I spoke in my last Lecture of Mahometanism, Hindooism, and Buddhism, as the three great existing religions of the world; of the Persian, the Egyptian, the Greek, the Roman, and the Gothic, as the most conspicuous of those which belong to the past. It may strike some of you, that in one of these lists, though you may scarcely be able to say in which, there was a capital omission. Might not even the letter of Boyle’s Will have reminded me, that the Christian missionary is likely to be encountered by Jews in all parts of the world? Is there any faith which has had a more memorable past than theirs?
It is indeed true, that a person must take a most imperfect view of society during the last 1800 years, who forgets that the Jew has had a place in it. Upon whatever age, upon whatever portion of the world he fixes his eye, this strange figure encounters him. He sees men without a place which they can call their own upon the earth, still feeling themselves to be the nation which has been chosen out of all others to be the head of the earth; men willingly submitting to the most grovelling occupations, and with a character seemingly conformed to these occupations, yet never deserted by a vision, both of past and future glory; men trampled upon by all people, and yet exercising a mighty influence, one which has increased with the increase of riches and civilization, over the counsels of statesmen and princes; men, who if the time should come when no God but Mammon is worshipped in the world, will carry a fearful recollection into the very temples of Mammon of a greater than he, who may be his destroyer. It is true also that the Jew has never been without powerful arguments for that which he holds, and against that which he denies. He can always appeal to his own consistency in support of the first—to the persecutions and crimes of Pagans, Mahometans, and Christians, as evidence in opposition to them. Though he cannot make converts, though he does not wish it—for his business is to keep the family of Abraham distinct from all others—he can do much to shake the faith of those among whom he dwells. In all times, of late years more especially, he has been able to adapt himself to prevailing habits of thought and feeling, to become conspicuous in art and science, to enter into philosophical speculations, and strangely to mingle the lessons which he has received in the schools of the Prophets with the wisdom of those who most despise them.
The Jew then may on these grounds be well said to belong to the present, his religion to be one of the existing religions of the earth. He is a witness for something which is indestructible.
But he is also, by his own sad confession, a witness for something which is departed. If he or we can explain and reconcile these facts, we must turn to records which both of us profess to reverence. The question between us is, “What are the true principles of the old Jewish life and fellowship? in what way may they be most effectually asserted in our day?”
This, then, is my reason for not placing the Jew in either of those divisions to which I referred the other beliefs of mankind. We cannot go back in his case, as we did in the Mahometan, to the first promulgation of the faith, or, in the case of the Hindoo, to the earliest Vedas, without finding ourselves engaged in the assertion or defence of that which is as dear to us as it is to him; and we cannot interpret his present position, except by comparing it with our own. In following the course which I marked out for myself originally, we shall, I believe, be enabled to consider this subject from its right point of view. I proposed to enquire how the religions which have passed under our review stand severally related to Christianity. The first of these was the Mahometan. Now it is the Jewish side of Christianity in which we must seek for this relation. From the Old Testament we shall learn what are the great points of agreement between us and the Mahometan. In studying those points of agreement, we shall, perhaps, see more clearly the grounds of our difference both with the Mahometan and the modern Jew.
I. I endeavoured to shew you in my first Lecture that the mere dry, formal assertion of the unity of God, as an article of doctrine, was not that which had given Islamism its power. The proclamation, “There is one God,” was no school formula; it was the announcement of a Living Being, acting, speaking, ruling. Now this is the leading characteristic of the Old Testament. Schoolmen giving you an account of it will say, that it is distinguished from all Pagan books by its assertion of the unity of the object of worship. But we have seen reason to think that this quality, taken alone, might not separate it from the early sacred writings of the Hindoos. Turn to the Book of Genesis or Exodus, and you at once feel the essential difference. There are no speculations about God, no questionings how man is to contemplate Him, or to be absorbed into His essence. He is creating the world according to a certain order; He is making man in His own image; He is placing man in a garden, fixing a certain prohibition for him, giving him a helpmeet, discovering his sin when he has broken the command, pronouncing a sentence upon him, promising him a blessing. He is punishing the murderer, visiting the earth with a flood, calling out a man to be a preserver of the race, sending forth his sons to people the earth, with the rainbow as a pledge of his mercy; scattering them abroad when they wished to build a tower, and to make themselves a name; calling a man out of his father’s house, and bidding him go into a land which should be shown him, promising him that in him and in his seed all the families of the earth should be blest; giving him a covenant, giving him a son; trying the faith of the father; revealing Himself to Isaac and Jacob; guiding the Hebrew youth into Egypt, causing him to bring his whole family thither; hearing their cry when a king arose who knew not Joseph, and made them slaves; revealing Himself to Moses as the I Am; sending signs and judgments upon Pharaoh, bringing the people out of Egypt, appointing them a feast in memorial of their deliverance from generation to generation; feeding them with manna, and causing the rock to be struck when they were thirsty; proclaiming the Law to them amidst thunders and lightnings; prescribing the form of the tabernacle, and the order of the priesthood; laying down the ordinary rules which were suitable to them as an eastern people; going before them in the ark of the covenant.
