Old 
 and New Testaments. 
 
 He may have read, or heard read, portions 
 of the Prophets or the Psalms, which may 
 have suggested some of the grander passages 
 in the Koran about the attributes of the 
 Deity ; but, on the other hand, all his know- 
 ledge of Biblical incidents and characters 
 seems not derived from the sacred history 
 itself, but culled from a variety of sources, 
 the Talmud, the Targum, and the Midrash 
 of the Jews, the spurious Gospels of the 
 Christians, and Arabian and Syrian tradition, 
 ranging from the beautiful and probable down 
 to the puerile and grotesque. 
 
 The history of the most prominent cha- 
 
*J1 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 racters of the Old Testament is either totally 
 disfigured in the Koran, or supplemented 
 with long circumstantial stories, which for the 
 most part destroy the consistency and perso- 
 nality of the character. Some of the tales, 
 for instance, related about Abraham are 
 beautiful and instructive, and in harmony 
 with what we read elsewhere about the pa- 
 triarch, though they may not be actually true ; 
 but others are so silly that no sound critic 
 could possibly admit the incidents of both as 
 real occurrences in the life of the same person. 
 As a specimen of the higher kind, take 
 the following account, borrowed from the 
 Talmud, of the conversion of Abraham from 
 the idolatry of his countrymen : ' When the 
 night overshadowed him, he saw a star, and 
 he said, " This is my Lord ; " but when it set 
 he said, " I like not gods which set." And 
 when he saw the moon rising he said, " This 
 is my Lord ; " but when he saw it set he said, 
 " Verily, if my Lord direct me not, I shall 
 become one of those who go astray." And 
 when he saw the sun rising he said, " This is 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 73 
 
 my Lord, this is the greatest ; " but when it 
 set he said, " O, my people, verily I am clean 
 of that which ye associate with God : I direct 
 my face unto Him Who has created the 
 Heavens and the earth. I am of the right 
 faith, and am not one of the idolaters." ' We 
 may fairly believe that we have here, though 
 cast into that vivid dramatic form which 
 legend commonly assumes, the record of a 
 true fact : the gradual elevation of the patri- 
 arch's mind from the superstitious worship of 
 the heavenly bodies prevalent among his 
 countrymen, to a purer and more spiritual 
 faith. The accounts, on the other hand, of 
 his destruction of the images of ancestral 
 deities, and of the attempt of Nimrod to put 
 him to death by burning, are too foolish to be 
 looked upon as anything but purely mythical. 
 The life of Moses is not so much distorted 
 as the lives of some other characters, Solo- 
 mon, for instance, who is turned into a kind of 
 wonder-working magician ; but the narrative of 
 the Exodus, and of the settlement in Canaan, is 
 overlaid with such a mass of tedious legendary 
 
74 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 rubbish, that the mind of the reader becomes 
 fatigued and bewildered, and thankfully es- 
 capes from the fantastic shadows of Fairy- 
 land into the serene daylight of real history. 
 Viewing the Koran, therefore, as a compi- 
 lation, the critical, artistic power of the com- 
 piler cannot be ranked high. 
 
 It is needless to say that the idea of a 
 plurality of persons in one Godhead was utterly 
 V repugnant to the rigid monotheism taught by 
 Mahomet. His vague acquaintance with 
 Christianity seems to have led him into sup- 
 posing that Christians acknowledged, and even 
 in some degree worshipped, what he calls 
 ' companions ' of God, and taught that sons and 
 daughters were born to Him. This strange 
 misconception seems to have arisen partly 
 from confused information about the doctrine 
 of the Holy Trinity, which he seems actually 
 to have thought involved the worship of God 
 the Father, Jesus, and the Virgin Mary as 
 co-ordinate deities ; partly perhaps from the 
 tendency to saint-worship, which was begin- 
 ning to grow up in the Church. 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 75 
 
 The foundation, therefore, of the Christian 
 creed, the divine Sonship and incarnation of 
 our blessed Lord, was emphatically denied 
 and denounced by the apostle of Islam. It 
 is doubtful indeed if the Christian doctrine 
 was ever fairly and reasonably put before 
 him, the Christianity with which he came in 
 contact beino^ probably tainted with Mani- 
 cheism, Nestorianism, and other common 
 forms of Oriental error ; but at any rate he 
 conceived it to be a part of his mission as a 
 preacher of pure monotheism to declare that 
 Jesus was not God, and that divine honours 
 ought not to be paid to Him. Mahomet's 
 aim was to show that the life and character 
 of Jesus had been totally misunderstood and 
 misrepresented : that He had really come 
 only as a prophet, only to begin the work 
 which Mahomet himself was destined to 
 complete : namely, the restoration to its 
 original purity of the monotheistic faith of 
 Abraham : a design which the believers in 
 Jesus had frustrated by unduly exalting Him 
 to the level of the Deity. 
 
76 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 Against the Jews he maintained that 
 Jesus was, Hke himself, an inspired prophet 
 and reformer ; against the Christians that He 
 was not more than this. Hence the pecuHar 
 aversion of Jew and Christian ahke from the 
 religion of Islam. Each was irritated by the 
 assumption of superiority on the part of this 
 rival to both, which required the Jew to 
 believe more, and the Christian to believe 
 less, than was contained in the creed of his 
 forefathers. According to the teaching of 
 the Koran, the Jews would be condemned 
 because they rejected Christ as a prophet, 
 the Christians because they adored Him as 
 the Son of God. 
 
 The intolerant tone, however, of the 
 Koran towards Judaism and Christianity 
 increases very much with the gradual growth 
 of Mahomet's power, and the extension of 
 his views of conquest. At first the language 
 is mild, almost conciliatory, and, as concerning 
 the ultimate condition of the Christian, hope- 
 ful : take the following as a specimen : ' Surely 
 those who believe and those who Judaise, 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. "-i"] 
 
 and Christians and Sabseans, whoever be- 
 lieveth in God and the last day, and doeth 
 that which is right, shall have their reward 
 with their Lord : there shall come no fear on 
 them, neither shall they be grieved.' And 
 yet more strongly : ' Unto every one of you 
 were given a law and an open path, and if 
 God had pleased, He had surely made you 
 one people ; but He hath thought fit to give 
 you different laws that He might try you in 
 that which He hath given you respectively. 
 Therefore strive to equal each other in good 
 works. Unto God shall ye all return, and 
 then will He declare unto you that concerning 
 which ye have disagreed.' But as time goes 
 on, this mild language is exchanged for stern, 
 uncompromising denunciation alike of Chris- 
 tian and Jew ; and as the rule laid down in the 
 Koran itself is that where passages are dis- 
 cordant, the later revelation abrogates the 
 earlier, the moderate passages just cited must 
 go for nothing. 
 
 The references in the Koran to the life 
 of our Lord exhibit a wider and wilder de- 
 
78 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 parture from sober history than the references 
 to characters of the Old Testament. In the 
 pages of the Koran the life of Jesus is dressed 
 up with those fantastic and puerile stories of 
 unnecessary and unseemly wonders with 
 which the Apocryphal Gospels abound, and 
 which rob the character of that divine dignity 
 and simplicity which in the genuine Gospels 
 excite our admiration and our love. The 
 events connected with the birth of John the 
 Baptist are related in tolerable harmony with 
 the Gospel narrative. Not so those which 
 concern the birth and infancy of our blessed 
 Lord. In the Koran the Angel Gabriel not 
 only announces the future birth of Christ to 
 the Virgin Mary, but the conception of the 
 Divine Son is represented as due to his in- 
 fluence. The birth of Jesus is described as 
 having taken place under a palm-tree in the 
 desert, whither his mother had wandered. 
 Being nearly exhausted from want of food 
 and drink, she is directed by Gabriel to shake 
 the branches of the tree, whereupon ripe 
 dates immediately fall from them, and a 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 79 
 
 spring of pure water gushes forth from Its 
 roots. She takes the child home, who speaks 
 in his cradle, and announces himself as a 
 prophet of God. When older he animates a 
 bird made of clay, to convince his companions 
 of his prophetical destiny ; but it is expressly 
 said that this and other miracles were wrought 
 by the permission of God, not by his own 
 power. Some hazy account of the Holy 
 Eucharist which had been brought to Ma- 
 homet may perhaps have given birth to the 
 curious statement in the Koran, that, at the 
 request of Jesus, God caused a table laden 
 with provisions to descend from heaven, that 
 the day of its descent might become a festival 
 day to his disciples. The reality of the 
 crucifixion is explained away by the adoption 
 of the common Gnostic theory that God 
 frustrated the design of the Jews by taking 
 up the real Jesus into heaven, while His 
 enemies wasted their rage upon a phantom 
 substituted for Him. As a consequence 
 of this view, the resurrection disappears 
 altogether as part of the history of our Lord ; 
 
8o THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 and faith in the resurrection of all men, al- 
 though an integral part of the Mohammedan 
 creed, is not based in the Koran on the fact 
 of a risen Christ, but on the power of an 
 Almighty Creator to renew and revive that 
 which He originally made. The miracle of 
 r<?-creation, it is remarked, is not greater than 
 the miracle of creation. 
 
 Of any notion of the Holy Spirit, not 
 merely as a Person, but even as a direct in- 
 fluence or energy from the Deity operating 
 on man, I cannot find any trace in the 
 Koran. The cold, rigid monotheism which 
 Mahomet taught, did not tolerate the idea of 
 such close personal communion between man 
 and his Maker. The interpretation put 
 upon the promise of the Paraclete in St. 
 John xvi. is the most curious instance either 
 of astounding ignorance or of audacious im- 
 posture, to be found in the whole of the 
 Koran. First, Trapa/cXT^Tos is confounded 
 with Trept/cXvTo?, which signifies ' renowned,' or 
 * praised ; ' and then this being also the mean- 
 ing of Ahmed, of which the name Mohammed 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 8 1 
 
 is compounded, the passage is wrested into a 
 prophecy of the coming of Mahomet. 
 
 ' Jesus, the son of Mary, said, O children 
 of Israel, verily I am the Apostle of God 
 sent unto you confirming the law which was 
 given before me, and bringing good tidings 
 of an Apostle who shall come after me, 
 whose name shall be Ahmed.' There are 
 some other passages more dimly alluded to 
 which Mahomet or his disciples conceived to 
 be prophetic of himself, and he asserted that 
 the Bible had contained more, but had been 
 mutilated by Jews and Christians. 
 
 While, however, the Koran jealously 
 guards the unity of the Godhead, it incul- 
 cates a belief in Intermediate beings, angels 
 and genii, who are allowed to exercise a 
 very powerful influence upon human beings. 
 The angels are represented in the Koran as 
 incorporeal beings created of fire, the guar- 
 dians of the throne of God, the messengers 
 of His will between heaven and earth. At 
 the creation of man, they were bidden to 
 worship Adam as the son of God. All 
 
 G 
 
82 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 obeyed excepting the devil Eblis, who was 
 too proud and envious to fall down before a 
 creature of clay, and became thenceforth the 
 enemy of man. Further, the good angels are 
 described as impeccable and immortal, oi 
 various orders and ranks, which are distin- 
 goiished by the number of their wings. To 
 each man is assigned his guardian angel ; and 
 two who attend him, one on either side, take 
 an account of his actions good and bad which 
 will be produced on the day of judgment. 
 Anofels take the souls of men from their 
 bodies ; angels will summon men to judg- 
 ment by the sound of the trumpet ; angels in- 
 tercede with God for the penitent ; angels 
 will convey the faithful to heaven, the lost to 
 hell, where they keep guard over the fallen 
 spirits. 
 
 The genii of the Koran are almost iden- 
 tical with the daemons of the Talmud. They 
 have more in common with angels than men, 
 yet are inferior in several respects. Like 
 angels, they are made of fire, they have 
 wings, they roam up and down the world, 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 83 
 
 they know future events ; but they have some 
 human quah'ties, they eat and drink, they are 
 liable to human passions, and to death. 
 
