MUTUAL RELATIONS OF DIFFERENT MODES OF INTELLECTUAL CULTURE.
Necessary consequences of a supposed equality of all races--Uniform
testimony of history to the contrary--Traces of extinct
civilizations among barbarous tribes--Laws which govern the
adoption of a state of civilization by conquered
populations--Antagonism of different modes of culture; the Hellenic
and Persian, European and Arab, etc.
Had it been the will of the Creator to endow all the branches of the
human family with equal intellectual capacities, what a glorious tableau
would history not unfold before us. All being equally intelligent,
equally aware of their true interests, equally capable of triumphing
over obstacles, a number of simultaneous and flourishing civilizations
would have gladdened every portion of the inhabited globe. While the
most ancient Sanscrit nations covered Northern India with harvests,
cities, palaces, and temples; and the plains of the Tigris and Euphrates
shook under the trampling of Nimrod's cavalry and chariots, the
prognathous tribes of Africa would have formed and developed a social
system, sagaciously constructed, and productive of brilliant results.
Some luckless tribes, whose lot fortune had cast in inhospitable climes,
burning sands, or glacial regions, mountain gorges, or cheerless steppes
swept by the piercing winds of the north, would have been compelled to a
longer and severer struggle against such unpropitious circumstances,
than more fortunate nations. But being not inferior in intelligence and
sagacity, they would not have been long in discovering the means of
bettering their condition. Like the Icelanders, the Danes, and
Norwegians, they would have forced the reluctant soil to afford them
sustenance; if inhabitants of mountainous regions, they would, like the
Swiss, have enjoyed the advantages of a pastoral life, or like the
Cashmerians, resorted to manufacturing industry. But if their
geographical situation had been so unfavorable as to admit of no
resource, they would have reflected that the world was large, contained
many a pleasant valley and fertile plain, where they might seek the
fruits of intelligent activity, which their stepmotherly native land
refused them.
Thus all the nations of the earth would have been equally enlightened,
equally prosperous; some by the commerce of maritime cities, others by
productive agriculture in inland regions, or successful industry in
barren and Alpine districts. Though they might not exempt themselves
from the misfortunes to which the imperfections of human nature give
rise--transitory dissensions, civil wars, seditions, etc.--their
individual interests would soon have led them to invent some system of
relative equiponderance. As the differences in their civilizations
resulted merely from fortuitous circumstances, and not from innate
inequalities, a mutual interchange would soon have assimilated them in
all essential points. Nothing could then prevent a universal
confederation, that dream of so many centuries; and the inhabitants of
the most distant parts of the globe would have been as members of one
great cosmopolite people.
Let us contrast this fantastic picture with the reality. The first
nations worthy of the name, owed their formation to an instinct of
aggregation, which the barbarous tribes near them not only did not feel
then, but never afterward. These nations spread beyond their original
boundaries, and forced others to submit to their power. But the
conquered neither adopted nor understood the principles of the
civilization imposed upon them. Nor has the force of example been of
avail to those in whom innate capacity was wanting. The native
populations of the Spanish peninsula, and of Transalpine and Ligurian
Gaul, saw Phenicians, Greeks, and Carthaginians, successively establish
flourishing cities on their coasts, without feeling the least incitement
to imitate the manners or forms of government of these prosperous
merchants.
What a glorious spectacle do not the Indians of North America witness at
this moment. They have before their eyes a great and prosperous nation,
eminent for the successful practical application of modern theories and
sciences to political and social forms, as well as to industrial art.
The superiority of this foreign race, which has so firmly established
itself upon his former patrimony, is evident to the red man. He sees
their magnificent cities, their thousands of vessels upon the once
silent rivers, their successful agriculture; he knows that even his own
rude wants, the blanket with which he covers himself, the weapon with
which he slays his game, the ardent spirits he has learned to love so
well, can be supplied only by the stranger. The last feeble hope to see
his native soil delivered from the presence of the conqueror's race, has
long since vanished from his breast; he feels that the land of his
fathers is not his own. Yet he stubbornly refuses to enter the pale of
this civilization which invites him, solicits him, tries to entice him
with superior advantages and comforts. He prefers to retreat from
solitude to solitude, deeper and deeper into the primitive forest. He is
doomed to perish, and he knows it; but a mysterious power retains him
under the yoke of his invincible repugnances, and while he admires the
strength and superiority of the whites, his conscience, his whole
nature, revolts at the idea of assimilating to them. He cannot forget or
smother the instincts of his race.