Nothing, you see, is set forth in the Hindoo manner, as a dream, or thought, or reflection about God; all is set forth as coming from Him; He is, and He is doing. This is the Old Testament language; this is the language which the Mahometan asserts must be true still. It is a record, he said, but not merely a record—it tells us of Him who was, and is, and is to come; of One by whose command the world was made, and by whose command it subsists; who rules and directs in the affairs of men, not less now than of old. I conceive that there is nothing in Christianity so primary and fundamental as this belief; nothing which it is so necessary for us to assert, in the simple, practical language of the Old Testament, and not to dilute by any modern phrases or unreal substitutes. It was on this account especially that I violated chronology, by considering Mahometanism before either of the other religions with which it divides Asia; for I believed that it had taken hold of the great first principle—that it had begun at the beginning; not working its way up to the divine ground from the earthly, but assuming that ground as its starting point. And, at the same time, I wished you to feel how idle the assertion is, that this doctrine merely belongs to the world in its infancy; how when it seemed to have become obsolete, amidst the arguments and discussions of the schools, it stood forth again as a living, terrific reality: as a truth which men must be taught by the sword, if they would be taught it in no other way.
II. Next, the Mahometan believed that the Lord of All does actually make His will known to men; that He speaks, and that they can hear and obey His voice. This is the second most obvious characteristic of the Old Testament. Abram is called out of his land by the unseen Lord. He knows that he is, and he does what he is commanded. Moses is bidden to go in before Pharaoh; he shrinks from the work, but he is certain that the Lord God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob has sent him. Thus Revelation, or the declaration of God’s mind and will—of God himself—to man, is assumed as the ground of action, and history, and knowledge. It is not put as a vague, distant possibility that such communications may be made to man, that they may reach him; it is declared that they must reach him, or that he is helpless and ignorant. He must act under a divine call of some kind, or he cannot act rightly. The Mahometan affirms that this truth of the old time is a truth of the later time. In the seventh century after Christ, Mahomet claims to be called of God to a work. We may believe that in many points he greatly mistook the nature of this call, of this work. But the principle that any man who rouses the heart of a nation, who proclaims any deep truth in the midst of it, has a calling from God—that he has no right to deny it or to explain it away; that he cannot do what he is meant to do except on the faith of it; this is a conviction which we Christians have inherited, or ought to have inherited, from the Jew quite as much as the Mahometan. Our own language is framed upon the supposition: we speak of callings and vocations. If the words mean nothing, it is a great pity that we should use them. It is lending ourselves to a falsehood—it is contracting a false habit of mind. But I am sure they have meant something to men in past times to all good and great men, who have really served their generation in any kind of work. And I do trust and believe that they mean something to some of us still; that we feel we should be parting with what is most precious, if they ceased to mean that something—that we desire they should mean much more.
III. But, thirdly, the Mahometan, while he acknowledges that the voice of God thus speaks to men, also believes strongly that there is meant to be some record of His utterances—some book of which it may be said, This is the book. He cannot part with this conviction; it is necessary to him. Whether or not he can explain how and why the Koran should cease at a certain point, he is sure that it was to cease at a certain point that there must be a Book which is complete, and to which men may refer as an authority. The Israelites, of whom we read in the Old Testament, could not of course contemplate that Book as a complete Book: it was growing. Their own lives and histories were contributing to it. Their Patriarchs had no Book. Still, from the time that the Law was delivered, they were convinced that they had that written in enduring letters which proceeded from God. They believed that His communications were meant to be preserved in letters. They laboured to preserve them, and to keep them apart from all which they believed was not His. They had confidence that God Himself would watch over His own Revelation. Upon us this conviction also has descended; we agree with the Mahometan that the belief in a Book of Revelation, a completed Book, is not incompatible with the idea of God ruling in the world now or His calling men to do a work for Him now; nay, that the one truth is necessary to the other. Why Mahomet required a new Bible in the seventh century, why we do not require it, is a point to be considered hereafter; that which I am pressing here is, that both alike do feel the need of a Bible—of a Divine Book.