 Such is Islam, viewed as a theological 
 system — a vast advance upon polytheism, 
 fetichism, gross and grovelhng superstition of 
 any kind ; but how immeasurably below even 
 the Jewish revelation of the nature of God, 
 and of the relation between God and man ! 
 It is austere, comfortless, and cold. The 
 Deity is represented, not indeed as a mere 
 philosophical abstraction, but yet as a Being, 
 remote, unapproachable in majesty and might, 
 wielding at His arbitrary will the destinies 
 and movements of men, yet far aloof from 
 them ; a ruler of overwhelming power, rather 
 than a loving and merciful, though almighty 
 Father. There is nothing to fill up or bridge 
 over the chasm which divides this tremen- 
 dous Being from man ; no divine Mediator, 
 no quickening illuminating Spirit ; for the 
 action of angels is too precarious and vague 
 to fulfil these offices. Islam — resignation to 
 the irresistible will and decrees of God — ^ 
 G 2 
 
84 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 expresses very well the relation between man 
 and his Maker as set forth in the Koran ; 
 the submission of obedient fear to a power, 
 not the devotion of love to a person. The 
 theology, therefore, of the Koran fails to 
 meet the profoundest religious needs of 
 man ; it removes the Creator to an immeasur- 
 able distance from the creatures whom He 
 has made, and in the renunciation of all idea 
 of mediation it falls infinitely below not 
 Judaism only but Magianism and Brah- 
 manism, which in other respects it excels. 
 All that is good and true in the Koran 
 concerning the nature of God, and worthy 
 of the subject, is to be found in the Bible, if 
 it be not borrowed from the Bible ; all that is 
 original is good for nothing, if indeed there 
 be anything purely original, for probabl)' 
 most of the wilder statements could be traced 
 to traditional sources. The genius, indeed, 
 of Mahomet as the founder of a theological 
 system consisted, not so much in inventing 
 or devising anything actually new, as in 
 piecing together fragments of other creeds, 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 85 
 
 and by his commanding personal influence, 
 tact, enthusiasm, and self-confidence, impos- 
 ing this patchwork system successfully on 
 so large a number of his fellow-country- 
 men. In itself, the Koran is a clumsy pro- 
 duction. To suppose that an angel was sent 
 from heaven to reveal the truths which it 
 contains, would be unnecessary, for those 
 truths are to be found more amply, more 
 beautifully expressed elsewhere ; to suppose 
 that Gabriel was sent from heaven to reveal 
 the childish absurdities which it contains, 
 would be an insult to the character and work 
 of angels. 
 
 It remains to consider briefly the teaching 
 of the Koran concerning a future state. It 
 may truly be said that if the lofty, though 
 cold, conception of the Deity be the highest 
 point in the teaching of Islam, its doctrine of 
 a future state stands on the lowest level. It 
 is, indeed, not raised much above the belief 
 which has prevailed among many heathen 
 nations. As the wild Indian imagines that 
 the joy of the future life will consist in rang- 
 
86 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 ing over well stocked hunting grounds with 
 the bow and the dog, which have been his 
 companions in the chase on earth ; as our 
 Teutonic forefathers, ere their conversion to 
 Christianity, looked forward to banquets in 
 the drinking halls of Odin, as the height of 
 celestial bliss ; so did the Arab, instructed 
 by the Koran, anticipate that the joys of 
 Paradise would be of that sensuous and volup- 
 tuous nature which to his temperament were 
 most alluring. ' Verdant gardens watered 
 by clear and unfailing streams, rivers of milk 
 the taste whereof changed not, rivers of wine 
 pleasant to them that drink, rivers of clarified 
 honey, perpetual shade from trees ever laden 
 with the most delicious fruits ; ' these are 
 the things which make up the scenery of the 
 Mohammedan Paradise. Here the faithful, 
 arrayed in costly raiment of silk, and adorned 
 with bracelets of gold and pearls, should re- 
 pose on soft couches, attended by dark eyed 
 damsels of immortal youthfulness and super- 
 human beauty. Life in Paradise, in short, is 
 made up of the most earthly sensual enjoy- 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 8/ 
 
 ments, only magnified and intensified to a 
 degree never experienced on earth, and 
 which, if they ever could be experienced, must 
 soon cloy the appetite of the most insatiable 
 Arab that ever lived. Of God there is no 
 mention in these descriptions, nor, indeed, is it 
 easy to see how the Divine Being could with 
 decency be introduced into them. There are, 
 indeed, occasional hints of a beatific vision of 
 the Deity to be enjoyed by the holiest of the 
 faithful, but they are rare and dim compared 
 with the frequent and glowing pictures of 
 more material and corporeal delights. The 
 pains of hell are, in their grossness, a fitting 
 counterpart to the pleasures of Paradise. 
 One quotation will suffice : ' They who 
 believe not shall have garments of fire fitted 
 to them ; boiling water shall be poured upon 
 their heads ; their bowels and also their skins 
 shall be dissolved thereby, and they shall be 
 beaten with maces of iron. So often as they 
 shall endeavour to get out of hell because of 
 the anguish of their torments, they shall be 
 dragged back into the same, and their tor- 
 
88 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 mentors shall say unto them, taste ye the 
 pain of burning.' 
 
 In the description of the resurrection, and 
 of the day of judgment, some of the Scrip- 
 tural doctrine is reproduced ; the archangel's 
 trumpet, the darkening of the sun, the shak- 
 ing of the earth, the reeling of the mountains, 
 the shrivelling together of the heavens like a 
 parched scroll ; but all these are strangely 
 jumbled with the wildest and most fantastical 
 imaginations. 
 
 In all these descriptions of the resurrection, 
 the judgment, and the future life, in addition 
 to their intrinsic materiality and coarseness, 
 we see the culminating example of a weak- 
 ness which pervades the whole of the Koran, 
 and perhaps more than anything else betrays 
 its human origin. I mean the attempt to bring 
 down the most inscrutable mysteries to the 
 level of the human understandinof. The mi- 
 nute circumstantial descriptions of holy places 
 where angels would fear to tread, and of holy 
 persons before whom they would veil their 
 faces, savours of a thoroughly human curiosity 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 89 
 
 which imaofines or invents where it cannot 
 discover. They are in direct contradiction to 
 the teaching of Holy Scripture, ' eye hath not 
 seen, nor ear heard, neither hath entered into 
 the heart of man to conceive the things which 
 God hath prepared for them that love Him.' 
 The reticence and reserve of the Bible con- 
 cerning many subjects which most excite 
 human curiosity is surely of some value in 
 evidence that the origin of the sacred volume 
 is not human, but divine. With that partial 
 knowledge of the future state which the 
 Gospel vouchsafes to us, the wise Christian is 
 content. To know that * God hath prepared 
 for them that love Him such eood thinofs as 
 pass man's understanding ; ' to know that 
 though there be a veil between us and the 
 other world, and ' that it doth not yet appear 
 what we shall be,' yet if ' we purify ourselves 
 even as Christ is pure, we shall be like Him, 
 for we shall see Him as He is; ' to know that 
 the body of our humiliation, the body of this 
 present fallen nature, liable to sin, to disease, 
 to death, shall be changed so as to be 
 
90 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 fashioned according to the body of Christ's 
 glorified state ; such knowledge, surely, is 
 enough to be thankful for, enough to live by. 
 Such knowledge is a revelation of truths 
 which we could not have certainly discovered 
 for ourselves, a revelation which discloses 
 light sufficient to guide and cheer us as we 
 plod along the dark and slippery ways of 
 this world's night, while the greater light, 
 which would now only dazzle and bewilder, 
 is held back until the day comes, when the 
 shadows shall flee away and we shall ' know 
 even as we are known.' 
 
91 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 MORAL TEACHING OF THE BIBEE AND THE 
 KORAN CONTRASTED. 
 
 * Allahu Akbar ! Prayer is better than sleep ! O Thou 
 bountiful One, Thy mercy ceaseth not ! My sins are great: 
 greater is Thy mercy ! I extol His perfection ! Allahu Akbar.' 
 — TJie Mohanwicdan Call to Prayer. 
 
 The apostolic mission of Mahomet having 
 been once acknowledged, it was natural that 
 he should undertake the regulation, not only 
 of the creed but also of the moral practice 
 and ceremonial worship of his countrymen. 
 The Koran consequently became the ethical 
 digest, the civil code, the ceremonial hand- 
 book, as well as the theological oracle of 
 his disciples. And it is obvious that if 
 Mahomet's aim was to remodel the national 
 life, the most effectual way of attaining it, 
 
92 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 his prophetic authority once estabHshed, was 
 to frame a number of positive precepts touch- 
 ing every department of moral conduct. A 
 pecuHar character is by this method quickly 
 but forcibly stamped upon the recipients. 
 They become ' new creatures,' with new 
 motives, and new purposes. They are 
 capable of being conducted by their ruler to 
 definite ends, because their movements are 
 under control, because the people are more 
 like a disciplined army, than are a people 
 to whom greater freedom of thought and 
 action is allowed. Nothing less than the 
 imposition of a minute code of rules for 
 practical life could have enabled Benedict, or 
 Francis of Assisi, or Dominic, or Ignatius 
 Loyola to fix such a distinct and lasting 
 character upon the great religious orders 
 which they created. 
 
 It was by their subjection to a system of 
 positive precepts, moulding and regulating 
 every department of life, that the Israelites, 
 after their emancipation from Egypt, were 
 trained for that peculiar position among the 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 93 
 
 nations of the world which it was God's pur- 
 pose to give them. Their long servitude in 
 Egypt had crushed their spirit of independ- 
 ence and self-respect, had lowered their moral 
 standard, and corrupted the pure faith of 
 their forefathers. Nothing less than a stringent 
 minute set of practical laws could have trans- 
 formed them from a rabble of abject and 
 superstitious slaves into a brave, God-fearing, 
 God-loving host of free men. Such a code 
 was given to them in the hands of their 
 mediator, Moses ; it became to them, what 
 the Koran has become to the Mussulman, 
 the theological, moral, ceremonial, and civil 
 code, all in one ; it taught them what to 
 believe, how to worship, how to live. Hav- 
 ing been converted, under the influence of 
 their heaven-sent law, into a valorous and 
 puissant people, they took forcible possession 
 of the land of Canaan ; and the promise made 
 ages before to their ancestors Abraham, 
 Isaac, and Jacob, was at last fulfilled. 
 
 Thus far there certainly seems some 
 analogy between the effects of the law given 
 
94 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 to the Jews from God, as they beheved, 
 through Moses, and the effects of the law- 
 given to the Arabs from God, as they no less 
 believed, through Mahomet. The aim of 
 Mahomet was to revive among his country- 
 men the Arabs, as Moses revived among his 
 countrymen the Jews, the pure faith of their 
 common forefather Abraham. In this he 
 succeeded to a very great extent. For a 
 confused heap of idolatrous superstitions he 
 substituted a pure monotheistic faith ; he 
 abolished some of the most vicious practices 
 of his countrymen, modified others ; he 
 generally raised the moral standard, improved 
 the social condition of the people, and intro- 
 duced a sober and rational ceremonial in 
 worship. Finally he welded by this means 
 a number of wild independent tribes, mere 
 floating atoms, into a compact body politic, 
 as well prepared and as eager to subdue 
 the kingdoms of the world to their rule and 
 to their faith, as ever the Israelites had been 
 to conquer the land of Canaan. 
 
 But the danger of a precise system of 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 95 
 
 positive precepts regulating in minute detail 
 the ceremonial of worship, and the moral and 
 social relations of life, is that it should retain 
 too tight a grip upon men when the circum- 
 stances which justified it have changed or 
 vanished away ; that the movements as it 
 were of full-grown men should be impeded 
 and cramped by garments fitted only for 
 children ; or to speak more correctly, perhaps, 
 that the moral growth of those who live 
 under such a minute system of restraints 
 should be stunted and retarded. Amongst 
 the Jews there was a provision made against 
 this danger. It was one peculiar part of the 
 mission of the Prophets to counteract that 
 tendency to narrowness, formality, and hard- 
 ness, which was the consequence of living 
 under a rigid system of positive precepts. 
 They kindled the spirit of worship and of 
 morality, as opposed to the letter ; they pre- 
 pared the way for the purer, loftier, more 
 free dispensation of the Gospel. The earlier 
 system of exact and positive laws had been 
 necessary, first to transform the character of 
 
96 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 the people, and then to maintain it ; first to 
 mark them off from all other nations as God's 
 chosen, peculiar possession, and then to fence 
 them round and preserve their creed and 
 morals intact, and undefiled by the mass of 
 heathenism which surrounded them. But 
 lest they should confound virtue as identical 
 with obedience to the outward requirements 
 of the law, the voices of the Prophets were 
 ever and anon lifted up to declare that a 
 strict conformity to practical precepts, whether 
 of conduct or ceremonial, would not ex- 
 tenuate, but rather increase, in the eyes of 
 God the guilt of an unpurified heart and an 
 unholy life. 
 
