CAUSES OF MOHAMMED'S TRIUMPH.

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system except to attack it, are not those who can best explain the causes of its vitality or its success. One historian tells us that Mohammedanism triumphed by the mere force of arms; another, by the use Mohammed made of the tendency so deeply planted in man to fall victims in masses to any wellconceived imposture; a third traces his success to his skilful plagiarisms from faiths purer than his own; and a fourth to the elevated morality, or to the lax morality, inculcated in the Koran; for both of these are strangely enough urged almost in the same breath by the same people: while, lastly, others dwell on the inherent strength of the founder's character and the enthusiasm that must accompany a crusade against idolatry.' We feel that most of these have some truth in them; some of them have much; and one or two of them are not only not true, but they are the very reverse of the truth. But we also feel that none of them singly, nor all of them together, adequately account for the phenomena they profess to explain.

2

In treating of Mohammedanism, as remarked by M. Barthélemy St. Hilaire, we have to try in limine to discard alike our national and our religious

'See some of these explanations admirably dealt with by F. D. Maurice, Religions of the World,' Lecture I.

2. Mahomet et le Koran,' preface, p. 6.

prejudices. It was not till Mohammedanism had existed for eight hundred years that it was possible to discard the one; and not till very lately that it was even attempted to discard the other. Since the conquest of Constantinople, or rather since the brilliant naval victory of Don John of Austria at Lepanto, and its final repulse by John Sobieski from the walls of Vienna two hundred and thirty years later, Mohammedanism has ceased, in Europe at least, to be an aggressive and conquering power; and since then, it has been possible for the states of Christendom to breathe more freely, and to forget the infidel in the ally or the subject.

Religious prejudice is more difficult to overcome. Men who are ardently attached to their own religion find it difficult to judge another dispassionately, and from a neutral point of view. The philosopher who, according to Gibbon's famous aphorism, looked upon all religions of the Roman Empire as equally false, and the magistrate who looked upon all as equally useful, would be alike incapacitated for viewing the Musalman creed from the Musalman stand-point. Perhaps the populace who looked upon all religions as equally true would have been the best judges of the three; but I doubt whether in this, as in most epigrammatic sentences, something of truth has not bcen sacrificed to the antithesis. Nature does not

COMPARATIVE STUDY OF RELIGION.

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arrange herself in antithetical groups for our convenience; and I doubt whether the mass of any people, at any time, have looked upon all religions as equally

true.

But the comparative study of religion is beginning to teach, at all events, the more thoughtful of mankind, not indeed that all religions are equally true or equally elevating, but that all contain some truth; that no religion is exclusively good, none exclusively bad; that any religion which has a real and continued hold on a large body of mankind must satisfy a real spiritual need, and is so far good. God is in all His works, and not the least so in the thoughts and aspirations of His creatures towards Himself; and what we have to do is to feel after Him in each and all, assured that He is there, even if haply in our ignorance we can find no trace of Him.

Truly, when we are dealing with religion at all, even though it be Polytheism or Fetishism, we are 'treading upon holy ground;' and in order that we may treat that creed, sublime in its simplicity, which is our special subject, with that union of candour and of reverence which alone befits it, it is necessary before concluding this introductory Lecture that I should lay down clearly one principle which must guide us in our investigation.

It is this, that for the purposes of scientific

investigation, religions must be regarded as differing from one another in degree rather than in kind. This is the one postulate, itself the result of a careful induction, upon which alone the existence of any true science of religion must depend. Without a clear perception of this truth you enter upon the study of the religions of the world, with a preconceived idea, which will colour all your conclusions, and will invalidate them the more gravely, the more favourable those conclusions are to your own creed. The ordinary distinctions of kind, therefore, drawn between true and false, natural and supernatural, revealed and unrevealed religions, are, for our present purpose, unreal and misleading. The fact is, that from one point of view all religions are more or less natural, from another all are more or less supernatural; and all alike are to be treated from the same standpoint, and investigated by the same methods. In the Science of Religion, to quote an expression of Max Müller's used in this place, Christianity 'owns no prescriptive rights, and claims no immunities.' It challenges the freest inquiry; and as it claims to come from God Himself, so it fears not the honest use of any faculties that God has given to man. Christianity is indeed a revelation, and what it really reveals is true; and, so far, if the alternative must needs be put in this shape, no Christian would have any doubt in which category to place his own creed.

DO RELIGIONS DIFFER IN KIND?

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But does Christianity claim any such monopoly of what is good and true as is implied in this crude classification, or will any one say that there is no real revelation of God in the noble lives of Confucius or Buddha, and no fragments of Divine truth in the pure morality of the systems which they founded? Truth, happily for man, is myriad-sided, and happy he who can catch a far-off glance of the one side of it presented to him! Claim, if you like, for the Bible what the Koran does claim for itself and the Bible does not a rigid or a verbal inspiration. Grant that the truth revealed passed mechanically through the mind of the sacred writer without contamination and without alloy, yet who can say, since the Verities with which religion deals are all beyond the world of sense,—that the precise meaning attached by him to any one word in his creed is the same as that attached to it by any other?-quot homines tot sententia. The recipient subject colours every object of sensation or of thought as it passes into it, and is conscious of that object, not as it entered, but as it has been instantaneously and unconsciously transformed in the alembic of the mind. In religion, as in external nature, the human mind is, as Bacon says, an unequal mirror to the rays of things, mixing its own nature indissolubly with theirs. And this relative element once admitted into religion at all, it follows that to divide religions

F