The aborigines of Spanish America are supposed to evince a less
unconquerable aversion. It is because the Spanish metropolitan
government had never attempted to civilize them. Provided they were
Christians, at least in name, they were left to their own usages and
habits, and, in many instances, under the administration of their
Caziques. The Spaniards colonized but little, and when the conquest was
completed and their sanguinary appetites glutted by those unparalleled
atrocities which brand them with indelible disgrace, they indulged in a
lazy toleration, and directed their tyranny rather against individuals
than against modes of thinking and living. The Indians have, in a great
measure, mixed with their conquerors, and will continue to live while
their brethren in the vicinity of the Anglo-Saxon race are inevitably
doomed to perish.
But not only savages, even nations of a higher rank in the intellectual
scale are incapable of adopting a foreign civilization. We have already
alluded to the failure of the English in India and of the Dutch in Java,
in trying to import their own ideas into their foreign dependencies.
French philanthropy is at this moment gaining the same experience in the
new French possession of Algeria. There can be no stronger or more
conclusive proof of the various endowments of different races.
If we had no other argument in proof of the innate imparity of races
than the actual condition of certain barbarous tribes, and the
supposition that they had always been in that condition, and,
consequently, always would be, we should expose ourselves to serious
objections. For many barbarous nations preserve traces of former
cultivation and refinement. There are some tribes, very degraded in
every other respect, who yet possess traditional regulations respecting
the marriage celebration, the forms of justice and the division of
inheritances, which evidently are remnants of a higher state of society,
though the rites have long since lost all meaning. Many of the Indian
tribes who wander over the tracts once occupied by the Alleghanian race,
may be cited as instances of this kind. The natives of the Marian
Islands, and many other savages, practise mechanically certain processes
of manufacture, the invention of which presupposes a degree of ingenuity
and knowledge utterly at variance with their present stupidity and
ignorance. To avoid hasty and erroneous conclusions concerning this
seeming decadence, there are several circumstances to be taken into
consideration.
Let us suppose a savage population to fall within the sphere of activity
of a proximate, but superior race. In that case they may gradually learn
to conform externally to the civilization of their masters, and acquire
the technicalities of their arts and inventions. Should the dominant
race disappear either by expulsion or absorption, the civilization would
expire, but some of its outward forms might be retained and perpetuated.
A certain degree of mechanical skill might survive the scientific
principles upon which it was based. In other words, practice might long
continue after the theory was lost. History furnishes us a number of
examples in support of this assertion.
Such, for instance, was the attitude of the Assyrians toward the
civilization of the Chaldeans; of the Iberians, Celts, and Illyrians
towards that of the Romans. If, then, the Cherokees, the Catawbas,
Muskogees, Seminoles, Natchez and other tribes, still preserve a feeble
impress of the Alleghanian civilization, I should not thence conclude
that they are the pure and direct descendants of the initiatory element
of that people, which would imply that a race may once have been
civilized, and be no longer so. I should say, on the contrary, that the
Cherokees, if at all ethnically connected with the ancient dominant
type, are so by only a collateral tie of consanguinity, else they could
never have relapsed into a state of barbarism. The other tribes which
exhibit little or no vestiges of the former civilization are probably
the descendants of a different conquered population which formed no
constituent element of the society, but served rather as the substratum
upon which the edifice was erected. It is no matter of surprise, if this
be the case, that they should preserve--without understanding them and
with a sort of superstitious veneration--customs, laws, and rites
invented by others far more intelligent than themselves.
The same may be said of the mechanical arts. The aborigines of the
Carolines are about the most interesting of the South Sea islanders.
Their looms, sculptured canoes, their taste for navigation and commerce
show them vastly superior to the Pelagian negroes, their neighbors. It
is easy to account for this superiority by the well-authenticated
admixture of Malay blood. But as this element is greatly attenuated, the
inventions which it introduced have not borne indigenous fruits, but, on
the contrary, are gradually, but surely, disappearing.