 ' To what purpose is the multitude of 
 your sacrifices unto me ? Bring no more 
 vain oblations ; incense is an abomination 
 unto me ; the new moons and sabbaths, the 
 calling of assemblies, I cannot away with : it 
 
 is iniquity, even the solemn meeting 
 
 Wash you, make you clean ; put away the evil 
 of your doings from before mine eyes ; cease 
 to do evil, learn to do well ; seek judgment, 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 97 
 
 relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, 
 plead for the widow.' It would be unnecessary 
 to multiply citations of similar passages, which 
 are familiar to us all. They are all anti- 
 cipations of the moral teaching of Him who 
 pronounced woe on those hypocrites that 
 paid tithe of mint, anise, and cummin, but 
 omitted the weightier matters of the law, 
 judgment, mercy, and faith. 
 
 It is obvious to any reader of the Koran 
 that it does not contain, except perhaps in a 
 few stray passages, any teaching analogous 
 to the moral teaching of the Hebrew Prophets 
 which might act as a corrective to the cramp- 
 ing and hardening influence of its positive pre- 
 cepts. Nor has any school of teachers arisen 
 in Islam who have made it their aim to accom- 
 plish this salutary object. There have been 
 Scribes (and probably Pharisees) in abun- 
 dance, but no Prophets. 
 
 In the reformation which Mahomet 
 
 effected among the Arabs, by persuading 
 
 them to adopt as of divine institution a set of 
 
 theological doctrines and moral precepts, it 
 
 H 
 
98 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 has been admitted that there seems some 
 analogy to the reformation effected among 
 the Israehtes by Moses. It has often been 
 considered that in the propagation of the 
 creed of Mahomet by the sword, there is a 
 further parallel to the forcible occupation of 
 the land of Canaan by the Jews. There are 
 critics who will compare the extermination or 
 subjugation of the inhabitants of conquered 
 territory alike by Mahomet and Joshua, and 
 maintain that it is equally difficult to reconcile 
 either with sound principles of morality. 
 The supposed analogy, however, breaks 
 down upon examination, and the case turns 
 out to be one, not for comparison, but 
 contrast. In the Koran, the Mussulman is 
 absolutely and positively commanded to make 
 war upon all those who decline to acknowledge 
 the prophet until they submit, or, in the case of 
 Jews and Christians, purchase exemption from 
 conformity by the payment of tribute. The 
 mission of the Mussulman, as declared in the 
 Koran, is distinctly aggressive. We might 
 say that Mahomet bequeathed to his disciples 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 99 
 
 a roving commission to propagate his faith 
 by the employment of force where persuasion 
 failed. ' O prophet, fight for the religion of 
 God' — ' Stir up the faithful to war,' such are 
 commands which Mahomet believed to be 
 given him by God. ' Fight against them 
 who believe not in God nor the last day,' 
 ' attack the idolatrous in all the months,' such 
 are his own exhortations to his disciples. 
 
 We need hardly stop to point out that 
 such a charge is diametrically opposite to the 
 commission of Christ to His Apostles, who 
 were commanded to preach the Gospel to 
 every creature, but were expressly forbidden 
 to support their preaching by carnal weapons. 
 It is more important to show that the Jews 
 had no roving commission to go about the 
 world making proselytes, and presenting the 
 alternatives of tribute or the sword to such 
 as would not accept their creed. They were 
 commanded to take possession of only a 
 narrow strip of land, promised ages before to 
 their ancestors, to extirpate the inhabitants 
 on account of their singular wickedness, and 
 H 2 
 
lOO THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 then to keep themselves aloof from their 
 neighbours in order that the light of a pure 
 monotheistic faith might be maintained burn- 
 ing undimmed amidst the darkness of sur- 
 rounding heathenism. Again and again the 
 people are reminded that the land is given 
 them as a step towards the fulfilment of the 
 promise made by God to their forefathers, 
 that through their seed all nations of the 
 earth should in the ages to come be blessed ; 
 again and again they are instructed that in 
 destroying or expelling the inhabitants they 
 were only instruments used for the removal 
 of wickedness instead of some inanimate force, 
 such as earthquake, or plague, or the fire 
 which consumed Sodom and Gomorrah. 
 ' Understand this day that the Lord thy God 
 is He which goeth over before thee; as a con- 
 suming fire shall He destroy them, and bring 
 
 them down before thy face Speak not 
 
 thou in thine heart after that the Lord thy 
 God hath cast them out from before thee, 
 saying, for my righteousness the Lord hath 
 brought me in to possess this land Not 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. lOl 
 
 for thy righteousness or for the uprightness of 
 thine heart dost thou go to possess their land ; 
 but for the wickedness of these nations the Lo7'd 
 thy God doth drive them out from before thee, 
 and that He may perform, the word which the 
 Lord s ware unto thy fathers, Abraham, Isaac, 
 and Jacob ' (Deut. ix. 3-5). The two pur- 
 poses for which the Jews were permitted to 
 take forcible possession of Canaan are here 
 distinctly stated : the immediate purpose was 
 the expulsion of wickedness ; the ultimate 
 far reaching purpose was, retrospectively, the 
 fulfilment of the promise made to their fore- 
 fathers ; prospectively, as a part or conse- 
 quence of this fulfilment, the bestowal of a 
 blessing on all families of the earth. Mean- 
 while the Jews, having been once established 
 in their country, were to abstain from aggres- 
 sion upon surrounding nations, and as far as 
 possible from intercourse with them. They 
 were to act on the defensive, to keep them- 
 selves separate and undefiled ; not to compel 
 others to accept their faith, but to wait pa- 
 tiently God's own time, and God's own way of 
 
I02 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN, 
 
 extending It, In the Book of Deuteronomy 
 (xvii.) there are some principles laid down 
 for regulating- the character and conduct of 
 kings who might in future be appointed. 
 They all aim at repressing the acquisition of 
 military power, the display of military pomp, 
 the indulgence in luxury, and the accumula- 
 tion of riches to which the Oriental despots of 
 the world were addicted. The Jewish king- 
 was not to multiply horses to himself, or 
 wives or silver and orold. The career of 
 
 O 
 
 Solomon was in direct disobedience to these 
 commands, and initiated a disastrous policy 
 of worldly greatness and ambition in his suc- 
 cessors, which ended in the overthrow of the 
 Empire, In the Koran, on the other hand, 
 there is no such condemnation of these 
 elements of earthly luxury and ostentation, 
 and the later caliphs certainly indulged in 
 them to their hearts' content. 
 
 The latitude of toleration allowed to the 
 Jews towards nations alien in creed or birth, 
 or both, was as great as possible compatibly 
 with the necessity of keeping the chosen 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. IO3 
 
 nation free from contamination ; and much 
 greater than many from a superficial view of 
 the Jewish position are apt to imagine. 
 ' Thou shalt not abhor an Edomite, for he is 
 thy brother; thou shalt not abhor an Egyptian, 
 because thou wast a stranger in his land.' 
 Edomite or Egyptian children of the third 
 generation were to be admitted as members 
 of the congregation (Deut. xxiii. 7, 8). The 
 league of peace made with the Gibeonites 
 was to be observed for ever, noLwithstandine 
 they had obtained it by a fraudulent artifice. 
 This scrupulous adherence to a pledge once 
 given, this ' swearing to a neighbour, and dis- 
 appointing him not, though it were to their 
 own hindrance,' presents a striking contrast to 
 the acts of treachery which were not onlv 
 cohnived at by Mahomet, but in some cases 
 expressly sanctioned. 
 
 Nothing, again, is more continually and 
 solemnly reiterated in the pages of the Penta- 
 teuch than the duty of showing kindness to 
 strangers. The command is always based 
 upon a touching appeal to the recollection of 
 
I04 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 their own former condition as strangers and 
 sojourners in Egypt. ' Thou shalt not op- 
 press a stranger, for ye know the heart of a 
 stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land 
 of Egypt' 'Thou shalt neither vex a stranger 
 nor oppress him, seeing ye were strangers in 
 the land of Egypt.' The Koran also enjoins 
 repeatedly and in very emphatic language the 
 duty of showing kindness to the stranger and 
 the orphan, and of treating slaves, if converted 
 to the faith, with the consideration and respect 
 due to believers. The duty even of mercy 
 to the lower animals is not forgotten, and it 
 is to be thankfully acknowledged that Moham- 
 medanism as well as Buddhism shares with 
 Christianity the honour of having given birth 
 to Hospitals and Asylums for the insane and 
 sick. But ardent admirers of Islam are so 
 much captivated by these laudable traits that 
 they sometimes unduly magnify them, and 
 underrate the teaching of the Bible in refer- 
 ence to the same subjects. To take the case 
 of slavery, for instance ; persons filled with 
 admiration of the humane treatment of the 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. IO5 
 
 slave inculcated in the Koran, and as a rule 
 practised in Mohammedan countries, are apt 
 to forget that slavery after all is distinctly re- 
 cognised by the Koran as an integral part of 
 the social system ; that the Mohammedan slave 
 could not look forward like the Hebrew to his 
 release in the seventh year ; and that, while 
 the Koran enjoins kindness in general terms, 
 there are not such often repeated and touch- 
 ing warnings as we find in the Pentateuch 
 against oppression of slaves and hired ser- 
 vants, not such distinct and minute provisions 
 for their happiness and welfare. ' Thou shalt 
 not oppress an hired servant that is poor and 
 needy, whether he be of thy brethren or of 
 thy strangers that are in thy land within thy 
 gates: at his day thou shalt give him his hire, 
 neither shall the sun go down upon it, for he 
 is poor and setteth his heart upon it ... . 
 thou shalt remember that thou wast a bond- 
 man in Egypt, and the Lord thy God re- 
 deemed thee thence.' If a master struck a 
 slave so as to cause the loss of an eye or a 
 tooth, the slave was to go free for his eye's 
 
I06 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 sake, or his tooth's sake ; if he caused his 
 death, the master was to be punished. When 
 the slave was released in the seventh year, 
 his wife and children accompanied him unless 
 the wife had been given him by his master. 
 In that case, and in that case only, the master 
 could retain her (Exod. xxi.^). The run- 
 away slave was not to be restored to his 
 master. ' Thou shalt not deliver unto his 
 master the servant which is escaped from his 
 master unto thee : he shall dwell with thee in 
 that place which he shall choose in one of thy 
 ofates where it liketh him best : thou shalt not 
 oppress him' (Deut. xxiii. 15). 
 
 By such like enactments did the law of 
 Moses mitigate the condition of slavery. The 
 Gospel has done more. It did not violently 
 Interfere with any of the existing social or 
 political institutions amongst which it arose ; 
 it accepted them, it made the best of them. 
 It did not preach rebellion against the slave- 
 
 ^ Mr. Bosworth Smith's references to the Pentateuch on 
 this subject are defective and one-sided (' Lectures on Mo- 
 hammedanism,' p. 245). 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. lO/ 
 
 owner, or the despot ; but It was ever slowly 
 yet surely sapping the despotism alike of the 
 slave-owner and the political tyrant at its 
 roots by proclaiming principles of justice and 
 mercy, and infusing a spirit of brotherhood, 
 which were inconsistent with oppression in any 
 form. The conduct of St. Paul towards the 
 slave Onesimus and his master Philemon is a 
 typical illustration of the general attitude of 
 Christianity towards the institution of slavery 
 as a whole. He sends back the fugitive, but 
 requests Philemon that he may be received 
 not as a slave, but as a brother beloved ; be- 
 cause like the master he had become a Chris- 
 tian, was a member of the same spiritual 
 family, an inheritor of the same Heavenly 
 kingdom (Phllem. i6), 
 
 To pass from the treatment of slaves to 
 the treatment of enemies, ' Islam, tribute, or 
 the sword,' is the well-known formula which 
 sums up the teaching of the Koran concern- 
 ing this matter. ' When ye encounter the un- 
 believers, strike off their heads until ye have 
 made a great slaughter among them ; and 
 
Io8 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 bind them in bonds, and either give them a 
 free dismission afterwards or exact a ransom 
 until the war shall have laid down its arms.' 
 This is mild compared with many other pas- 
 sages where the alternative of release is not 
 suggested. The Israelites, as was observed 
 just now, were to abstain from aggression, 
 except upon the inhabitants of that land in 
 which they were to act as God's instruments 
 for the extirpation of wickedness. The cap- 
 ture of towns in Canaan, therefore, but in 
 Canaan only, was to be followed by complete 
 destruction of all that breathed therein. If 
 forced into war with more distant countries, 
 when the Jewish army came before a city 
 peace was to be proclaimed. If this was not 
 accepted and the city was besieged and cap- 
 tured, the men only were to be put to the 
 sword ; the women and children were to be 
 saved alive (Deut. xx.). Under the Mosaic 
 law women taken captive in war were not to 
 be degraded to the condition of slave concu- 
 bines. If a man wished to make one his 
 wife, she had first to go through a kind of 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN, IO9 
 
 religious ceremonial of purification, and then 
 she was allowed a month of mourning for her 
 old home before she was married. If the 
 husband afterwards wished to put her away, 
 she was free to go wherever she pleased ; the 
 man was not to sell her or in any way to 
 make merchandise of her (Deut. xxi.). These 
 provisions for the honour of female captives 
 form a striking contrast to the law of the 
 Koran, which, while it endeavours to alleviate 
 the evils of polygamy by restricting the 
 number of a man's wives to four, places no 
 limit whatever to the number of his concu- 
 bines, and makes no provision for the mitiga- 
 tion of their unhappy lot. 
 
