Christ, is to bring them (1) to the only infallible Physician, (2) to the only efficient Educator, (3) to the only qualified Redeemer. No work on this earth is so important, so beneficent, so sublime as this. To bring to Christ, you must be Christlike. You may bring crowds to your church by clap-trap. You can only bring them to Christ by a life of Christly stateliness, inspiration, and influence. We have here-III. The SUBLIMEST TYPE OF HUMANITY. "And Jesus answered them saying, The hour is come that the Son of man should be glorified." "The Son of man," not the mere son of a Jew or Gentile, not the son of a nation, a church, or a sect, but the "Son of man,"-sustaining the same relations to all, having the same love for all-the model man. First: He speaks with magnanimity in prospect of His death, Gethsemane and Calvary were before him. And yet with what sublime composure He fronts them. Secondly: He speaks with triumph at the prospect of His glory. The Son of man shall be glorified-glorified in the resurrection from the dead, his exaltation to heaven, his moral victories over all the errors, the curses, and miseries of the world. No. CXXXI. Subject: PHYSICAL FACT-A THREEFOLD SIMILE. "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."-JOHN xii. 24. The fact in nature to which Christ refers is patent to all and practically recognised in all labours of the agriculturist. It is this-that the grain, in order to multiply itself, must go down into the earth and die. This fact might be taken as a symbol of three things: I. AS A SYMBOL OF THE HISTORY OF JESUS CHRIST. For His doctrine to obtain wide, regal influence over the minds of men, His death seemed necessary; it struck home in thunder His truths to the understanding and conscience. Christ means to say that His death was as necessary to the extension of His truths in the world, as the death of the seed to the multiplication of its kind; and it was verily so. Ought not Christ to have suffered? The fact may be taken-II. AS A SYMBOL OF THE HISTORY OF MORAL TRUTH. A great truth, to grow and multiply, must go deep into the soil of the soul, and there its logical husks and wrappages must die and rot; and then by quiet reflection it shall germinate and grow. A TRUE SOUL. III. As a SYMBOL OF THE HISTORY OF The fact admirably illustrates the history of a true soul. First: It is simple in its appearance. How plain and unattractive is the grain of corn! How unostentatious is a true soul! it makes itself of no reputation. Secondly: Unbounded in its possibilities. What possibilities does a single grain possess? Harvests slumber in one seed; forests repose in one shell! What wondrous potentialities lie within the human soul! Thirdly: Developed by self-abnegation. Unless the soul dies to self, loses all its egotism, becomes self-oblivious, it will never rise into freedom, power, and perfection. The Chief Founders of the Chief Faiths. Around no men, amongst all the millions of mankind, does so much interest gather as around the Founders of the Chief Religious Faiths of the world. Such men are sometimes almost lost in the obscurity of remote ages, or of the mystery with which they surrounded themselves or their early followers invested them. But whenever they can be discerned, their characters analysed, and their deeper experiences understood, they are found to be, not only leaders and masters of the multitudes who have adopted more or less of their creed and ritual, but also interpreters (more or less partial) of the universal yearnings of the soul of man. Such men may have seemed to sit at the fountains of human thought and feeling, and to have directed or have coloured the mysterious streams; but they have quite as often indicated in their doctrines and in their deeds the strong courses of the thoughts and feelings which are more permanent and deeper than any one man or even any one age could completely discover. The aim of these papers will be, with necessary brevity, to review the chief of such men, noting suggestively rather than exhaustively, their biography, their circumstances, their theology, and their ethics. And in concluding the series, it is proposed to compare and to contrast each and all of them with the "One Man whom in the long roll of ages we can love without disappointment and worship without idolatry, the Man Christ Jesus." PRINCIPAL BOOKS OF REFERENCE.-Max Müller's "History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature," "The Science of Language,' ," "Chips from a German Workshop;" Rev. F. D. Maurice's "Religions of the World; " Archdeacon Hardwick's "Christ and other Masters;' Rev. J. W. Gardner's "Faiths of the World; " Miss Mary Carpenter's "Last Days of Rammohun Roy;" Rev. F. W. Farrar's "Witness of History to Christ;" Rev. A. W. Williamson's "Journey in North China;" Canon Liddon's Bampton Lecture on "Our Lord's Divinity Cousin's "History of Modern Philosophy;" S. Clarke's "Ten Great Religions;" Father Huc's "Christianity in China." No. XI. Subject: Mahomet, his Biography (continued). FTER Mahomet's flight, that great crisis in his life, which to himself and to his followers is an epoch of unrivalled interest and meaning, he dictated the chief portions of his sacred book, "The Koran," or Reading, "Thing to be read." Of that he was the sole author, professing to have received it in revelations, using