The preceding observations will, I think, suffice to show that the
traces of civilization among a barbarous tribe are not a necessary proof
that this tribe itself has ever been really civilized. It may either
have lived under the domination of a superior but consanguineous race,
or living in its vicinity, have, in an humble and feeble degree,
profited by its lessons. This result, however, is possible only when
there exists between the superior and the inferior race a certain
ethnical affinity; that is to say, when the former is either a noble
branch of the same stock, or ennobled by intermixture with another. When
the disparity between races is too great and too decided, and there is
no intermediate link to connect them, the contact is always fatal to the
inferior race, as is abundantly proved by the disappearance of the
aborigines of North America and Polynesia.
I shall now speak of the relations arising from the contact of different
civilizations.
The Persian civilization came in contact with the Grecian; the Egyptian
with the Grecian and Roman; the Roman with the Grecian; and finally the
modern civilization of Europe with all those at present subsisting on
the globe, and especially with the Arabian.
The contact of Greek intelligence with the culture of the Persians was
as frequent as it was compulsory. The greater portion of the Hellenic
population, and the wealthiest, though not the most independent, was
concentrated in the cities of the Syrian coast, the Greek colonies of
Asia Minor, and on the shores of the Euxine, all of which formed a part
of the Persian dominions. Though these colonies preserved their own
local laws and politics, they were under the authority of the satraps of
the great king. Intimate relations, moreover, were maintained between
European Greece and Asia. That the Persians were then possessed of a
high degree of civilization is proved by their political organization
and financial administration, by the magnificent ruins which still
attest the splendor and grandeur of their cities. But the principles of
government and religion, the modes and habits of life, the genius of the
arts, were very differently understood by the two nations; and,
therefore, notwithstanding their constant intercourse, neither made the
slightest approach toward assimilation with the other. The Greeks called
their puissant neighbors barbarians, and the latter, no doubt, amply
returned the compliment.
In Ecbatana no other form of government could be conceived than an
undivided hereditary authority, limited only by certain religious
prescriptions and a court ceremonial. The genius of the Greeks tended to
an endless variety of governmental forms; subdivided into a number of
petty sovereignties. Greek society presented a singular mosaic of
political structures; oligarchical in Sparta, democratical in Athens,
tyrannical in Sicyon, monarchical in Macedonia, the forms of government
were the same in scarcely two cities or districts. The state religion of
the Persians evinced the same tendency to unity as their politics, and
was more of a metaphysical and moral than a material character. The
Greeks, on the contrary, had a symbolical system of religion, consisting
in the worship of natural objects and influences, which gradually
changed into a perfect prosopopoeia, representing the gods as
sentient beings, subject to the same passions, and engaged in the same
pursuits and occupations as the inhabitants of the earth. The worship
consisted principally in the performance of rites and demonstrations of
respect to the deities; the conscience was left to the direction of the
civil laws. Besides, the rites, as well as the divinities and heroes in
whose honor they were practised, were different in every place.
As for the manners and habits of life, it is unnecessary to point out
how vastly different they were from those of Persia. Public contempt
punished the young, wealthy, pleasure-loving cosmopolitan, who attempted
to live in Persian style. Thus, until the time of Alexander, when the
power of Greece had arrived at its culminating point, Persia, with all
her preponderance, could not convert Hellas to her civilization.
In the time of Alexander, this incompatibility of dissimilar modes of
culture was singularly demonstrated. When the empire of Darius succumbed
to the Macedonian phalanxes, it was expected, for a time, that a
Hellenic civilization would spread over Asia. There seemed the more
reason for this belief when the conqueror, in a moment of aberrancy,
treated the monuments of the land with such aggressive violence as
seemed to evince equal hatred and contempt. But the wanton incendiary
of Persepolis soon changed his mind, and so completely, that his design
became apparent to simply substitute himself in the room of the dynasty
of Achæmenes, and rule over Persia like a Persian king, with Greece
added to his estates. Great as was Alexander's power, it was
insufficient for the execution of such a project. His generals and
soldiers could not brook to see their commander assume the long flowing
robes of the eastern kings, surround himself with eunuchs, and renounce
the habits and manners of his native land. Though after his death some
of his successors persisted in the same system, they were compelled
greatly to mitigate it. Where the population consisted of a motley
compound of Greeks, Syrians, and Arabs, as in Egypt and the coast of
Asia Minor, a sort of compromise between the two civilizations became
thenceforth the normal state of the country; but where the races
remained unmixed, the national manners were preserved.