 Of course we do not forget that the regu- 
 lations of the Pentateuch concerning war 
 were frequently violated, like many other 
 particulars of the moral law ; yet the deeds of 
 the most merciless kings of Israel and Judah 
 will hardly offer a parallel to one act of bar- 
 barous cruelty approved, if not actually 
 ordered, by Mahomet. Omm Kirfa, an aged 
 woman, chieftainess of a tribe which had 
 
no THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 molested and plundered the caravans of the 
 faithful, having been made captive, was tied 
 by the legs to two camels, which were then 
 driven in opposite directions, so that her body 
 was literally torn asunder. I am not aware 
 that the exploits even of modern Bashi 
 Bazouks and Circassians can rival such an 
 ' atrocity ' as this, committed under the sanction 
 of the founder of Islam. If it be scornfully 
 observed that things as horrible have been 
 done by men bearing the name of Christians, 
 and sometimes professedly in the name of 
 Christianity, we of course admit what every 
 Christian with shame and sorrow must con- 
 fess. Only such alleged parallels prove no- 
 thing. The ' tu quoque ' argument is always 
 a poor one, and in this instance it is peculiarly 
 unfortunate. Wars undertaken in the name 
 of religion by Christians are in direct dis- 
 obedience both to the spirit and letter of the 
 Gospel ; whereas religious wars undertaken 
 by Mohammedans are in conformity with the 
 practice and precept of the founder of their 
 religion. Christianity, therefore, cannot be 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. I I I 
 
 made in any way chargeable with cruelties 
 committed in wars which are themselves in 
 contravention of the command of Christ. 
 That men have (sometimes with a sincere zeal 
 for God only not according to knowledge) 
 attempted to propagate the Christian faith by 
 war with its concomitant horrors in direct 
 disobedience to the command of Christ, does 
 not improve the position of the Mussulman 
 when he propagates his creed by war in 
 direct obedience to the command of Mahomet. 
 One more illustration may suffice to close 
 the contrast between the Pentateuch and the 
 Koran respecting the conduct of war. In 
 the book of Deuteronomy the destruction of 
 such trees in an enemy's country as bore 
 edible fruit is expressly forbidden : ' Thou 
 shalt not cut them down to employ them in 
 the siege, for the tree of the field is man's life.' 
 On one occasion when some palm trees (one 
 of the principal sources of food to the Arab) 
 were an impediment to some military opera- 
 tion of the prophet, he produced a special re- 
 velation authorising their removal. ' What 
 
112 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 palm trees ye cut down or left standing were 
 so cut down or left standing by the will of 
 God, that He might disgrace the evil doers.' 
 The vices most prevalent in Arabia in 
 the time of Mahomet which are most sternly 
 denounced and absolutely forbidden in the 
 Koran were drunkenness, unlimited concu- 
 binage and polygamy, the destruction of 
 female infants, reckless gambling, extortionate 
 usury, superstitious arts of divination and 
 magic. The abolition of some of these evil 
 customs, and the mitigation of others, was a 
 great advance in the morality of the Arabs, 
 and is a wonderful and honourable testimony 
 to the zeal and influence of the reformer. The 
 total suppression of female infanticide and of 
 drunkenness is the most signal triumph of his 
 work ; yet it may be observed that the ex- 
 cesses of cruelty and licentiousness of which 
 Mohammedans can be guilty, notwithstanding 
 abstinence from wine, proves that total absti- 
 nence from one evil thing is not in itself so 
 good a security for virtue as the Christian 
 principle of soberness and temperance in all 
 thinofs. 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. II3 
 
 The condition of women in Arabia seems 
 to have been improved in three ways by the 
 provisions of the Koran. The transmission 
 of a man's wives to his heir as part of his 
 property, Hke his furniture or any other house- 
 hold chattel, was forbidden. The right of a 
 woman to a share in her father s or husband's 
 property was declared, and, as already stated, 
 the legal number of wives for any one man 
 was limited to four. Mahomet himself was 
 exempted from this restriction by a special 
 revelation in his favour. Under the Jewish 
 law, polygamy was tolerated ; but it was not- 
 distinctly sanctioned, as it is in the Koran, by 
 the definition of a fixed allowable number of 
 wives, and therefore no impediment was 
 placed in the way of the ultimate removal of 
 the system by the gradual growth of purer 
 and truer views respecting the married state 
 and the position of women in society. 
 
 The laws respecting divorce in the Koran 
 are vile, and reveal the condition of the wife 
 as suffering under the extreme degradation and 
 servitude common in all Oriental countries. 
 
1 14 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 The husband might put away his wife and 
 take her back again at pleasure ; but if divorce 
 had been thrice repeated she could not return 
 to her husband except on one revolting con- 
 dition, that she should first be married to 
 another man and live with him for one whole 
 day and night. We read of one follower of 
 the prophet who had offspring by sixteen 
 wives. As he could not have possessed 
 more than four at any one time, his case is 
 a remarkable illustration of the facility of 
 divorce. With these abominable customs 
 contrast the command in Deuteronomy (xxiv. 
 4), which expressly forbids a man to take back 
 a wife who has been once divorced and 
 married to another. In Deuteronomy, again 
 (xxi.), we find a law directed against the 
 effects of that favouritism and jealousy which 
 are among the many banes and curses of 
 polygamy. ' If a man have two wives, one 
 beloved and the other hated, and they have 
 borne him children, both the beloved and 
 hated, and if the first born son be hers that 
 was hated ; then it shall be when he maketh 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. II5 
 
 his sons to inherit that which he hath, that 
 he may not make the son of the beloved first 
 born before the son of the hated, but he shall 
 acknowledge the son of the hated for the first 
 born by giving him a double portion of all 
 that he hath : the right of the first born is 
 his.' 
 
 The exhortations to almsQfivino- as a 
 solemn duty commanded by God and owed 
 to man are, as is well known, very numerous 
 in the Koran. It is perhaps the point on 
 which the teaching of the Koran may most 
 fairly be compared with the teaching of the 
 Pentateuch, yet there are not such careful and 
 particular instructions in the Koran as in the 
 Pentateuch for ministering to the necessities 
 of the ' stranger, the fatherless, and the 
 widow.' The certainty of a rich reward in 
 the life to come to those who bestow alms is 
 promised in the Koran in terms which sound 
 rather like a bribe to benevolence, and which 
 might not improbably foster pride in the 
 almsgiver. Future punishment is predicted 
 with equal positiveness on those who should 
 I 2 
 
Il6 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 neglect the duty. ' Unto such as beUeve and 
 bestow alms shall be given a great reward,' 
 but he who did not pay his legal contribution 
 of alms would have a serpent twisted about 
 his neck on the day of resurrection. 
 
 The duties of prayer and fasting are In- 
 culcated in the Koran as co-ordinate with the 
 duty of almsgiving ; and the punctual and 
 scrupulous observance by the Mussulman of 
 the appointed hours of prayer, and the ap- 
 pointed season of fasting, is notorious and 
 edifying. According to the traditional ac- 
 count of Mahomet's nocturnal journey to the 
 seventh Heaven, he was commanded by the 
 Almighty to impose on his disciples the obli- 
 gation of saying prayers fifty times a day. 
 By the advice of Moses, he supplicated and 
 obtained a mitigation of this intolerable 
 burden, and the number was gradually re- 
 duced to five. The observance of these 
 hours was indispensable. The prayers might 
 be shortened on the march or in the camp, 
 when some emergency demanded action with- 
 out delay : but the omissions were to be made 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. I I 7 
 
 up afterwards when the pressure of danger 
 or haste was at an end. CleanHness was 
 designated by Mahomet as the key of prayer, 
 even as prayer was the gate of Paradise ; 
 and accordingly his disciples were forbidden 
 to enter on their devotions without having 
 washed the face, hands, and feet. In the 
 absence or scarcity of water, the believer is 
 by a special permission in the Koran to use 
 sand as a substitute. 
 
 In the beginning of his career, when he 
 was cultivating friendly relations with the 
 Jews, Mahomet instructed his disciples to 
 turn their faces, when they prayed, towards 
 Jerusalem ; but after all hopes of conciliating 
 the Jews were at an end, Mecca was estab- 
 lished as the Holy City, the centre of attrac- 
 tion to which the eyes and thoughts of the 
 faithful worshipper were to be directed. The 
 temple indeed at Mecca, the Kaaba, was 
 considered by Mahomet, in common with the 
 rest of his countrymen, as far exceeding 
 Jerusalem in antiquity and sanctity as a spot 
 consecrated to pure worship. It was sup- 
 
Tl8 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 posed to be almost coeval with the world. 
 The original having been destroyed by the 
 deluge, the temple was rebuilt, according to 
 Arabian tradition, by Abraham and Ishmael ; 
 but the black stone was venerated as a genuine 
 relic of the primaeval building, having been 
 let down, it was said, by God to earth at the 
 request of Adam, after his expulsion from 
 Paradise. The duty of visiting this holy 
 place is urged in the Koran with no less 
 frequency and solemnity than the duties of 
 almsgiving and prayer. Every Mohammedan, 
 as he values the prospect of happiness in the 
 life to come, is bound to make the pilgrimage 
 once, at least, in his lifetime, and those who 
 are able should make it every year in the 
 appointed month. If prevented by sickness 
 or any other pressing necessity, the omission 
 was suffered to be redeemed by offerings and 
 a ten days' fast. 
 
 The Koran prescribes that one month in 
 the year, the month Ramadan, should be 
 observed as a very strict fast. From sunrise 
 to sunset, neither food nor drink must pass 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. II9 
 
 the lips, but after sunset the natural appetites 
 may be moderately gratified. As the Arabian 
 year is lunar, each month in the course of 
 thirty-three years runs through all the diffe- 
 rent seasons. Consequently when the month 
 Ramadan falls in the middle of the summer, 
 the length of the days and the severity of the 
 heat cause such vigorous abstinence from 
 sunrise to sunset to be extremely mortifying. 
 
 We have now touched upon the main 
 precepts, ethical and ceremonial, contained in 
 the Koran. The following passage is per- 
 haps the best summary of the moral teaching 
 which could be picked out of the whole book, 
 especially as showing that Mahomet himself 
 did not value ceremonial unless it was at- 
 tended by that real devotion on the part 
 of the worshipper which all ceremonial is 
 intended to express : 
 
 ' There is no piety in turning your faces 
 towards the east or the west ; but he is pious 
 who believeth in God, and the Last Day, and 
 the Angels and the Scriptures and the Pro- 
 phets, who for the love of God dispenses his 
 
I20 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 wealth to his kinsfolk, to the orphans, and to 
 the needy, and the wayfarer, and to those who 
 ask, and for ransoming; who observeth prayer, 
 and payeth the legal alms, and who belongs to 
 them that are faithful to their engagements, 
 when they have engaged in them, and are 
 patient under ills and hardships and in time 
 of trouble ; these are they who are just and 
 those who fear the Lord.' 
 
