Part 4 (1/2)

But, for Alexandria at least, the cup was now full In the year 640 the Alexandrians were tearing each other in pieces about some Jacobite and Melchite controversy, to hters on both sides seee) the knowledge of what they were fighting for, and to have so bewildered the question with personal intrigues, spites, and quarrels, as to reen factions at Constantinople, which began by backing in the theatre, the charioteers who drove in blue dresses, against those wild drove in green; then went on to identify theical factions; gradually developed, the one into an aristocratic, the other into a deious party; and ended by a civil war in the streets of Constantinople, accompanied by the iven up the city to the flames, and driven Justinian from his throne

In the midst of these Jacobite and Melchite controversies and riots, appeared before the city the armies of certain wild and unlettered Arab tribes A short and fruitless struggle followed; and, strange to say, a few months swept away from the face of the earth, not only the wealth, the commerce, the castles, and the liberty, but the philosophy and the Christianity of Alexandria; crushed to powder by one fearful blow, all that had been built up by Alexander and the Ptolemies, by Clement and the philosophers, and made void, to all appearance, nine hundred years of hu no real hold on their hereditary Creed, accepted, by tens of thousands, that of the Mussulman invaders

The Christian remnant became tributaries; and Alexandria dwindled, from that time forth, into a petty seaport town

And now--can we pass over this newin what the strength of Isla that I am bound to examine in what relation the creed of Omar and Amrou stands to the Alexandrian speculations of five hundred years, and how it had power to sweep those speculations utterly from the Eastern mind It is a difficult problem; to me, as a Christian priest, a very awful problem What more awful historic probleher? to see God, as it were, undoing his oork, and repenting Him that He had made man? Awful indeed: but I can honestly say, that it is one froation of which I have learnt--I cannot yet tell how much: and of this I am sure, that without that old Alexandrian philosophy, I should not have been able to do justice to Islam; without Islam I should not have been able to find in that Alexandrian philosophy, an ever- living and practical element

I must, however, first entreat you to disar notion that Mohammed was in anywise a badto work s which he did not do He sinned in one instance: but, as far as I can see, only in that one--I ht I allude to his relaxing in his own case those wise restrictions on polygamy which he had proclaimed And yet, even in this case, the desire for a child may have been the true cause of his weakness He did not see the whole truth, of course: but he was an infinitely better man than the men around: perhaps, all in all, one of the best men of his day Many here may have read Mr Carlyle's vindication of Mohammed in his Lectures on Hero Worshi+p; to those who have not, I shall only say, that I entreat theh I differ in s utterly from Mr Carlyle's inferences and deductions in that lecture, yet that I ainal facts and documents, that the picture there drawn of Mohammed is a true and a just description of a th of Islam? The common answer is, fanaticism and enthusiasm To such answers I can only rejoin: Such terms must be defined before they are used, and we must be told what fanaticism and enthusias word ending in -is in -ation or - ality But while fanaticis defined--a work o on to consider another answer We are told that the strength of Islam lay in the hope of their sensuous Paradise and fear of their sensuous Gehenna If so, this is the first and last tie body of people--perhaps of any single ives us innumerable proofs that such merely selfish motives are the parents of slavish impotence, of pedantry and conceit, of pious frauds, often of theextends, of nothing better Moreover, the Christian Greeks had much the same hopes on those points as the Mussulmans; and siave the to the Mussul idea; and it is absurd to consider the wild battle-cries of a few ireen- kerchiefed Houris calling to theeneration of sober and self-restraining her motives

Another answer, and one very popular now, is that the Mussul, because they believed what they said; and the Greeks weak, because they did not believe what they said From this notion I shall appeal to another doctrine of the very sa by believing a lie? Have you not told us, nobly enough, that every lie is by its nature rotten, doomed to death, certain to prove its own impotence, and be shattered to ato it into rude actual contact with fact, and Nature, and the eternal laws? Faith to be strongwhich is not one's self; faith in so true, which would exist just as th of belief comes from that which is believed in; if you separate it from that, it becomes a mere self-opinion, a sensation of positiveness; and what sort of strength that will give, history will tell us in the tragedies of the Jeho opposed titus, of the rabble who followed Walter the Penniless to the Crusades, of the Munster Anabaptists, and ive the fury of idiots; not the deliberatethat faith can only give strength where it is faith in soo on to another answer alht of Islae virtue of the Arab character If we have discovered this in the followers of Mohammed, they certainly had not discovered it in thely, as ht a ood, and refuse that which was evil; and to that divine light they stedfastly and honestly attributed every right action of their lives Most noble and affecting, in ird, king of Persia, when he reproached hiery and poverty of the Arabs ”Whatsoever thou hast said,” answered the oldthe forreen lizards; they buried their infant daughters alive; nay, some of them feasted on dead carcases, and drank blood; while others slew their kinsfolk, and thought the they became possessed of arood from evil, and made no distinction between that which was lawful and unlawful Such was our state; but God in his mercy has sent us, by a holy prophet, a sacred volume, which teaches us the true faith”

These words, I think, show us the secret of Islaed chapter of the Koran which is said to have been Moha; when, after long fasting and lorious eastern stars, he careat thing, and that she must help him to write it down

And as this which seemed to the unlettered camel-driver so priceless a treasure? Not merely that God was one God--vast as that discovery was--but that he was a God ”who showeth towhich he knew not;” a ”most merciful God;” a God, in a word, who could be trusted; a God ould teach and strengthen; a God, as he said, ould give hie to set his face like a flint, and would put an answer in his mouth when his idolatrous countrye to thehteous hteous