In the latter periods of the Roman empire, the two civilizations had
become completely blended in the whole East, including continental
Greece; but it was tinged more with the Asiatic than the Greek
tendencies, because the masses belonged much more to the former element
than to the latter. Hellenic forms, it is true, still subsisted, but it
is not difficult to discover in the ideas of those periods and countries
the Oriental stock upon which the scions of the Alexandrian school had
been engrafted. The respective influence of the various elements was in
strict proportion to the quantity of blood; the intellectual
preponderance belonged to that which had contributed the greatest share.
The same antagonism which I pointed out between the intellectual culture
of the Greeks and that of the Persians, will be found to result from the
contact of all other widely different civilizations. I shall mention but
one more instance: the relations between the Arab civilization[181] and
our own.
There was a time when the arts and sciences, the muses and their train,
seemed to have forsaken their former abodes, to rally around the
standard of Mohammed. That our forefathers were not blind to the
excellencies of the Arab civilization is proved by their sending their
sons to the schools of Cordova. But not a trace of the spirit of that
civilization has remained in Europe, save in those countries which still
retain a portion of Ishmaelitic blood. Nor has the Arab civilization
found a more congenial soil in India over which, also, its dominion
extended. Like those portions of Europe which were subjected to Moslem
masters, that country has preserved its own modes of thinking intact.
But if the pressure of the Arab civilization, at the time of its
greatest splendor and our greatest ignorance, could not affect the modes
of thinking of the races of Western Europe, neither can we, at present,
when the positions are reversed, affect in the slightest degree the
feeble remnants of that once so flourishing civilization. Our action
upon these remnants is continuous--the pressure of our intellectual
activity upon them immense; we succeed only in destroying, not in
transforming or remodelling.[182]
Yet this civilization was not even original, and might, therefore, be
supposed to have a less obstinate vitality. The Arab nation, it is well
known, based its empire and its intellectual culture upon fragments of
races which it had aggregated by the weight of the sword. A variegated
compound like the Islamitic populations, could not but develop a
civilization of an equally variegated character, to which each ethnical
element contributed its share. These elements it is not difficult to
determine and point out.
The nucleus, around which aggregated those countless multitudes, was a
small band of valiant warriors who unfurled in their native deserts the
standard of a new creed. They were not, before Mohammed's time, a new or
unknown people. They had frequently come in contact with the Jews and
Phenicians, and had in their veins the blood of both these nations.
Taking advantage of their favorable situation for commerce, they had
performed the carrier trade of the Red Sea, and the eastern coast of
Africa and India, for the most celebrated nations of ancient times, the
Jews and the Phenicians, later still, for the Romans and Persians. They
had the same traditions in common with the Shemitic and Hamitic families
from which they sprung.[183] They had even taken an active part in the
political life of neighboring nations. Under the Arsacides and the sons
of Sassan, some of their tribes exerted great influence in the politics
of the Persian empire. One of their adventurers[184] had become Emperor
of Rome; one of their princes protected the majesty of Rome against a
conqueror before whom the whole east trembled, and shared the imperial
purple with the Roman sovereign;[185] one of their cities had become,
under Zenobia, the centre and capital of a vast empire that rivalled and
even threatened Rome.[186]
It is evident, therefore, that the Arab nation had never ceased, from
the remotest antiquity, to entertain intimate relations with the most
powerful and celebrated ancient societies. It had taken part in their
political and intellectual[187] activity; and it might not
inappropriately be compared to a body half-plunged into the water, and
half exposed to the sun, as it partook at the same time of an advanced
state of civilization and of complete barbarism.