IV. But the Mahometan does not only look upon the peculiar Prophet as called of God. He believes that the whole body of Islamites is a body called by God to the work of proclaiming Him, and putting down whatever sets itself in opposition to Him. I need not remind you that the children of Israel had this belief before them. In the strength of it they went—a little handful of men, who were lately Egyptian slaves, and drove out the Canaanitish people; beating down their walls, and slaying them with the edge of the sword. They were not a wild, undisciplined host—a terrific horde, like the Huns or the Avars of later times; they were most orderly; divided according to tribes, each man encamping beside the standard of the house of his fathers, marshalled under regular leaders, practising the ordinary methods and stratagems of war. Still, that which gave them all their energy, that which made them one people, that which caused their discipline to be an instrument of their valour, not a substitute for it, was a belief that the Lord of Hosts was among them, that they were His soldiers, and moving under His command. They were sure that they had a commission from Him to punish a people the cup of whose iniquities was full. They were sure they were not doing a work for themselves, but were executing the purposes of His Will. And this the Mahometan says is the true law of armies, the right spirit for men of later as well as earlier days, to fight in, and to act in, at all times. They must feel that an Unseen Power is in the midst of their host; that they are His soldiers. We are often told that the opinion is a mistaken and a dangerous one; one which belonged to Judaism, and which Christianity discountenances. I cannot think so. That there is a sense in which the disciples of the Koran have perverted Jewish example, I shall endeavour to shew presently. Perhaps we shall find that the perversion has been in not adhering to it closely enough. But I do not think that any Christian nation has ever been the worse for believing that it was acting as the minister of God. Our forms and proclamations always express this. Have we been better when these forms and proclamations were real and significant, or when they were false? It seems to me, that the more we come to think these phrases not merely phrases, but the expressions of what is true, the more simple and honest our lives will be, and that when to any nation they become mere phrases, its life, I need not say its Christianity, is gone. I feel very sure that the sense of a Divine Presence has never utterly forsaken, and does not forsake, any host of Christian men fighting by land or sea: or that, if it do, their arms become palsied, and they become the shame of their enemies. They may act very inconsistently with this profession; the inconsistency no doubt weakens the reality of it; but it is not a mere profession. Asking the help of God may be a poor formality to easy, luxurious men; those who are on the eve of battle, who are standing between life and death, have no time for words unless they mean something. And they have a signification as of old, otherwise a feeble force would not be able to put a greater one to flight, supported by all the advantages of position, and the resources of art. When our soldiers shall utterly disbelieve that the same Lord who went forth with Joshua and Gideon is with them, see whether we shall not have tidings of cowardice and ignominy, not of courage and triumph.
V. We saw how much the office of the caliph or sovereign had blended itself with Mahometan life and history, how the visible centre of the host recalled to each soldier the sense of his allegiance to Allah the Unseen King. Here, again, we are reminded of the Old Testament. David, and every true king, felt that he reigned by covenant with God, that he was the witness of Him to the people. And his people returned the feeling. Looking up to Him, they felt that they were a people indeed—it was not a dream; they were so actually; they had one heart, one with each other, one with those who had gone before them, one with those who should come after them. Of course such language is liable to misinterpretation. There were crimes and divisions in the times of David and Hezekiah, as at all times. Scripture does not conceal them, but declares them, and shows the punishment of them. When any evil deed was perpetrated by the king it destroyed the reverence of the people for him, and so their own unity. On the other hand, their evil condition re-acted upon him, and led him to depend more on the number of his armed men than upon the strength of Israel. These facts do not weaken the assertion I made, but illustrate it. Do not they seem also to prove that these records are not merely records of the past, or of a particular nation, but that they explain the bonds by which sovereign and subjects are connected according to a divine and immutable law, in all times and in all nations? So the Mahometan thought in his own case. Had the people among whom he came felt the same; had there been that real vital relation between the monarch and those who paid him homage, which there was between the caliph and the soldiers of the Crescent, those soldiers would not have triumphed as they did. This is no rash assertion; it is borne out by the experience of history. Asia was not able to resist the armies of the prophet, because there was no such national feeling as that which I have described. Constantinople could not ultimately resist them, for there was nothing like it in the Greek empire. They were resisted in Western Europe, for there a set of Christian nations had gradually grown up, believing, amidst many confusions and inconsistencies no doubt, but still practically believing, that their kings were covenant kings, reigning in the name of the Lord, as much as the kings of Judah had ever done.