 We get here a taste, a gleam, of that 
 higher and more spiritual moral teaching 
 which, as was pointed out at the beginning of 
 this lecture, is the most salutary counterpoise 
 to the stiffness and hardness of bare ethical 
 precepts and ceremonial regulations, and to 
 their tendency to contract men's notions 
 of morality. Yet if all the sublime teaching 
 of the Hebrew Prophets did not suffice to 
 rescue the Jews from formalism, if our Lord 
 had to denounce pretentious prayer-making, 
 ostentatious almsgiving, superstitious ablu- 
 tions, an inordinate veneration of Jerusalem 
 and the Temple as the only spots where 
 prayer would be acceptable, it is impossible 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 121 
 
 to forbear thinking that the minute directions 
 of the Koran concerning the times and places 
 of prayers, and fasting, and pilgrimage, con- 
 cerning the amount of almsgiving, and its 
 consequent reward, must be perilous to the 
 preservation of a large-minded, large-hearted 
 piety. The tendency of the human heart 
 to self-deceit and formalism is so strong that 
 when men are tied down to the performance 
 of certain religious functions, minutely and 
 precisely fixed in respect to time and manner, 
 so that neither less nor more is required of 
 them, they will very commonly (though per- 
 haps often unconsciously to themselves) fall 
 into the error of imagining that there is a 
 peculiar intrinsic merit and virtue in the mere 
 discharge of those duties. Morality is viewed 
 not in the abstract but in the concrete, as 
 consisting in a bundle of religious observances, 
 rather than in a certain disposition of the 
 heart towards God and man. 
 
 Thus, in contrasting the moral teaching of 
 the Koran with the moral teaching of the Old 
 Testament, and still more of the New Testa- 
 
122 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 ment, the point which cannot fail to strike 
 the careful student is this, that it deals much 
 more with sin and virtue in fragmentary 
 detail than as wholes. It deals with acts 
 more than principles, with outward practice 
 more than inward motives, with precept and 
 command more than exhortation. For in- 
 stance, there are commands to give full 
 measure, to weigh with a just balance, to 
 abstain from wine and gambling, to treat cer- 
 tain persons with kindness ; but on the graces 
 of truth and honesty, of temperance and 
 mercy, as principles of wide application, the 
 Koran does not dwell. I have failed to dis- 
 cover a single passage which touches on. 
 the virtue of meekness properly so called. 
 Patience is inculcated, but chiefly as a con- 
 dition of success in propagating the faith of 
 Islam ; for unless the believer was patient 
 under insult and adversity, the cause of his 
 religion might be injured by the provocation 
 of an attack.^ 
 
 1 It is, however, only fair to give a specimen, which may 
 be a sample of many more like it, of the check which 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 1 23 
 
 Nowhere in the Koran, as in the Bible, 
 is sin set forth as the subtle leaven, the 
 moral disease, pervading and corrupting 
 human nature, as the evil principle of which 
 all particular forms of wickedness are the 
 outcome. The Koran prescribes the practice 
 of certain virtues, and condemns the practice 
 of certain vices ; it encourages by promising- 
 rewards, it deters by threatening punishment ; 
 but it does not hold up before man the hate- 
 fulness and ugliness of all sin as a whole. 
 It does not depict vividly and forcibly the 
 sinfulness of his fallen nature and of the im- 
 possibility of his really cleansing himself in 
 the sight of God. Of the need of propitia- 
 tion for daily and inevitable transgressions, 
 there is not a word. This places at once a 
 
 reverence for the precepts of the Koran could place upon 
 angry passions. As one of the sons of Ali, Mahomet's 
 nephew, was dining, a slave dropped by accident a dish of 
 scalding broth upon him. The poor creature fell prostrate 
 before his master, and, to deprecate his rage, repeated a verse 
 from the Koran : ' Paradise is for those who command their 
 anger ;' ' I am not angry,' was the reply. ' And for those 
 who pardon offences ; ' * I pardon your offence.' ' And for 
 those who return good for evil ; ' 'I give you your liberty 
 and four hundred pieces of silver.' 
 
124 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 vast interval between the standpoint of the 
 Mohammedan and the Jewish religions. The 
 essence of the Biblical ethics is the insuffi- 
 ciency of man to fulfil the divine law of 
 righteousness, the hopelessness of his obtain- 
 ing the favour of God, or opening the gates 
 of Heaven by the strength of his own merits. 
 The necessity, therefore, of propitiation and 
 atonement runs through the teaching of the 
 Bible from beginning to end. Every offering 
 under the Jewish Law was an acknowledg- 
 ment of the offerer's inability to meet God's 
 demands ; it was a cry for mercy. All the 
 offerings were summed up and completely 
 discharged for man in the Life crowned by 
 the Death of Jesus Christ ; and the attitude 
 of the Christian towards God is that of humi- 
 lity and hope, his moral motive is gratitude 
 and love. The moral motive of Islam is a 
 solemn sense of the duty of obedience and 
 submission to an Almighty Ruler ; whereas 
 the moral motive of Christianity is love to 
 an Almighty Father, an all-sympathising Re- 
 deemer, Brother, and Friend. 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 1 25 
 
 The moral teaching of the Koran, put 
 into a few words, seems to amount to this : 
 ' Obey these rules for moral conduct, and 
 conform to this prescribed ceremonial in 
 worship, because they are commanded by 
 God and His prophet, and you will be re- 
 warded with everlasting bliss in the life to 
 come ; ^ disobey them, and you will be re- 
 warded with everlasting torment.' Such a 
 system is not calculated to inspire hope in the 
 sinner, or to foster humility in the righteous, 
 and is, to say the least, not unlikely to gender 
 the delusion that the whole of practical 
 morality and piety is enclosed within the 
 narrow compass of a fixed number of precepts. 
 There is no foundation laid in the Koran for 
 that far-reaching charity which, under the 
 Gospel, regards all men as equal in the sight 
 of God, and recognises no distinctions into 
 races and classes ; there is no foundation for 
 
 1 Not, indeed, because you deserve it. Mahomet is care- 
 ful to say that future bliss is the gift of God's mercy ; but yet 
 it is as confidently asserted that this gift will follow the dis- 
 charge of certain prescribed duties, as if it were the price 
 paid for them. 
 
126 THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 
 
 that keen sense of sinfulness, unworthiness, 
 insufficiency, for that distrust of self, and that 
 reliance on one higher and mightier than 
 ourselves, which has enabled all God's saints 
 to do and to suffer things beyond their 
 natural power, making good the saying of 
 St. Paul, ' When I am weak, then am I 
 strong.' 
 
127 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 THE PRACTICAL RESULTS OF CHRISTIANITY 
 AND ISLAM. 
 
 * By their fruits ye shall know them.' 
 
 We have considered Islam hitherto in itself; 
 the nature of its origin, and the character of 
 its Founder ; its Sacred Book, and the teaching 
 theological and moral therein contained. But 
 the best test, after all, of the truth and worth 
 of a religion must be the practical one. 
 What has it effected ? Is mankind the better 
 for it or the worse ? What are its fruits ? 
 Men do not gather figs from thorns, neither 
 from a bramble bush gather they grapes. 
 Caution, however, must be observed in the 
 application of this test. It is not always easy 
 to trace how far the prosperity or the depres- 
 sion of any given country is owing to the 
 
128 THE PRACTICAL RESULTS OF 
 
 religion which prevails there or to other 
 causes : race, climate, foreign invasion, and 
 the like. Nor is it the primary object of 
 religion to secure man's happiness in this 
 world, but to guide him in his aspirations to 
 the world above. But it seems safe to take 
 our stand upon this principle, which may be 
 called the law of concomitant variations : 
 that if prosperity has followed the establish- 
 ment of a certain form of religion, increasing 
 where it is strong, and decreasing where it is 
 weak, and this in a multitude of instances, — 
 that is to say, in divers countries, and in 
 divers ages of the world, — there must be 
 something in that religion which is conducive 
 to prosperity ; and, in like manner, that if the 
 reverse follows, there must be something in 
 that religion adverse to prosperity, and con- 
 sequently that such religion cannot as a 
 whole be divine. ' The light which leads 
 astray is not the light from Heaven.' 
 
 Let us, then, briefly survey what has taken 
 place in those countries where Islam has been 
 planted. First of all, it must be freely 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. I 29 
 
 granted that to his own people Mahomet 
 was a great benefactor. He was born In a 
 country where poHtical organisation, and 
 rational faith, and pure morals were un- 
 known. He introduced all three. By a 
 single stroke of masterly genius he simul- 
 taneously reformed the political condition, 
 the religious creed, and the moral practice 
 of his countrymen. In the place of many 
 independent tribes he left a nation ; for 
 a superstitious belief in Gods many and 
 Lords many he established a reasonable 
 belief in one Almighty yet beneficent Being ; 
 taught men to live under an abiding sense of 
 this Being's superintending care, to look to 
 Him as the rewarder, and to fear Him as the 
 punisher, of evil doers. He vigorously at- 
 tacked, and modified or suppressed, many 
 gross and revolting customs which had pre- 
 vailed in Arabia down to his time For an 
 abandoned profligacy was substituted a care- 
 fully regulated polygamy, and the practice of 
 destroying female infants was effectually 
 abolished. 
 
 K 
 
130 THE PRACTICAL RESULTS OF 
 
 As Islam gradually extended Its conquest 
 beyond the boundaries of Arabia, many 
 barbarous races whom it absorbed became in 
 like manner participators in its benefits. 
 The Turk, the Indian, the Negro, and the 
 Moor, were compelled to cast away their idols, 
 to abandon their licentious rites and customs, 
 to turn to the worship of one God, to a 
 decent ceremonial and an orderly way of life. 
 The faith even of the more enlightened 
 Persian was purified ; he learned that good 
 and evil are not co-ordinate powers, but that 
 just and unjust are alike under the sway of 
 one all wise and holy Ruler, who ' ordereth 
 all things in heaven and earth.' 
 
 For barbarous nations, then, especially— 
 nations which were more or less in the con- 
 dition of Arabia itself at the time of Ma- 
 homet — nations in the condition of Africa at 
 the present day, with little or no civilisation, 
 and without a reasonable religion — Islam 
 certainly comes as a blessing, as a turning 
 from darkness to light, and from the power 
 of Satan unto God. But the imposition of a 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 131 
 
 system good for barbarians upon people 
 already possessing higher forms of civilisation, 
 and the principles of a purer faith, is not a 
 blessing but a curse. Nay more, even the 
 system which was good for people when they 
 were in a barbarous state may become posi- 
 tively mischievous to those same people 
 when they begin to emerge from their bar- 
 barism under its influence into a higher con- 
 dition. The danger, as was remarked at the 
 beginning of the last lecture, attaching to a 
 system which minutely regulates every de- 
 partment of social life, moral conduct, and 
 religious ceremonial, is that it should be held 
 rigorously in force upon men when they have 
 outgrown the need of it. It may be good 
 as far as it goes ; good relatively to certain 
 circumstances, and perhaps, for the circum- 
 stances under which it was first devised, the 
 best possible ; but if it be not absolutely and 
 perfectly good, good for all times, places, and 
 persons, it must at some time, in certain 
 places, and to certain persons become not a 
 
 K 2 
 
132 THE PRACTICAL RESULTS OF 
 
 help, but a hindrance, to civIHsation and 
 moral progress. 
 
 The iimnediate eflect, then, of the intro- 
 duction of Islam among barbarous races, is 
 to raise them considerably in the scale of 
 humanity. Its action in this respect is pro- 
 bably more speedy than the action of Christi- 
 anity, owing to that definiteness, positiveness, 
 minuteness, with which it is brought to bear 
 on practical life, of which we have already 
 spoken ; it lays down rules and enforces 
 conformity to them, and consequently a more 
 immediate return is yielded in a visible re- 
 formation of manners, than is possible in the 
 case of a religion which inculcates large 
 principles for the due application of which 
 much must be left to the individual con- 
 science. 
 