Mohammed invented the religion most conformable to the ideas of a
people, among whom idolatry had still many zealous adherents, but where
Christianity, though having made numerous converts, was losing favor on
account of the endless schisms and contentions of its followers.[188]
The religious dogma of the Koreishite prophet was a skilful compromise
between the various contending opinions. It reconciled the Jewish
dispensation with the New Law better than could the Church at that time,
and thus solved a problem which had disquieted the consciences of many
of the earlier Christians, and which, especially in the east, had given
rise to many heretical sects. This was in itself a very tempting bait,
and, besides, any theological novelty had decided chances of success
among the Syrians and Egyptians.[189] Moreover, the new religion
appeared with sword in hand, which in those times of schismatical
propagandism seemed a warrant of success more relied upon by the masses
to whom it addressed itself, than peaceful persuasion.
Thus arrayed, Islamism issued from its native deserts. Arrogant, and
possessed but in a very slight degree of the inventive faculty, it
developed no civilization peculiar to itself, but it had adopted, as far
as it was capable of doing, the bastard Greco-Asiatic civilization
already extant. As its triumphant banners progressed on the east and
south of the Mediterranean, it incorporated masses imbued with the same
tendencies and spirit. From each of these it borrowed something. As its
religious dogmas were a patchwork of the tenets of the Church, those of
the Synagogue, and of the disfigured traditions of Hedjaz and Yemen, so
its code of laws was a compound of the Persian and the Roman, its
science was Greco-Syrian[190] and Egyptian, its administration from the
beginning tolerant like that of every body politic that embraces many
heterogeneous elements.
It has caused much useless surprise, that Moslem society should have
made such rapid strides to refinement of manners. But the mass of the
people over whom its dominion extended, had merely changed the name of
their creed; they were old and well-known actors on the stage of
history, and have simply been mistaken for a new nation when they
undertook to play the part of apostles before the world. These people
gave to the common store their previous refinement and luxury; each new
addition to the standard of Islamism, contributed some portion of its
acquisitions. The vitalizing principle of the society, the motive power
of this cumbrous mass, was the small nucleus of Arab tribes that had
come forth from the heart of the peninsula. They furnished, not artists
and learned men, but fanatics, soldiers, victors, and masters.
The Arab civilization, then, is nothing but the Greco-Syrian
civilization, rejuvenated and quickened, for a time, with a new and
energetic, but short-lived, genius. It was, besides, a little renovated
and a little modified, by a slight dash of Persian civilization.
Yet, motley and incongruous as are the elements of which it is composed,
and capable of stretching and accommodating itself as such a compound
must be, it cannot adapt itself to any social structure erected by other
elements than its own. In other words, many as are the races that
contributed to its formation, it is suited to none that have _not_
contributed to it.
This is what the whole course of history teaches us. Every race has its
own modes of thinking; every race, capable of developing a civilization,
develops one peculiar to itself, and which it cannot engraft upon any
other, except by amalgamation of blood, and then in but a modified
degree. The European cannot win the Asiatic to his modes of thinking; he
cannot civilize the Australian, or the Negro; he can transmit but a
portion of his intelligence to his half-breed offspring of the inferior
race; the progeny of that half-breed and the nobler branch of his
ancestry, is but one degree nearer, but not equal to that branch in
capacity: the proportions of blood are strictly preserved. I have
adduced illustrations of this truth from the history of various branches
of the human family, of the lowest as well as of the higher in the scale
of intellectual progress. Are we not, then, authorized to conclude that
the diversity observable among them is constitutional, innate, and not
the result of accident or circumstances--that there is an absolute
inequality in their intellectual endowments?
FOOTNOTES:
[181] The word _Arab_ is here used instead of the more common, but less
correct, term _Saracen_, which was the general appellation bestowed on
the first propagators of the Islam by the Greeks and Latins. The Arab
civilization reached its culminating point about the reign of Harun al
Rashid. At that time, it comprised nearly all that remained of the arts
and sciences of former ages. The splendor and magnificence for which it
was distinguished, is even yet the theme of romancers and poets; and may
be discerned to this day in the voluptuous and gorgeous modes of life
among the higher classes in those countries where it still survives, as
well as in the remains of Arab architecture in Spain, the best preserved
and most beautiful of which is the well-known Alhambra. Though the Arab
civilization had a decidedly sensual tendency and character, it was not
without great benefits to mankind. From it our forefathers learned some
valuable secrets of agriculture, and the first lessons in horticulture.