many amanuenses. Just at this point we have to do, however, not with its doctrines, only with the work as it has to do with the writer's experiences. And as the writing of the book extends over a period of twenty-three years, it will evidently cast much light on his biography. So viewed, it may be regarded as a revelation alike of his strongly individual prophet-like nature; of his sincerity and reality, and of the leading events of his life; of his eccentric nature, for it was found by his followers lying about in many unconnected leaves; and because it is, as Thomas Carlyle says, in itself, through its lack of historic sequence and its wild chanting songs, "a bewildered rhapsody." The book is a proof of his reality. For, as the great Chelsea sage goes on to show, "the Koran is a confused ferment of a great rude human soul: rude, untutored, that cannot even be read, but fervent, earnest, struggling vehemently to utter itself in words. Natural uncultivation is a main feature of the book. The panting, breathless haste and vehemence of a man struggling in the thick of the battle for life and salvation. This is the mood he is in." One of its early Suras, or sections, seems to indicate the genuineness of the spirit of the man,— "By the declining day I swear, To do the things which be right, And stir up one another to truth and steadfastness." And then too this book is a sort of autobiography, for it implies many of the events of his life. It has been well said, that, as with David in his Psalms, so with Mahomet. His life hangs suspended in these hymns as on votive pictures, each the record of some grave experience." All the incidents in his life he regards as some special revelation or other, and so he treats them here. Thus, for instance, he refers to, and interprets, what he calls his divine call, and his mother's death, and his visit, years afterwards, to her grave. In this book, too, he tells much of Abu Bakr, an immensely rich merchant who unhesitatingly accepted Islamism from its founder, who was his thoughtful, calm, tender, and firm friend, his only companion in this flight. The prophet was, however, not more desirous of gaining over members of great families like Abu Bakr, but, in his best moods at least, took pains about the needy and helpless. After the Hegira, and the composition probably of the principal part of the Koran, his fortunes brightened, but his character darkened. Goethe says of him, "At first he was profoundly sincere, but that afterwards what in his character is earthly increases and develops itself, the divine retires and is obscured, his doctrine becomes a means rather than an end. All kinds of practices are employed, nor are horrors wanting.” Instead of seeming as earnest in his career—a prophet anxious about truth—he becomes like a mere politician at the head of a party that he means shall win. And his weapons henceforward are physical rather than moral. He spent the last ten years of his life virtually in creating a fanatical army of warriors. He had, of course, at first gathered recruits by moral means, for in some such way he obtained the sword by which, it is proverbial, he ultimately promulgated his religion. And in view of these later and far-reaching victories, by which, gradually, all the Bedouin tribes were conquered, M. Renan wisely says, "From all sides, we come to this singular result; that the Mussulman movement was started almost without religious faith; that, setting aside a small number of faithful disciples, Mahomet really wrought very little conviction in Arabia." In this deterioration he became actually cruel, as his wicked treatment of the Jews, with whom he was disappointed because they would not, though monotheists, accept Islamism, and his battles with the Koreish show. With the Jews, for example, he acted as the following instances among many indicate. A Jewess, having written anti-Mohammedan verses, was assassinated by one of his followers, and the prophet praised him in the mosque for his deed. An aged Jew was by his command murdered for the same offence. At another time he deliberately commanded the execution of seven or eight hundred Jewish prisoners who had surrendered at discretion, and the sale of their wives and children into slavery. Moreover, in this last decade of his life his multiplication of wives, beyond the limit of the law, but as he said, in obedience to special revelation, shows that while he was in other respects far from a common voluptuary, he was not free from the spirit of self-indulgence. For though it is affirmed that his polygamy was in accordance with custom, and that his practices in war were a necessity, it is nevertheless clear that true heroism would have consisted in counteracting and not in increasing such a custom, and in triumphing over what seemed necessity for bloodshed. For it cannot be suggested in palliation that this yielding was that of a man of a weak will overcome by a resistless current of circumstances. It was rather that of a strong man who willed to yield. At length, however, he had, like all the founders of religion but One, to succumb unwillingly to death. In the sixty-third year of his age, having on the very last day of his life gone into the mosque to attend morning prayer, he went back to the room of his favourite wife, Ayeoba, and died in her arms June 8, A.D. 632. |