These are some of the points of real affinity between Christianity and Mahometanism. I say Christianity; meaning thereby that though these principles belong to the Old Testament, and not to the New as such, yet that Christians can adopt them and realize them, and that Jews, who seem to stand upon the ground of the Old Testament, cannot. I do not say this in reproach to them, I merely state it as a fact. All the most living principles of the Old Testament, those which were embodied in the life and history of the Jewish people, have become dead letters to their descendants. They retain the acknowledgment of the Divine unity as against anything which contradicts it, or seems to them to contradict it. But the sense of a Living Being, of One speaking, acting, ruling, this may dwell deep down in the heart of Jews; it may have been drawn out by persecution in many; but, so far as we can judge, it is always threatening to become dried up in a formula among the orthodox Israelites, to lose itself in pantheistical phrases among the liberal and intellectual. The former class will readily acknowledge a Divine Book, but for the very purpose of keeping out the notion of any real intercourse between heaven and earth since it was closed. And yet this Book will not satisfy them; it must be stifled under Rabbinical interpretations; all its practical, homely, awful realities, must be reduced into notions, and speculations, and frivolities. The liberal class will gladly avail themselves of phrases about a living voice, that they may throw off the burden of these interpretations, and in fact of the Book which they oppress. But the living voice does not proceed from a personal being who has a right to command his creatures; there is no bowing to it as to that which must not, cannot be resisted; no acknowledgment of a high calling, no feeling of a relation to the past; only a claim to be independent, to think and feel differently from those who went before—a very natural tendency, surely, in men who have been under a grievous yoke, but offering little hope that they will be emancipated from it, or will not fall under a more grievous one still. Hence, it is not to be wondered at that the reality of that which is unseen, for which the Jewish worship bore such a wonderful testimony, should be lost in that very worship, that its ceremonial should bind the spirit to earth instead of raising it. No wonder that the most vulgar of all outward things, the mere coin by help of which one is exchanged for another, should have become the great object of heart devotion. To speak of this people as not having any longer any sense of the relation of the people to its Sovereign, would be a mockery—that heavy loss is of course inevitable. It is far pleasanter, and more wonderful, to remember that the sense of a national existence, of a national calling, has, through all these centuries of degradation, not forsaken them. It has been upheld by that glorious hope of a Deliverer to come hereafter, which neither the Rabbinism of one of their schools, nor the Pantheism of another, has been able to extinguish. They had been almost 600 years without a temple or a capital, scorned and hated by all people, when Mahomet arose; yet when he bade them join his standard as the reviver of the true faith of their fathers, as the asserter of the Lord Jehovah against his enemies, they utterly refused the invitation. He thought, and perhaps rightly, that they were too degraded to understand the words which he spoke to them, too little worshippers of Him whom their Scriptures proclaimed, to believe that He could really interfere in the affairs of the world. His first great war, therefore, was directed against them. If they yielded they were not crushed, still less converted. The belief that they belonged to the true stock of Abraham, and he at the best only to an illegitimate offshoot from it, that they were children of the promises, and he was not, sustained them. Here was the one sure thing which they could hold fast, a token that the lock of hair on the head of Samson, shorn, blinded, and captive, might still grow again. There was a reality and continuity in the national feeling of the Jew which the Islamite felt he could not encounter. There was nothing, or scarcely anything in him, which corresponded to it. He acknowledged a sovereign, his empire was to spread far and wide; but, except so far as the caliph or representative of Mahomet was concerned, it had no connexion with any feeling of family, or even country. Mecca became indeed the shrine of religious worship for all Mahometans; but the practical centre of Mahometan society was at one time in Persia, at one time in Spain, at last in Turkey. So that a system, in many respects like the Jewish, was in this one directly opposed to it. The Jews had grown from a family into a nation, and, so long as they continued a nation, were the great witnesses against all attempts at universal sovereignty. The Mahometans, setting at nought family distinctions and national distinctions, attempted to bind all races and languages together, under the authority of one man, the successor of the Prophet.
This is a remark of great importance with a view to the subject in which we are now engaged. I have shewn you that there are many points in which Christianity and Mahometanism both claim affinity with Judaism, as it was set forth in the Old Testament. Now we are come to a point in which they both separate from it. The Mahometan claims to be a universal religion; to set up a universal society. The Gospel does so too. The questions we have now to consider are, on what basis these universal societies respectively rest, and what is the relation between them.
I. We have seen that it is common to Judaism, to Mahometanism, to Christianity, that they assert the will of a living Being as the ground of all things, that they speak of Him as declaring Himself, as exercising a continual, not an occasional, government over men. This recognition of a Divine, personal, unseen Sovereignty; of One who is not sought out by men, but who seeks men; who calls them, and chooses them to do His work, is the strength of all three. Each one of them becomes helpless when this faith is lost, or is exchanged for any other. But if you look at the records of the Old Testament, you will be struck by nothing so much as this—that this Divine Being is continually said to be declaring His NAME to men. In other words, it is not the fact of His existence chiefly which He is teaching them to acknowledge, it is His character—what manner of Being He is. He calls upon them to obey a Will; but each act of obedience brings them into closer acquaintance with Him who gives the command.