 But when we turn to consider the effects 
 of the introduction of Islam among nations 
 already acquainted with the civilisation of the 
 Roman Empire and the light of the Christian 
 religion, the picture is very different. We 
 are compelled by the facts of history to 
 
CHRISTIAKITY AND ISLAM. 1 33 
 
 decline believing that in these cases Islam, 
 viewed as a whole, has been anything but an 
 enormous evil. Claiming, as it did, to be the 
 truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the 
 truth, it tolerated no rival ; Christianity and 
 Christian civilisation were voluntarily or by 
 compulsion to bend the knee before it. The 
 most effectual plan was to make a clean 
 sweep of both. Let us see how far the first 
 Mohammedan conquerors acted upon it. I 
 will quote the words of that most eminent 
 and trustworthy historian of the Byzantine 
 Empire, Mr. Finlay. * The Arab conquest,' 
 he says, ' of Palestine and Syria, not only 
 put an end to the political power of the 
 Romans, which had lasted seven hundred 
 years, but it also rooted out every trace of 
 the Greek civilisation introduced by the 
 conquests of Alexander the Great which 
 had flourished in the country for upwards of 
 nine centuries.'^ 
 
 The celebrated reply of the Caliph Omar, 
 when asked what should be done with the 
 
 ^ Vol. i. p. 445, 2nd edition. 
 
134 THE PRACTICAL RESULTS OF 
 
 library of Alexandria, illustrates the policy of 
 the Saracens in Egypt as elsewhere. ' If,' 
 said he, ' these writings agree with the Book 
 of God, they are useless, and need not be 
 preserved ; if they disagree, they are perni- 
 cious, and ought to be destroyed ; ' and ac- 
 cordingly the library was burned. Here, 
 again, Mr. Finlay remarks, ' political sagacity 
 convinced the Arabs that it was necessary to 
 exterminate Greek civilisation in order to 
 destroy Greek influence. The Goths, who 
 sought only to plunder the empire, might 
 spare the libraries of the Greeks ; but the 
 Mohammedans, whose object was to convert 
 or subdue, considered it a duty to root out 
 everything that presented any obstacle to the 
 ultimate success of their schemes for the ad- 
 vent of Mohammedan civilisation.' Tracing 
 their career of conquest along the northern 
 coast of Africa, he concludes by observing : 
 ' The Saracens were singularly successful in 
 all their projects of destruction ; in a short 
 time, both Latin and Greek civilisation was 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 1 35 
 
 exterminated on the southern shores of the 
 Mediterranean.'^ 
 
 In Spain, after the estabHshment of the 
 CaHphate of Cordova in 936 a.d., order suc- 
 ceeded a state of anarchy, which had been 
 disastrous ahke to the conquerors and to the 
 conquered, and under a happy succession of 
 vigorous, and in many instances, upright and 
 enhghtened CaHphs, commerce and agricul- 
 ture, science, literature, and the arts, were 
 carried to a higher degree of perfection than 
 in any other country under Arabian rule. I 
 am not just yet going to discuss the question, 
 how far Arabic science and art were original, 
 how far borrowed from the lower Greek 
 Empire.' What I wish to point out at 
 present, is, that although in Spain a high 
 order, as it seemed, of prosperity grew up, 
 yet it was only partial, it did not extend to 
 the whole of the population ; the subject 
 Christians were never conciliated, or assimi- 
 lated ; they were not happy or content ; and 
 
 ^ Vol. pp. 450, 451, 2nd edition. 
 
136 THE PRACTICAL RESULTS OF 
 
 their resistance to the Moors, as they were 
 called, never ceased, from the day the first 
 Moor set foot in the land until the day the 
 last was expelled from it. 
 
 From this rapid survey of the early con- 
 quests of the Saracens, two facts seem 
 abundantly plain : first, that the claim of 
 Islam to supersede every other form of faith 
 and of civilisation was so absolute, that it could 
 not tolerate their presence side by side with 
 itself; and that, as a consequence, it never 
 could get a permanent hold upon any country 
 which had become thorougJily leavened with 
 the Christianity, the civilisation, and the law 
 of the Roman Empire. It is a very inexact 
 way of speaking to say that it * crumpled up 
 the empire ; ' ^ it would be more correct to 
 say that it grated on the edges. Countries 
 like Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and northern 
 Africa, on the fringe of the empire, countries 
 whose inhabitants were regarded as rebels by 
 the Emperor, and as heretics by the Greek 
 Church, fell before Islam, but on the heart of 
 
 ^ Bosworth Smith, Lect. i. p. 26, 2nd edition. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 1 37 
 
 the empire it made no impression. Once it 
 menaced Constantinople, but it was hurled 
 back by the might and valour of Leo the 
 Isaurian. The second fact is this ; that in 
 those countries on the skirts of the empire 
 where It did succeed in planting" itself, this 
 was accomplished at the cost of uprooting as 
 far as possible the religion and civilisation 
 which it found there. To quote again from 
 Mr. Finlay : ' Of all the native populations in 
 the countries subdued, the Arabs of Syria 
 alone appear to have immediately adopted 
 the new religion of their co-national race ; but 
 the great mass of the Christians in Syria, 
 Mesopotamia, Egypt, Cyrenaica, and Africa, 
 clung firmly to their faith, and the decline of 
 Christianity in all those countries is to be 
 attributed rather to the extermination than 
 to the conversion of the Christian inhabitants. 
 The decrease in the number of the Christians 
 was invariably attended by a decrease in the 
 number of the inhabitants, and arose from the 
 oppressive treatment which they suffered 
 under the Mohammedan rulers of these 
 
138 THE PRACTICAL RESULTS OF 
 
 countries — a system of tyranny which was at 
 last carried so far as to reduce whole provinces 
 to unpeopled deserts.' ^ 
 
 Looking now beyond the limits of the 
 Roman Empire, the country where we might 
 most reasonably expect Mohammedanism to 
 have accomplished great things is Persia. 
 There Islam had a fair field to work upon ; 
 it became the national religion ; there were 
 no infidel Europeans to resist and hinder its 
 free development. But, as if by a strange 
 perverseness, Islam never seems to flourish 
 so well as when it is attacked or attacking. 
 Left to itself unmolested it loses energy, or 
 wastes its strength upon internal strife. In 
 Persia it split into a multitude of contending 
 sects, more occupied in devouring one another 
 than in promoting the welfare of their com- 
 mon country. The Persian is probably the 
 most polished, well educated, and literary, of 
 all Mohammedans ; yet his country is the 
 most deplorable specimen of mismanagement, 
 political, commercial, and everything else. 
 
 ^ Vol. i. p. 452. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 1 39 
 
 Fertile as the country is, and scanty as is the 
 population, there is none which has suffered 
 more cruelly from famine ; and, as a last 
 resource, the helpless government was re- 
 duced to the ignominious necessity, a short 
 time back, of calling in the aid of a foreigner, 
 a European, to save the country from be- 
 coming a total wreck. 
 
 Incomparably the most favourable ex- 
 ample of Mohammedan rule is to be found 
 in the Empire of the Great Moguls. The 
 greatest man of that illustrious dynasty as far 
 surpasses the best Caliphs of Cordova, as 
 they excel the Shahs of Persia. The wise 
 and noble Akbar, the third Mogul Emperor, 
 presents to us the extraordinary spectacle of 
 an Oriental despot, who during a long reign 
 of nearly half a century was unblemished by 
 a single crime worthy of record. In warfare 
 he was humane, forbidding the sale of cap- 
 tives as slaves, dispensing when possible with 
 the punishment of death, and forbidding it to 
 be inflicted with unnecessary pain, or pro- 
 longed torture. In legislation he was liberal ; 
 
140 THE PRACTICAL RESULTS OF 
 
 he abolished the capitation tax hitherto im- 
 posed upon the Hindoos, he admitted men 
 of all creeds to the highest offices of state. 
 But, unfortunately, it cannot be maintained 
 that this splendid example of an enlightened 
 Moslem ruler was himself a veritable Mussul- 
 man. He was in fact an eclectic, and, beyond 
 the doctrine of the unity of God, he paid but 
 little attention to the teaching, theological or 
 practical, of the Koran. He treated Chris- 
 tianity with marked respect, and even per- 
 mitted one of his sons to be instructed in the 
 Gospel. The Moslem, too, was free to drink 
 wine, to eat pork, to play at dice, and to with- 
 draw, if he pleased, from the Mosque. In 
 short, Akbar was so sorry a Mussulman that 
 he incurred the displeasure of his Moslem 
 subjects, not, we may suppose, so much from 
 the indulgences which he allowed to them, as 
 for the lenity and impartial justice which he 
 observed towards all other creeds. None of 
 his successors were equally tolerant, and in 
 Aurungzebe Moslem bigotry again mounted 
 the throne. The mild and equitable rule of 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 14! 
 
 Akbar is emphatically the case of an exception 
 which proves the rule. Still it is to be freely- 
 granted that the lot of the Hindoos under 
 Mussulman rule in India has never been so 
 unhappy as the lot of the subject Christians 
 in other countries. While this has been 
 partly due to the character of the rulers, much, 
 no doubt, has been owing also to the cha- 
 racter of the ruled. The Hindoo was natu- 
 rally more passive and submissive, than the 
 native of western countries, and the mild tole- 
 rance of his religious creed inspired him with 
 no earnest zeal either to propagate his own 
 faith, or to resist the faith of his conquerors. 
 
 But if there have been a few Moslem 
 dynasties which present some passing gleams, 
 more or less bright, more or less prolonged, 
 of civilisation and righteous government, 
 there is one which, from the beginning of 
 its career to the present day, has acted the 
 part of the destroyer and the oppressor with 
 the most fearful and unrelenting consistency. 
 No country under Moslem rule is permanently 
 prosperous, but the Ottoman Turk has sue- 
 
142 THE PRACTICAL RESULTS OF 
 
 ceeded beyond all others who have professed 
 the faith of Islam in making the countries 
 subject to his rule permanently miserable. 
 The land may be ' as the Garden of Eden 
 before him, but behind him it is a desolate 
 wilderness.' There is no country, perhaps, 
 which Providence has blessed with a more 
 bountiful store of natural resources than Asia 
 Minor, especially on the sea coast ; its rivers 
 ran with gold, its mountains yielded copper 
 and iron, and costly marble ; its plains waved 
 with all manner of crops, and the sides of its 
 hills were clad with the vine and the olive. 
 In the days of Greek and Roman enterprise 
 the coast was thickly studded with populous 
 and opulent cities. Under the care of an 
 industrious people, it once was, and might be 
 again, a paradise of beauty, and a treasure 
 house of wealth. But now the traveller wan- 
 ders through a dreary region rich only in ruins, 
 the melancholy relics of departed splendour, 
 and inhabited only by roving bands of Turco- 
 mans, and their herds of goats. Travellers 
 also in Palestine tell us that the sacred soil 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 1 43 
 
 would be prodigal in its gifts ; that it might 
 be again * a land of wheat, and barley, and 
 vines, and fig-trees and pomegranates, a land 
 of oil olive and honey ; a land wherein men 
 might eat bread without scarceness ; they 
 should not lack anything in it ; a land whose 
 stones are iron, and out of whose hills men 
 might dig brass ; ' ^ but the curse of Turkish 
 Mohammedan occupation is upon it, and, save 
 in the neighbourhood of Christian villages, 
 the once fruitful land has become barren. 
 The condition of European Turkey is too 
 notorious, unhappily, at the present time to 
 require any description or comment. The 
 conclusion to which we are brought by this 
 rapid survey is that sooner or later, in less 
 degree or in greater, historians and travellers 
 have the same tale to tell of all countries 
 under Moslem rule — the tale of lost fertility of 
 the soil, of a diminished and degraded popu- 
 lation, of ruined towns, of poverty-stricken 
 villages. 
 