”A God who showeth to ht to Islam, because it was a real idea, an eternal fact; the result of a true insight into the character of God And that idea alone, believe ht either to creed, philosophy, or heart of , each will endure, in proportion as it believes that God is one who shows towhich he knew not: as it believes, in short, in that Logos of which Saint John wrote, that He was the light who lightens every man who comes into the world

In a word, the wild Koreish had discovered, more or less clearly, that end and object of all metaphysic whereof I have already spoken so often; that external and iht of old; and had seen that its nahteousness, and that it dwelt absolutely in an absolutely righteous person; and moreover, that this person was no careless self-contented epicurean deity; but that He was, as they loved to call Him, the most merciful God; that He cared for hteous Of that they could not doubt The fact was palpable, historic, present To theraded Koreish of the desert, who as they believed, and I think believed rightly, had fallen from the old Monotheism of their forefathers Abraham and Ismael, into the lowest fetishi+sm, and with that into the lowest brutality and wretchedness--to the dead carcases; and burying their daughters alive; careless of chastity, of justice, of property; sunk in unnatural cri one another--a : ”I have a hteous God His curse is on all this, for it is unlike Hihteous men, after the pattern of your forefather Abraham Be that, and arise, body, soul, and spirit, out of your savagery and brutishness Then you shall be able to traate idolaters, to sweep the Greek tyrants fro for centuries, and to recover the East for its rightful heirs, the children of Abrahae froustine, I e my own moral sense, and confess that I have no iht, that I know no eternal source of right, if I deny it to have been one; if I deny what seems to me the palpable historic fact, that those wild Koreish had in thee, and perceive its boundless beauty, its boundless ie, and lived by it in proportion as they received it fully, such lives as no men in those times, and few in after times, have been able to live If I feel, as I do feel, that Abubekr, Omar, Abu Obeidah, and Amrou, were better men than I aher authority--has taught me: or I must attribute their lofty virtues to the one source of all in man which is not selfishness, and fancy, and fury, and blindness as of the beasts which perish

Why, then, has Islamism become one of the most patent and complete failures upon earth, if the true test of a systeress and as who are under its influence? First, I believe, fro allowed it He found it one of the ancestral and ihout the Hebrew Scriptures He found it in the case of Abraham, his ideal man; and, as he believed, the divinely-inspired ancestor of his race It see for an Arab

God shall judge him, not I Moreover, the Christians of the East, divided into either ates; and with far lower and more brutal notions of the end, were the very last men on earth to make him feel the eternal and divine beauty of that pure wedded love which Christianity has not only proclaimed, but commanded, and thereby eer sex And I believe, froood wife Kadijah, as long as she lived, that Mohareat truth in all its fulness, had he but been taught it He certainly felt the evil of polyaly as to restrict it in every possible way, except the only right way--nae

But his ignorance, ht law, froed itself That chivalrous respect for wo in the early Mohammedans, died out The women themselves--who, in the first few years of Islamism, rose as the men rose, and becaenerated rapidly into s I need not enter into the painful subject of woman's present position in the East, and the social consequences thereof But I firmly believe, not merely as a theory, but as a fact which ae of every Mussulman nation; and that till it be utterly abolished, all Western civilisation and capital, and all the civil and religious liberty on earth, will not avail one jot toward their revival You enerate the nation, and the relation of husband and wife before the fa as the root is corrupt, the fruit will be corrupt also

But there is another cause of the failure of Islamism, more intimately connected with those metaphysical questions which we have been hitherto principally considering

Aenerally the most intense belief in each uide and teacher But their creed contained nothing which could keep up that belief in the ood with the evil, and they paid the penalty of their undistinguishi+ng wrath In sweeping away the idolatries and fetish worshi+ps of the Syrian Catholics, the Mussulmans had swept away also that doctrine which alone can deliver men from idolatry and fetish worshi+ps--if not outward and material ones, yet the still erous idolatries of the intellect For they had swept away the belief in the Logos; in a divine teacher of every human soul, as, in some mysterious way, the pattern and antitype of human virtue and wisdom And more, they had swept away that belief in the incarnation of the Logos, which alone can make man feel that his divine teacher is one who can enter into the human duties, sorrows, doubts, of each human spirit And, therefore, when Mohammed and his personal friends were dead, the belief in a present divine teacher, on the whole, died with thean to put the Koran in the place of Hian to worshi+p the book--which after all is not a book, but only an irregular collection of Mohammed's meditations, and notes for sermons--with the most slavish and ridiculous idolatry They fell into a cabbalism, and a superstitious reverence for the mere letters and words of the Koran, to which the cabbalism of the old Rabbis was moderate and rational They surrounded it, and the history of Moha wonders, whereof the book itself contained not a word; and which Moha that he worked no miracles, and that none were needed; because only reason was required to show a ood God in all human affairs

Nevertheless, these later Mussulmans found the miracles necessary to confirm their faith: and why? Because they had lost the sense of a present God, a God of order; and therefore hankered, as ious and unnatural proofs of His having been once present with their founder Mohammed

And in thewhoreat darkness, had so nobly preached to the Koreish, receded in the minds of their descendants to an unapproachable and abysuidance, His personal care They had lost all which could connect Hi of their own souls, with their hules, with the belief that His mercy and love were counterparts of hu and radually, thank God; you s and deeds here and there, for many centuries after Mohammed: but it came; and then their belief in God's omnipotence and absoluteness dwindled into the eableness becaive, and deliver men--as it seemed to Mohaeable purpose to have His ohatsoever that way ht be That dark fatalism, also, has helped toward the decay of the Mohammedan nations It has made them careless of self-iress; and has kept, and will keep, the Mohaes behind the Christian nations of the West

How far the story of O the baths of Alexandria to be heated with the books froreat library is true, we shall never know Soether: but so many fresh corroborations of it are said to have been lately discovered, in Arabic writers, that I can hardly doubt that it had some foundation in fact