II. Hence we are able to understand the calling of the Jewish prophet. We are expressly told that he is called to know this Name. The character of God reveals itself to him in the different circumstances of his own history, or his nation’s history. He is taught that the evil which he is conscious of in himself, and which he sees in others, comes from unlikeness to the perfect Being in whose image he is created. He has but a glimpse of the Divine purposes and character, but it is such a glimpse as is suitable to his necessities and the necessities of his time. It enables him to understand what he is, and what his nature is, without God—what the blessing is of being called by Him—what the end of his calling is; namely, to make this Name known to his countrymen; to bring it out in opposition to the evil which is most prevailing among them.
III. And so too he understands, and is able to set forth, the purpose of his nation’s calling. It, too, was to proclaim this righteous name—to exhibit the conflict between God and all forms of evil—to shew that righteousness is a reality, and not a dream—that the government of the world is based upon it—that wrong and oppression are not meant to triumph—that the earth is not meant to be a den of robbers.
IV. But such a Revelation as this, though it may be handed down in enduring letters—though it may become a possession for all generations, could never merely be delivered to men as a book of sentences or maxims; it must come forth in a gradual history—a history of Divine acts and human acts.
The Revelation assumes that God is altogether distinct from His creatures; it must enable us to feel that He is distinct from them. It declares that He has made man in His own image; it must enable us to feel practically that this assertion also is true. It treats man as we find him, full of wrong and evil; it treats man as capable of the highest good—as unsatisfied till he attains that good. We must learn how these two things are practically compatible. It must be a book of life, then, not merely of letters—a record of real men, and real events. It must shew how the Divine Will directed events, and disciplined men for that perfect good, that knowledge of Himself, which he had designed for them. It must shew how He cultivates those faculties in His creature which he has given; how He enables them to overcome the darkness and evil in the midst of which they are struggling.
V. These are very obvious characteristics of the Jewish Revelation: its origin in a personal Being; its recognition of a righteous Name; its speaking of each class in the nation, and of the whole nation, as called to declare that Name; its human, practical, and historical form. But there is another characteristic as obvious. The history is always pointing to a completion, and that completion in a Person. The Prophets have a vision of a King who shall be the manifestation of God—the perfect image of Him—the Man—the Deliverer of the called nation, the ruler of all the nations: He who should establish righteousness, should open the unseen world, should unite earth and heaven. For such an one, these prophets say, David and his line were the preparation—he would really establish a universal kingdom. Now Christians affirm that the ground of universal society is the Revelation of this King. This Son of God, they say, has been manifested; He in whom this perfect Image dwelt; He has exhibited that Image in the life and acts of a man, in the poverty and death of a man: He, as a man, has exercised dominion over the powers of nature; as a man, wrestled with spiritual evil; as a man, triumphed over death; as a man, ascended to the right hand of God; He having so united man to God, has sent down His Spirit to dwell among men, that they might be one family, and glorify the Father of All in Him. The universal kingdom, say they, must be a fatherly kingdom. The Lord of it must be a suffering man, who is yet the Son of God. That which makes it one, and enables men to acknowledge God as one, must be a uniting, reconciling Spirit, who raises them above the broken forms and shadows of earth above those material things, in which there is nothing but division, into the true unity, the perfect, absolute Love.
This, according to the Christian’s faith, being the kingdom which is meant for all men, he must believe that God Himself designs that it should be made known to men; that all people should be brought into it. Men now, as much as formerly, must be commissioned servants of God for this end: there must be distinct callings tending to the accomplishment of it. All who have been brought to acknowledge the true King must have a share in the calling. But that particular work which was assigned to the Jewish nation, of putting down wrong and violence, of asserting justice and judgment, though it can never be obsolete, though each nation must be called upon in its own place and circumstances to fulfil it, cannot be the highest work of all. For He who did the highest work of all, did it by suffering, submission, sacrifice; the great triumph over the greatest evils was won in this way. Power manifested itself in weakness; He who was most meek, proved Himself to be most a King. He who most proved Himself to be Divine, did so by becoming one with the poorest and vilest. This was not a novelty in the history of the world; in a measure it had been shewn before, that what is greatest is best able to stoop; that what can most bear to be crushed, has most capacity of life; that each thing must die before it can attain its perfection. The whole history of the world, rightly read, would illustrate this lesson: above all, it had been illustrated by the prophets and holy men of the Old Testament: nay, those very exertions of national strength and energy, which seem to set this principle at nought, were themselves exhibitions of it. The glory of the Israelitish conquest of Canaan was this, that it was the triumph of weakness over strength, of infused spiritual might over the height of walls and the bulk of giants.