 1 See especially Captain Warren's 'Underground Jeru- 
 salem,' chap. XX. 
 
144 THE PRACTICAL RESULTS OF 
 
 Turning now from the effect of Moham- 
 medanism upon the countries where it was 
 introduced to its effect on human character, 
 some analogy is, I think, discernible between 
 the two. The immediate effect is surprisingly- 
 great, and for the most part exceedingly 
 admirable; but it does not last. The first 
 successors of Mahomet himself were splendid 
 examples of the character which his religion 
 could produce. Abu Bakr and Omar, 0th- 
 man and AH, were patterns of temperance, 
 justice, and honour, for parallels to whom we 
 look in vain among the corrupt and effete 
 rulers of the Roman Empire in their day. 
 But this early and speedy promise is followed 
 by a no less rapid deterioration and decay. 
 In the course of a few generations the noble 
 breed of men who founded the Empire of 
 Islam, partly warriors, partly statesmen, 
 partly even saints, has vanished away. The 
 Christians in the Syrian province of the 
 Roman Empire almost welcomed their Sara- 
 cenic conquerors as affording them the pros- 
 pect of a happier lot than that which they 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 1 45 
 
 endured under the evil administration of a 
 decadent power ; but in a few generations 
 these hopes were frustrated : the conquerors 
 became oppressors, and the province was 
 transformed into a desert. In like manner 
 the earlier Ottoman princes, although never 
 approaching the Saracenic Caliphs in nobi- 
 lity of character, were not destitute of many- 
 fine qualities, and Othman at least had some 
 true notions about the duties and obligations 
 of a sovereign to his people. 'Rule merci- 
 fully and justly,' were the last words he spoke 
 to his son. But his successors quickly de- 
 generated into merciless tyrants, and have 
 finally dwindled into the abject and despicable 
 creatures whom we have now beheld for 
 generations, seated on the throne of Constan- 
 tinople, and in whom it is often difficult to 
 say whether wickedness or weakness is the 
 more distinctive feature. 
 
 With regard to the science, literature, and 
 art of the Saracens, of which one hears and 
 reads so much, I would not for a moment 
 question their reality or underrate their value ; 
 
 L 
 
146 THE PRACTICAL RESULTS OF 
 
 but that they were in any sense direct pro- 
 ducts of Islam is, I think, very much to be 
 doubted. Where did the Saracens get these 
 things ? Did they evolve them from their 
 ' own inner consciousness ' ? They certainly 
 did not bring them with them from Mecca 
 and Medina. The fact is, that though they 
 succeeded in destroying much of Greek and 
 Roman literature and art, they could not 
 destroy all. They could not destroy every 
 copy of Aristotle and Hippocrates ; they 
 could not break down every Roman arch, 
 nor did they demolish the mighty dome of 
 St. Sophia at Constantinople. And there 
 were men among the Arabs who were wise 
 enough to study these Greek and Roman 
 masterpieces of thought and art, and clever 
 enough to turn their study to good practical 
 account. They taught in Persia and in the 
 Western part of the Roman Empire what 
 they had learned in the Eastern part of it ; 
 and reproduced, perhaps with improvements, 
 in Cordova or Bagdad, what they had seen 
 in Byzantium. Their range of study amongst 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 1 47 
 
 Greek authors was limited, and confined to 
 translations of books on physical and meta- 
 physical science. The research of Gibbon 
 failed to discover a record of any Arabic 
 translation of any Greek poet, orator, or 
 historian. We cannot rate very highly the 
 literary genius of a people who neglected the 
 richest treasury of human thought in these 
 departments which the world possesses. 
 Their native literary productions may be of a 
 very high order ; but it is difficult to believe 
 that what is so very insignificant in transla- 
 tion, can be positively first rate in the original, 
 at least in matter, though it may be in style. 
 Of the value of Arabian contributions to 
 astronomy, mathematics, and medicine, I am 
 quite incompetent to decide. Astronomy, 
 we may say, is indigenous in the East, where 
 the climate favours and facilitates the study. 
 The so-called Arabic numerals appear to be 
 of Indian origin. 
 
 If, then, it be true that the Mohammedans 
 picked up their science and art, for the most 
 part second-hand, from those fragments of 
 
 L 2 
 
148 THE PRACTICAL RESULTS OF 
 
 both in the Roman Empire which escaped 
 destruction from the early Mohammedan 
 invaders, this question naturally occurs : — sup- 
 posing Eastern and Western Christianity had 
 been left to pursue their course unmolested 
 in Syria, Palestine, Asia Minor, Egypt, 
 Northern Africa, Spain, and Turkey, would 
 not science, literature, the arts, and every- 
 thing else which makes up civilisation, have 
 flourished as well as they have done in those 
 countries under Moslem rule, or do now in 
 those which are still under it ? It is hard to 
 believe that they would not have flourished, 
 not only as well, but a great deal better. At 
 any rate, they could not have flourished less 
 than they do in most of those countries at 
 the present moment. Mr. Palgrave bears 
 strong testimony to the high intellectual and 
 practical qualities of the Arabs ; he sees 
 capacities and aptitudes in the race for ac- 
 complishing great things in science and art, 
 but he adds: 'When the Koran and Mecca 
 shall have disappeared from Arabia, then, 
 and then only, can we expect to see the Arab 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM, 1 49 
 
 assume that place in the ranks of civilisation 
 from which Mahomet and his book have, 
 more than any other cause, long held him 
 back.' Here again, then, we see, as in the 
 case of Persia, that Islam left to itself has 
 somehow the unpleasant knack of consuming 
 energy and retarding progress. 
 
 And this brings me to the last point in 
 connexion with this part of our subject. As 
 the greatest and noblest specimen of a so- 
 called Mohammedan sovereign, Akbar, was 
 not, strictly speaking, a Mohammedan at all, 
 so we find that, in all Mohammedan states, 
 many of the most eminent men in all depart- 
 ments, politics, war, and literature, belonged, 
 originally at least, to an alien race, and an 
 alien creed, most commonly Christian or 
 Jewish.^ The most remarkable Illustration 
 of this fact, because it is one which lasted for 
 several centuries, was the employment by the 
 Ottoman Turks of the corps known by the 
 
 ^ He who thinks it worth while to plod through the lists 
 of learned men in the pages of Abdulpharagius may soon 
 convince himself of this fact. 
 
150 THE PRACTICAL RESULTS OF 
 
 name of the Janissaries. From the end of the 
 fourteenth up to the middle of the seventeenth 
 century, the great military conquests of the 
 Turks were mainly due to this celebrated 
 body of soldiers. And who were the Janis- 
 saries ? They were the offspring of Christians 
 in the provinces which the Turk had already 
 subdued — Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, and 
 Roumania. They were a human tax levied 
 by the conqueror on his victims ; the very 
 flower of their strength. Torn at an early 
 age from their homes, they were carefully 
 trained up as Mussulmans, in ignorance of 
 any home but the camp, and of any earthly 
 power to whom allegiance was due, save the 
 representative of the great prophet of Islam. 
 * From the seminaries of the Janissaries,' says 
 Von Hammer, ' issued the greatest men of 
 the Ottoman Empire. As long as the yearly 
 levy of Christian children continued, their 
 most famous statesmen and generals were 
 for the most part born Greeks, Albanians, and 
 Bosnians; seldom native Turks.' 'And thus,* 
 he proceeds in cogent and indignant language, 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 15! 
 
 * thus the strength of Turkish despotism re- 
 paired itself in the heart-blood of Christen- 
 dom ; and by means of this cunning engine 
 of statecraft Greece was compelled to tear 
 herself to pieces by the hands of her own 
 children.' The words of Von Hammer are 
 only a repetition of an observation made 
 centuries before, in 1573, by a Venetian diplo- 
 matist at the court of Selim II. * It is in the 
 highest degree r^pmarkable,' he said, 'that the 
 wealth, the administration, the force, in short 
 the whole body politic of the Ottoman Empire 
 rests upon, and is entrusted to, men born in 
 the Christian faith, converted into slaves, 
 and reared up as Mahometans.' The saying 
 remains in a great measure true to the present 
 day. Whatever vital energy there is in 
 Turkey, whatever agricultural industry, what- 
 ever commercial enterprise, appears to depend 
 upon Jews or Christians ; in fact upon any 
 people but the Turks ; and though the 
 common Turk can fight with courageous 
 obstinacy, the conduct of the fleet, and army 
 of that poor shadowy thing men call the 
 
152 THE PRACTICAL RESULTS OF 
 
 Sublime Porte, appears to be entrusted in a 
 great measure to foreigners. We do not say 
 that the barbarism of the Turk is the product 
 of Islam ; far from it. It is, no doubt, in a 
 great measure inherent in the Tartar race ; 
 but we do say that Mohammedanism has not 
 cured it, or even improved it. As he was 
 barbarian in the beginning, so is the Turk 
 barbarian now, and so, as long as he remains 
 Mohammedan, barbarian to all human ap- 
 pearance he will continue to be. On the 
 other hand, experience warrants the assertion 
 that there is no race, barbarian or civilised, of 
 which Christianity has taken 2. firm hold} that 
 has not advanced, and that does not manifest 
 capacities of further progress to an indefinite 
 extent. This is the real answer to those 
 superficial remarks often made that the 
 Russian or the Bulgarian is as barbarous as 
 the Turk, that the Turk ' is a gentleman,' 
 
 ^ I use these words advisedly because Abyssinia is an 
 instance of a state which has long professed Christianity, 
 and yet is barbarous ; but Christianity in Abyssinia is so 
 very imperfect and impure that it can hardly be said to have 
 more than touched it. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 1 53 
 
 and so on. It is not indeed true, even now; 
 but if it was true, we might be quite sure that 
 it would not remain true, because history and 
 experience teach us that while in Christian 
 states there is an indefinite power of advance, 
 Mohammedan states, after quickly reaching a 
 certain point, become stationary, or else 
 retrograde. In the most degraded, the 
 most barbarian Christian state, there are 
 untold germs, endless possibilities of growth. 
 Is it thus with Mohammedan nations ? Let 
 the past history or the present condition of 
 Arabia, of Persia, of Syria, of Egypt, of 
 Northern Africa, of Spain, of Asia Minor, of 
 Turkey in Europe supply the answer. It is 
 easy to point to individual Mohammedans 
 who have been better than individual Chris- 
 tians, just as it is easy to point to special eras 
 when some Mohammedan states have been 
 more civilised than some Christian states. 
 But this proves nothing. The question is, 
 not whether Islam has produced here and 
 there fine types of character, or splendid eras 
 of civilisation, but whether, as a system, in the 
 
154 THE PRACTICAL RESULTS OF 
 
 long run, it promotes a high and ever in- 
 creasing order of civilisation and virtue. 
 Are Mohammedan countries, as a rule, pros- 
 perous and progressive, or are they depressed, 
 stationary, retrograde ? Take a practical test. 
 Would any one as willingly live in the 
 London, the Paris, the Vienna, the St. 
 Petersburg, of 200 years ago, as he would 
 live in the London, the Paris, the Vienna, 
 the St. Petersburg, of the present day, not- 
 withstanding all the abominations which yet 
 remain there ? I trow not. This is because 
 the countries of which those ' cities are the 
 capitals have advanced in civilisation. Could 
 we apply the same test with equal confidence 
 to cities under Mohammedan rule, Smyrna 
 for instance ? In fact, from a review of the 
 past history, and a survey of the present con- 
 dition, of the principal countries in the world, 
 there seems no escape from the conclusion 
 that Christianity and real civilisation are 
 practically co-extensive ; where the one ends, 
 the other ends also. 
 
 And if this be the case ; if, though with 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 1 55 
 
 occasional gleams of sunshine, the presence 
 of Mohammedanism acts like an east wind 
 on prosperity and progress, the question yet 
 remains why is this ? The explanation may 
 be found in the fact that three of the worst 
 elements of barbarism, three conditions the 
 most fatal to human civilisation and moral 
 improvement, are incorporated in Islam as 
 integral parts of the system. The three evils 
 to which I allude are polygamy, despotism, 
 and its counterpart, slavery. They are in- 
 digenous in the East ; Mahomet alleviated 
 them indeed, but they are distinctly adopted 
 in the Koran, and consequently are invested 
 with a kind of divine sanction. They stamp 
 upon the religion of Mahomet an essentially 
 Oriental character. Christianity and the 
 Western nations abhor and repudiate these 
 three evil things, and consequently Moham- 
 medanism has ever been the most implacable 
 foe to Christianity and the Western nations, 
 the most impervious barrier to the advance of 
 Christianity and Western civilisation in an 
 eastward direction. 
 
156 THE PRACTICAL RESULTS OF 
 
 The establishment of a regulated polygamy 
 by Mahomet was, of course, a great advance 
 upon the unrestrained licentiousness which in 
 Arabia had preceded it ; but then polygamy, 
 although controlled, is established, with all its 
 concomitant evils : degradation on the side of 
 the woman who belongs to the husband, 
 while the husband does not belong to her ; 
 jealousies on both sides, an overgrown 
 and divided household. Yet all who ac- 
 knowledge the Koran must accept poly- 
 gamy .as a divinely sanctioned condition 
 of life. Under the law of Moses, polygamy 
 was tolerated ; under the law of Mahomet it 
 is established. All honour to him for en- 
 deavouring to mitigate its evils by restriction. 
 The practice was so deeply rooted in Oriental 
 life, that this was probably all which he could 
 venture to attempt. The divine wisdom of 
 the Mosaic law is manifested in the fact that 
 while it seems to do less for the evil, while 
 it tolerates and places no defined limitations 
 on the practice, it thereby left the way more 
 clear for its ultimate abolition. 
 
