[Footnote 205: _Holy Bible and Sacred Books of the East_, p. 12.]
[Footnote 206: Mohammed was once asked whether he trusted in his own
merit or in the mercy of God, and he answered, "The mercy of God." But
the whole drift of his teaching belied this one pious utterance.]
[Footnote 207: Of the terrible darkness and bewilderment into which
benighted races are often found Schoolcraft furnishes this graphic and
painful picture in the condition of the Iroquois:
"Their notions of a deity, founded apparently on some dreamy tradition
of original truth, are so subtile and divisible, and establish so
heterogeneous a connection between spirit and matter of all imaginable
forms, that popular belief seems to have wholly confounded the possible
with the impossible, the natural with the supernatural. Action, so far
as respects cause and effect, takes the widest and wildest range,
through the agency of good or evil influences, which are put in motion
alike for noble or ignoble ends--alike by men, beasts, devils, or gods.
Seeing something mysterious and wonderful, he believes all things
mysterious and wonderful; and he is afloat without shore or compass, on
the wildest sea of superstition and necromancy. He sees a god in every
phenomenon, and fears a sorcerer in every enemy. Life, under such a
system of polytheism and wild belief, is a constant scene of fears and
alarms. Fear is the predominating passion, and he is ready, wherever he
goes, to sacrifice at any altar, be the supposed deity ever so
grotesque. He relates just what he believes, and unluckily he believes
everything that can possibly be told. A beast, or a bird, or a man, or a
god, or a devil, a stone, a serpent, or a wizard, a wind, or a sound, or
a ray of light--these are so many causes of action, which the meanest
and lowest of the series may put in motion, but which shall in his
theology and philosophy vibrate along the mysterious chain through the
uppermost, and life or death may at any moment be the reward or the
penalty."--_Notes on the Iroquois_, p. 263.]
[Footnote 208: _History of Rationalism_.]
[Footnote 209: And even the Buddha had spent six years in
self-mortification and in the diligent search for what he regarded as
the true wisdom.]
[Footnote 210: Henry Maudsley, in _The Arena_ of April, 1891.]
[Footnote 211: "Barren Mohammedanism has been in all the higher and more
tender virtues, because its noble morality and its pure theism have been
united with no living example."--Lecky, _History of Morals_, vol. ii.,
p. 10.]
[Footnote 212: The most intelligent Mohammedans, as we have shown in a
former lecture, admit the moral blemishes of his character as compared
with the purity of Jesus and only revere him as the instrument of a
great Divine purpose. His only element of greatness was success. Even
the Koran convicts him of what the world must regard as heinous sin, and
presents Jesus as the only sinless prophet.]
[Footnote 213: Douglass, _Confucianism and Taouism_.]
[Footnote 214: The apologists of Buddhism have made much of the story of
a distressed young mother who came to the "Master" bearing in her arms
the dead body of her first-born--hoping for some comfort or help. He
bade her bring him some mustard seed found in a home where no child had
died. After a wearisome but vain search he only reminded her of the
universality of death. No hope of a future life and a glad recovery of
the lost was given. As an illustration of Buddhism the example is a good
one.]
[Footnote 215: "Men wanted a Father in heaven, who should take account
of their efforts and assure them a recompense. Men wanted a future of
righteousness, in which the earth should belong to the feeble and the
poor; they wanted the assurance that human suffering is not all loss,
but that beyond this sad horizon, dimmed by tears, are happy plains
where sorrow shall one day find its consolation."--Renan, _Hibbert
Lectures_, p. 42.]
[Footnote 216: See report of Missionary Conference, London, 1888, vol.
i., p. 70.]
[Footnote 217: _St. Paul and Protestantism_, p. 79, quoted by Bishop
Carpenter.]
[Footnote 218: It is hardly necessary to remind the reader of the
well-known tribute which Napoleon, in his conversations with his friends
on the island of St. Helena, paid to the transcendent personality of
Christ. He drew a graphic contrast between the so-called glory which had
been won by great conquerors like Alexander, Cæsar, and himself, and
that mysterious and all-mastering power which in all lands and all ages
continues to attach itself to the person, the name, the memory of
Christ, for whom, after eighteen centuries of time, millions of men
would sacrifice their lives.]
[Footnote 219: Augustine appears to have been greatly moved by the life
as well as by the writings of Paul. In an account given of his
conversion to his friend Romanianus, he says, "So then stumbling,
hurrying, hesitating, I seized the apostle Paul, 'for never,' said I,
'could they have wrought such things, or lived as it is plain they did
live, if their writings and arguments were opposed to this so high a
good.'"--_Confessions_, Bk. vii., xxi., note.]
[Footnote 220: Genesis, xvii. 1.]
[Footnote 221: The doctrine of human merit-making was carried to such an
extreme under the Brahmanical system that the gods became afraid of its
power. They sometimes found it necessary to send apsaras (nymphs), wives
of genii, to tempt the most holy ascetics, lest their austerities and
their merit should proceed too far.--_See Article Brahmanism, in the
Britannica._]
[Footnote 222: Müller, _Chips from a German Workshop_, vol. i., p. 40.]
[Footnote 223: De Nat. Deorum, iii., 36.]
[Footnote 224: _Chips from a German Workshop_, p. 304.]
[Footnote 225: See Murdock's _Vedic Religion_, p. 57.]
[Footnote 226: _Hindu Philosophy_.]
[Footnote 227: The most sacred of human victims offered by the Aztecs
were prepared by a month of unbridled lust. See Prescott's _Conquest_.]
[Footnote 228: _Nineteenth Century_, July, 1888.]
[Footnote 229: Letters of Rev. Pentecost in _The Christian at Work_,
1891.]
[Footnote 230: The same principles are set forth with great emphasis in
Isaiah, Chap. iii.]