But though men had been learning this lesson gradually, the time which fully brought it out, which set at nought all pretensions of outward strength to dominion, which shewed that the power of God Himself must be exhibited through weakness and death, in order that it may be felt to be the power of Love; this was of necessity the beginning of a new era. Henceforth surely every new event of history would demonstrate this truth afresh. Whatever power was working in the world must submit to this, or be broken by it. The evidence might be various, complicated, often contradictory; but it would all tend to this point—it would assert a Loving Will as the ground of all things; that that Will had been fully manifested to men in the person of a man, who delighted to do it; that it can only accomplish its ends by bringing the wills of men into subjection to itself.
Now Mahometanism formally sets at nought this idea of a Divine and universal kingdom; treats it as a mere imagination which outrages all simplicity. It goes back to the one principle of God’s sovereignty; cares nothing for that gradual unfolding of a Name through a history of living acts; assumes that the Book is given as a complete scheme of life to the prophet; affirms that it is the commission of the faithful to diffuse the faith in this Book, and in the fact of the Divine sovereignty through the world; for this purpose invests its caliph or sovereign with absolute dominion.
In the seventh century after Christ, then, Mahomet taught that the world was to begin its history again; but to begin it with no hope of progress. That principle, which had been the mere starting-point of Jewish faith, the ground of what it was learning for 1900 years, was to be the one, all-sufficing maxim of Mahometan life. The Koran was to make it the one all-sufficing maxim for generations. Now it was so grand a thing to proclaim; God is: it had been proved so necessary by the experience of the Jews to repeat this lesson, not only in the ears of those who had recognized it, but of those who had—of those who professed to be living in the continual recognition of it; that I would not retract a word of what I said in my first Lecture concerning the needfulness and the blessing of the Mahometan witness, and of the terrific teaching by which it was enforced. The Jews who were so ready then, and have been so ready at all times, to make of their Testament only another Koran, a book of notions and sentences, would thus be reminded, if anything could remind them, of the essential, eternal difference between the two, and be led to ask “What do Old Testament records mean, if they have their completion in themselves, or if they have not their completion somewhere else? what do they mean if, out of that family and national kingdom of ours, some universal kingdom, utterly different from this, which the Mahometan is setting up, has not really grown?” And the Christians were surely in equal, or in greater want of an awful admonition to consider what they meant by the words which they were speaking; what substance there was in them. Why had Mahomet supposed that a new Bible must be sent from heaven more than five centuries after they had declared that the Bible was closed? There was no great new fact declared to mankind. So far as it told them anything, it only repeated what they knew before. The other, and main object of it, was to deny that fact of the actual manifestation of God—of the actual union of God with man, on which they professed to rest all their hopes for themselves and for their race. But did the Koran deny this fact more than they themselves had denied it? Were they acknowledging the fact by merely disputing about it? Did it mean anything to them? Was it not the clearest proof of a Divine government over the world, that they were not permitted to go on in this stupid unreality—that they were taught, even in such a method, that the words they admitted, must be more than words, or, even as such, must be taken from them?
Nor were the Mahometan conquests themselves in the least degree confutations of the Christian principle, that not outward strength, but weakness, trusting in God, is the cause of ultimate success. They were weak when they began. They triumphed, because they had more faith than their adversaries. Even in the triumphs of the Crescent there was a witness for the doctrine of the Cross; and every new Christian saint and martyr who learnt, in struggling against them, where help is to be found in the time of need, every Christian nation which learnt to confess Christ as its real King, and in His might to resist the oppressor, found, and proved to the world, that Mahometanism had not weakened that truth, but had only made it more manifest. Because the Mahometan recognizes a mere Will governing all things, and that Will not a loving Will, he is converted, as we saw that he had been in the course of his history, from a noble witness of a Personal Being into the worshipper of a dead necessity. Because he will not admit that there has been really a man in the world who was one with God—a man who exercised power over nature, and yet whose main glory consisted in giving up himself, therefore he cannot really assert the victory of man over visible things when he tries most to do so. He glorifies the might of arms when he most talks of the might of submission. Because he does not acknowledge a loving will acting upon men’s wills, to humble them in themselves, and to raise them to God, therefore he becomes the enslaver of his fellows, therefore cheerful obedience to a master, which for a while distinguished him, becomes servitude to a tyrant. Because he will not acknowledge that the highest and Divinest unity is that of love, but rests all upon the mere unity of sovereignty, he has never been able to establish one government upon the earth. Mightily as he has fought for it, his kingdom has ever been splitting into fragments; one race has displaced another; nations have broken loose from the recognized centre in each different age. It has been found that such a universality or unity is merely material; that it has no root in the nature of things—in the Divine order; that each new age must do something more to weaken its integrity and hasten its dissolution.