 To the votary of Islam, again, there is no 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 1 57 
 
 escape from the recognition of absolute des- 
 potism as a divinely ordered form of govern- 
 ment. By virtue of his alleged commission 
 from God, Mahomet claimed the right to 
 regulate every item in the life of his disciples ; 
 and his successors are suffered to inherit his 
 divine right of absolute power, only limited 
 in their case by deference to the directions of 
 the Koran. That sacred volume is the only 
 groundwork of jurisprudence for nations pro- 
 fessing the faith of Islam. It is for the 
 Mussulman his code of civil law, as well as of 
 theology and ethics. The ultimate appeal in 
 every question of law in any Mohammedan 
 nation, whether it be in the East or the West, 
 whether it be in the ninth century or the 
 nineteenth, is to some sentences inscribed on 
 a palm leaf or mutton bone in Arabia in the 
 middle of the seventh century. The rigidity of 
 the Koran is often so incapable of adaptation 
 to the necessities of particular cases that, in 
 order to prevent a deadlock, an ingenious 
 method of evasion is adopted. To quote the 
 words of Gibbon : ' The Kadi respectfully 
 places the sacred volume on his head, and 
 
158 THE PRACTICAL RESULTS OF 
 
 substitutes a dexterous interpretation more 
 apposite to the principles of equity, and to the 
 manners and policy of the times.' Should 
 the employment of this subterfuge become 
 more common, as in some Mohammedan 
 countries seems probable, the way will be 
 indefinitely opened to moral and social, if not 
 religious reformation ; but then Islam will 
 cease to be Islam. Where the religion of 
 Mahomet is maintained in its integrity, the 
 sciences of divinity and law coalesce ; the 
 jurist and divine is the same person, only 
 looked at from different points of view, and 
 one name is common to him in both capacities. 
 In like manner the functions of monarch and 
 chief pontiff are united in the same person. 
 Such is the impotence of the Ottoman Sultans 
 at the present day, that the administration 
 of government (if the word government can 
 be so far dishonoured as to be applied to 
 what is, in fact, merely a system of rapine) 
 must practically be conducted by other wills 
 than theirs ; yet the Grand Vizier and the 
 Mufti are in theory only the ministers, and 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 1 59 
 
 obedient slaves of the Sultan's will in tem- 
 poral and ecclesiastical affairs. And in 
 the early days of Saracenic and Turkish 
 power, the great Caliphs and Sultans ex- 
 ercised a despotic power exceeding that of 
 any Roman Emperor or Pope ; for the will 
 even of the most despotic emperors or popes 
 was subject to the control of some forms of 
 constitutional law, and that law, again, was 
 leavened more or less by the principles of 
 the Gospel. Even the tyranny of the first 
 Buonaparte was not that purely arbitrary 
 will, that mere personal agency, which in its 
 origin is essentially Oriental, and which 
 is embodied in the religious system of Ma- 
 homet. 
 
 In describing the effects of the early 
 Saracenic conquests, Mr. Finlay remarks: 'No 
 attempt was made to arrange any systematic 
 form of political government, and the whole 
 power of the state was vested in the hands of 
 the chief priest of the religion, who was only 
 answerable for the due exercise of this ex- 
 traordinary power to God, his own con- 
 
l6o THE PRACTICAL RESULTS 
 
 science, and the patience of his subjects. 
 The moment, therefore, that the responsibiHty 
 created by national feeHngs, military compa- 
 nionship, and exalted enthusiasm ceased to 
 operate on the minds of the Caliphs, the ad- 
 ministration became far more oppressive than 
 that of the Roman Empire. No local magis- 
 trates elected by the people, and no parish 
 priests connected by their feelings and in- 
 terests both with their superiors and inferiors, 
 bound society together by common ties ; and 
 no system of legal administration, indepen- 
 dent of the military and financial authorities, 
 preserved the property of the people from 
 the rapacity of the government. Socially 
 and politically the Saracen Empire was little 
 better than the Gothic, Hunnish, and Avar 
 monarchies ; and that it proved more durable 
 with almost equal oppression is to be attri- 
 buted to the powerful enthusiasm of Ma- 
 homet's religion which tempered for some 
 time its avarice and tyranny.' We may add, 
 that where the conscience of the sovereign 
 and the patience of the people are the only 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. l6l 
 
 bounds to the exercise of his power, con- 
 science is apt to become hardened, and 
 patience amazingly enduring. Inured to 
 subjection, and deprived of any ready means 
 of discussing their wrongs or concerting re- 
 sistance, the people are apt to lapse into apa- 
 thetic indolence, and stupid resignation. 
 
 It is unnecessary to add that where poly- 
 gamy and despotism exist, there also slavery 
 must be found. Slavery, in fact, pervades 
 the whole social and political life of a people 
 under Moslem rule. The wife is the slave 
 of the husband, rather than his partner ; the 
 domestic servant is the slave of both. The 
 Pasha is the slave of the despot ; he is a 
 despot himself over the province which is in 
 bondage to his rule. Slavery appears to be 
 mild in Mohammedan countries, and so it is ; 
 not only be-cause kind treatment of the slave 
 is enjoined in the Koran, but also because, 
 where all are reduced more or less to the 
 condition of slaves, servitude is no disgrace. 
 Where all are equally subject to the absolute 
 will of the monarch, the sharp distinctions of 
 M 
 
1 62 THE PRACTICAL RESULTS OF 
 
 rank are removed. Servitude becomes no 
 barrier to the elevation of a man to the his^hest 
 offices in the State. The favour of the despot 
 indeed is more Hkely to be bestowed on a 
 slave than on a man of noble origin ; the 
 policy of the despot being to depress the 
 aristocracy, who might by their position be- 
 come leaders of rebellion, and to reduce all 
 ranks as much as possible to one dead level 
 of subjection. And, as a matter of fact, the 
 men who have risen to the hiohest offices in 
 Moslem States, especially at Constantinople, 
 have been commonly men who began by 
 discharging the most menial and often the 
 basest and most disgraceful functions about 
 the court of the sovereign. 
 
 We repeat that we do not affirm these 
 evils to be the direct products of Islam. 
 They are indigenous in the East, and are 
 deeply rooted in Oriental habits of life ; but 
 we do say that they are the concomitants of 
 Islam ; that where Islam is established they 
 are established, and further that, though 
 alleviated in degree, they are more closely. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 1 63 
 
 riveted upon Mohammedan countries than 
 any others, because they are there invested 
 with a divine sanction. Islam has taken up 
 into itself and consecrated these evil forms 
 of Oriental life, and consequently it opposes 
 the most solid obstacle to the reception in the 
 East of Christian and Western civilisation. 
 Where, on the other hand, the Mussulman 
 rules over a population which is Christian 
 and European, he can never assimilate them 
 or be assimilated by them ; the Koran forbids 
 him to treat an infidel as his equal ; the alien 
 invader can maintain his conquest only by 
 becoming an oppressor ; the two elements 
 may live centuries side by side, but like oil 
 and vinegar they will not fuse : the one is 
 Mohammedan, Asiatic, stationary ; the other 
 Christian, European, progressive. 
 
 As the character of the Great Head of 
 the Christian Church, when He became 
 incarnate, was Catholic, so is the character 
 of the Church which He founded. It is 
 capable of adaptation to human nature every- 
 where, because it is not like an inanimate 
 M 2 
 
164 THE PRACTICAL RESULTS OF 
 
 machine which, once made, can work only 
 in one way, but is a Hving organism instinct 
 with a divine Hfe, even the spirit of its Head. 
 It can move in a hundred different ways 
 according to His direction, and accommo- 
 date itself to every race, and to every form 
 of social or political condition ; it can live 
 under a despotism or a republic, amongst 
 the rich and the poor, the Teuton, the Celt, 
 the African, the Indian, the Melanesian. On 
 the other hand as the character of the founder 
 of Islam was essentially Oriental, so is the 
 character of the religion which he founded ; 
 it is acceptable to the Oriental nature, but 
 repugnant to the Western ; it has made rapid 
 progress and obtained a firm footing among 
 Eastern countries ; and, as it will not easily 
 recede from its pretensions to the possession 
 of absolute truth, it is the most formidable 
 rival which Christianity has to encounter in 
 the East. 
 
 And what tone, it may be asked, ought 
 the Christian Church to assume towards its 
 rival ? Certainly not that of denunciation or 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 1 65 
 
 defiance, nor, on the other hand, of approba- 
 tion and concession. In the face of the fact 
 that Christians never have been able to hve 
 peaceably and happily under Moslem rule, 
 although at the present day Mussulmans 
 live in great peace and prosperity under 
 Christian rule, it is, we think, rather hard 
 that Christians should be reproached as in- 
 clined to an attitude of harsh hostility or 
 contempt towards the Moslem faith. ^ By all 
 means let us recognise to the full what was 
 great and noble in Mahomet himself, and in 
 the work which he accomplished ; let us 
 recognise to the full all the good which the 
 religion of Mahomet has done, as well as all 
 the evil, all its truth as well as all its error ; 
 let us hold out the right hand of fellowship 
 to the Mussulman as a brother, though an 
 erring brother, whom we are bound to honour, 
 to respect, and even to love. But, on the 
 other hand, do not let us diso-uise' or qtIoss 
 over the fact that there is error, and most 
 
 ^ Bos. Smithj Lect. iv. p. 259, 279, and Preface to 
 second edition, p. 9. 
 
1 66 THE PRACTICAL RESULTS OF 
 
 mischievous error, in his rehgion ; do not let 
 us talk of it as if it were almost as good as 
 Christianity, or, because Mahomet had a sort 
 of reverence for Christ, go to the ridiculous 
 length of calling Islam * a form of Chris- 
 tianity ; ' ^ although it expressly denies the 
 very essence of Christianity, the Divinity 
 and Incarnation of our blessed Lord. Do 
 not let us make apologies for praying that 
 the Mussulman may be brought to the know- 
 ledge of a nobler and purer faith than his 
 own as if it was an insult.^ To cultivate 
 friendship and good-will with men of a dif- 
 ferent creed it cannot be necessary, because 
 it cannot be right, to surrender one jot 
 or tittle of the essential principles of our 
 own faith ; conscientious unbelievers would 
 despise us if we did. What is needed is the 
 exercise of that large-hearted charity which 
 seeks their good in every possible way ; en- 
 deavours to win them to the truth ; acts with 
 them where it can, and, where it cannot, stands 
 
 * Bos. Smith, Lect. iv. p. 260. ^ Ibid. p. 259. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 1 67 
 
 respectfully and courteously aside. It was 
 a common saying- of one of the most uncom- 
 promising Churchmen, the late Dean Hook, 
 to Dissenters with whom he was broueht 
 much in contact and always lived on the 
 most friendly terms, ' There is a line between 
 us, but across that line we shake hands.' 
 The saying would equally illustrate the 
 proper attitude of Christians towards the 
 Mussulman, or any other kind of unbeliever. 
 There is a line between us ; if we can per- 
 suade them to cross the line and to be one 
 with us, we will receive them with open arms ; 
 if they will not cross it, let us shake hands 
 over the line, and work hand in hand when- 
 ever they will move in a parallel direction 
 with us. But do not let us pretend that there is 
 no line, that Christianity is only a few shades 
 better than Mohammedanism, the Bible only 
 ' as a whole ' better than the Koran, and 
 that the difference between the two religions Is 
 one not of kind but only of degree.^ In short, 
 
 ^ Bos. Smith, Lect. i. p. 64, 67. 
 
1 68 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. 
 
 in our laudable anxiety to make our Chris- 
 tianity pleasant and attractive to men of 
 another creed, let us take heed not to dilute 
 Christian doctrine so far as to find some day 
 that we have lost what was of vital value for 
 ourselves, and only bestowed on others a 
 residuum which was hardly worth their 
 acceptance. 
 
 S. & H. 
 
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