Two questions, I hope, may have been partly answered by these observations. The first is, whether Christianity must abandon its claims to be a Revelation, in order that it may deal fairly with the Mahometan? The second, whether it can strengthen and quicken that faith of his which we found was so ready to perish? Whatever pretends only to be a better system of notions, a better scheme of conduct than his own, he will reject while he has the courage and constancy of his fathers; will only receive because he has sunk into a state in which it is indifferent what he holds, or rather, in which it is impossible for him with a real vital grasp to hold anything. Mahomet was believed by those, and those only, who felt that he brought a message from God; nothing which does not come as a message from God can reach the hearts of those who still acknowledge him. And of what form must the message be? If it sets at nought the first conditions of his original faith, nay, of his very existence, this he is certain cannot be from God; yea, he knows it must be from the devil. Only that which assumes this as its eternal foundation, and which deepens and expands it so that the facts of human life which seem least in accordance with it shall be shown to rest upon it, will carry that Divine stamp which the reason and conscience it awakens will recognise. Therefore we agree with the arguments of our opponents to this extent. Supposing they had proved the Gospel not to be a revelation, but only a product of the human intellect, their conclusion is incontestable. It ought not to be presented to the Mahometan; it is utter folly, or else cruelty, to inflict the proclamation upon him. But if it do not follow from the likeness which has been detected between Mahometanism, Judaism, and Christianity, that they are all equally deceived in their great postulate; if it appears that Christianity reveals that which alone interprets that postulate, and prevents it from sinking into a dead notion; then we have found that power which can avenge the outrages and injuries of Islamism, by preserving the precious fragments of truth which are lodged within it, forming them into a whole, making them effectual for the blessing of all the lands over which it reigns.
And surely, if this be the way in which we can and should speak to the Mahometan, no other can befit us in our intercourse with the Jew. Whatever there is in him of strength or earnestness clings to the belief that God spake to his fathers. Systems, rabbinical and philosophical, may choke that belief; money-getting habits may almost extinguish it. But it haunts him; it is an oppression to him, from which in these ways he seeks to be delivered when he is in an evil state of mind; it is his only consolation and hope when he rises into a higher one. With it is connected that sense of nationality which is even yet his noblest characteristic, however mixed it may be with sin and weakness. To it is linked that hope of a coming Deliverer which sometimes cheers him amidst all the misery and anguish of his actual condition. A religion which is not a message from God, not an unveiling of Him, is at once felt by him to be a phantasy. He may adopt the modern talk about the religious instinct or principle creating its own object; but it is in his mouth, if in no other person’s, absolutely insincere. Again then we say, if Christianity be not a Revelation, or we do not think it is, we are right to keep it from the Jew, as being something with which his mind can have no possible affinity. But if it be this; if it be such a revelation as rests upon his data, as justifies his nationality, as establishes his hope of a Deliverer, while it takes from these convictions that narrowness which he is beginning to find incompatible with his apprehensions respecting the condition and greatness of men; shows how the nationality, without being lost, may be expanded into a universal fellowship; hinders the vision of a future revelation from degenerating into the expectation of a sensual and mundane felicity, by declaring that the Redeemer has come already to claim Man for his possession, and to rescue him from his earthly bondage; then we may feel in this case that there is One power, and but One in the world, which can raise the fallen Israelite to a new and spiritual life.
There is, however, another view of the relations of Christianity with Judaism and Mahometanism—another, and a most important one. If Christianity deserve that character in which I have endeavoured to present it, it has, and it ought to have, its Judaical and Mahometan side. It may, as I have said, alienate this part of its own possession; it may forget the great truth which it has inherited from Judaism, the truth of a living King and Lord of the World; it may try to sever the doctrine of Christ from this absolute and eternal ground; then that doctrine loses all its meaning, becomes a shadow, and not a substance—a dogma, not a living word. Then God does assuredly raise up some witness for this truth, lest men should be robbed of it. But it is possible for Christians to take another course, if it be another; it is possible for them, apparently, to exalt the Judaical or Mahometan side of Christianity, to become, in fact, practically Jews or Mahometans, though they do not belong to the family of Abraham, and may care nothing about the Arabian Prophet. In practice Christians have done this when they have attempted to copy Jewish example in the manner of propagating their faith: really copying not that, but Mahometan example: for we truly copy Jewish example, as I have shewn you, when we go forth as national bodies, under our national sovereign, to resist wrong and robbery, and to maintain the position which God has given us: we copy Mahometan example when we attempt to spread the principles of the Universal Family, which is based upon the Love of God, and the Sacrifice of Christ, and the gift of the Spirit of meekness and of charity, by any other methods than those of love, and sacrifice, and meekness. We seem to copy Jewish example—we really copy Mahometan example, when we seek for any visible, mortal man to reign over the Universal Family; for the Jewish king reigned not over the universe, but over a particular nation: and so soon as a universal society grew out of the national one, it was the glorious proclamation that an Unseen King, who had ascended to the right hand of God, was its only Sovereign. We seem to copy Jewish example—we really copy Mahometan example, when we set visible and outward rewards before us as the prizes of our high calling; for though the Jew lived especially to assert God’s dominion over the earth, and to rule it, and subdue it for Him, yet the reward he always kept in sight was, that he might know Him who exercised righteousness and judgment in the earth, that he might awake up after His likeness, and be satisfied with it. In like manner we copy the example of the modern Jew and of the Mahometan, not of the ancient Jew, or if of the ancient Jew, only of the formal, heartless Pharisee, when we receive the Bible not as a record of actual doings, of actual intercourse between a living Being and His creatures upon earth, but only as a collection of notions and opinions, about which we are to dispute and tear each other in pieces. Still more effectually do we assume the character of the servant of the Prophet, of the degenerate Israelite, when we set up the dry confession of God’s sovereignty against his righteousness, supposing that His acts are ever acts of self-will; that His glory is ever anything but the glory of purity, and goodness, and truth. In all these ways we may prove that there is indeed a very near relation between our belief and theirs, inasmuch as we can hold the one under the name of the other.
Again, we may adopt what some would call, I think wrongly, a merely theoretical Judaism, or Mahometanism; we may seem to copy Jewish example by asserting the simplicity of God’s nature; by denying the possibility of a man manifesting forth the Unseen God, by rejecting the belief of a Father and a Son, and of a Spirit binding them together in an ever-blessed Unity. Why this is not the adoption of the true Judaical Faith, but the rejection of it, I have explained already; it has been ever ready to issue in the dryness of modern Judaism wherein all which we see alive in the Old Testament, is petrified. Now especially that result is inevitable; for now, less than in any former day, is it possible to speak of God as if he stood in no relation to man. The tendency of our time is to confound Him with His Creatures, with the works of His hands; to lose all thought of His distinctness; to regard Him as only the conception of man’s mind, a sort of synonyme for man’s thinking faculty, or for the life which dwells in things. Against such notions the records of Judaism and Mahometanism are mighty and standing protests; but they are more and more ineffectual protests. They shew why such notions of God can never satisfy human beings who know their own necessities; not what these notions signify, and how they are to be satisfied.
It is true, then, that the temptations of Jews and Mahometans are our temptations; that we carry their practical confusions and divisions within our own bosoms. At every moment we are liable to fall into them. Each careless step we take, each unholy temper we indulge, the neglect of our duties, the tolerance of our evil, is always increasing the danger. It is true also that the Christian has no right to undervalue any good thing which he finds in any Jew or Mahometan; it flows from a principle which he ought to hold fast, and which ought to produce the same or better fruits in him. While we acknowledge that every right act in them deserves tenfold more admiration than it could deserve in us, and that all our evil acts must be done with ten-thousand-fold greater sense of wrong and less of excuse, this confession does not in the least affect that which we believe; for Christianity is not concerned in justifying our sins, but in condemning them: it does not say that any particular set of men, calling themselves by the Christian name, are better than others; but it says that God will be true, though every man be a liar; that his kingdom will be established whether we who belong to it care that it should be established, or cut ourselves off from it. And the same conscience which tells us of our evil, forces each of us to say: ‘This evil comes not from my faith, but from indifference to it. It comes not from my holding too fast by that which is simple and old rather than seeking for a new and finer Christianity. It comes simply from my forgetting the Creed of my childhood. For if I did believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, I should be acknowledging that Will which Jews and Mahometans acknowledge as the ground of all things: only I should be confessing it as a loving and fatherly will. If I did believe in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried, who descended into hell, and rose again the third day from the dead, who ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God, the Father Almighty, who from thence shall come to judge the quick and dead, I should feel and understand that there is indeed a Man who will reign over the world, and judge it as Jews and Mahometans teach; but that this Man is the Son of God and the Son of Man; one who before he claimed our homage, submitted to our curse, wrestled with death and overcame; who has already set up his throne in the highest region of all, and calls upon every voluntary creature in his heart and spirit to do Him homage. If I did believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, the Forgiveness of Sins, the Resurrection of the Body, and the Life Everlasting, I should feel there was a mighty, Divine Power working in us, to make us more completely servants of a human king and of the Divine Will, than Jews and Mahometans have ever dreamed we could be: to make us members of a universal society, as Islamites wish us to be; to make our bodies more triumphant over death, more glorious than they have thought possible; but, besides this, to make us sons of God brethren with Him who is the Son of God—brethren with those who have passed into another world, who are perfectly freed from temptation and sin, who have inherited not a sensual Paradise, but a kingdom of righteousness, and peace, and love.’