The peach, the pear, the apricot, the finer varieties of apples and
plums, and nearly all of our most valued fruits were brought into
Western and Central Europe by the returning crusaders from the land of
the Saracens. Many valuable processes of manufacture, and especially of
the art of working metals, are derived from the same source. In the
science of medicine, the Arabs laid the foundation of that noble
structure we now admire. Though they were prevented by religious
scruples from dissecting the human body, and, therefore, remained in
ignorance of the most important facts of anatomy, they brought to light
innumerable secrets of the healing powers in the vegetable kingdom; they
first practised the art of distillation and of chemical analysis. They
were the beginners of the science of Chemistry, to which they gave its
name, and in which many of the commonest technical terms (such as
alkali, alembic, alcohol, and many others), still attest their labors.
In mathematical science they were no less industrious. To them we owe
that simple and useful method which so greatly facilitates the more
complex processes of calculation, without which, indeed, some of them
would be impossible, and which still retains its Arabic name--Algebra.
But what is more, to them we owe our system of notation, so vastly
superior to that of the Greeks and Romans, so admirable in its efficacy
and simplicity, that it has made arithmetic accessible to the humblest
understanding; at the present time, the whole Christian world uses
Arabic numerals.--H.
[182] It is supposed by many that Turkey will ultimately be won to our
civilization, and, as a proof of this, great stress is laid upon the
efforts of the present Sultan, as well as his predecessor, to
"Europeanize" the Turks. Whoever has carefully and unbiassedly studied
the present condition of that nation, knows how unsuccessful these
efforts, backed, though they were, by absolute authority, and by the
immense influence of the whole of Western Europe, have hitherto been and
always will be. It is a notorious fact, that the Turks fight less well
in their semi-European dress and with their European tactics, of which
so much was anticipated, than they did with their own. The Moslem now
regards the Christian with the same feelings that he did in the zenith
of his power, and these feelings are not the less bitter, because they
can no longer be so ostentatiously displayed.--H.
[183] The Arabs believed themselves the descendants of Ishmael, the son
of Hagar. This belief, even before Mohammed's time, had been curiously
blended with the idolatrous doctrines of some of their tribes.--H.
[184] _Philip_, an Arabian adventurer who was prefect of the prætorian
guards under the third Gordian, and who, through his boldness and
ability, succeeded that sovereign on the throne in A. D. 244.--H.
[185] _Odenathus_, senator of Palmyra, after Sapor, the King of Persia,
had taken prisoner the Emperor of Rome, and was devastating the empire,
met the ruthless conqueror with a body of Palmyrians, and several times
routed his much more numerous armies. Being the only one who could
protect the Eastern possessions of the Roman empire against the
aggressions of the Persians, he was appointed _Cæsar_, or coadjutor to
the emperor by Gallienus, the son of Valerian, the captive
sovereign.--H.
[186] The history of _Zenobia_, the Queen of the East, as she styled
herself, and one of the most interesting characters in history, is well
known. As in the preceding notes, I shall, therefore, merely draw
attention to familiar facts, with a view to refresh the reader's memory,
not to instruct him.
The famous Arabian queen was the widow of Odenathus, of Palmyra, who
bequeathed to her his dignity as _Cæsar_, or protector of the Eastern
dominions of Rome. It soon, however, became apparent that she disdained
to owe allegiance to the Roman emperors, and aimed at establishing a new
great empire for herself and her descendants. Though the most
accomplished, as well as the most beautiful woman of her time, she led
her armies in person, and was so eminently successful in her military
enterprises that she soon extended her dominion from the Euphrates to
the Nile. Palmyra thus became the centre and capital of a vast empire,
which, as Mr. Gobineau observes, rivalled and even threatened Rome
itself. She was, however, defeated by Aurelian, and, in A. D. 273,
graced the triumph of her conqueror on his return to Rome.
The former splendor of the now deserted Palmyra is attested by the
magnificent ruins which still form an inexhaustible theme for the
admiration of the traveller and antiquarian.--H.
[187] Though the mass of the nation were ignorant of letters, the Arabs
had already before Mohammed's times some famous writers. They had even
made voyages of discovery, in which they went as far as China. The
earliest, and, as modern researches have proved, the most truthful,
account of the manners and customs of that country is by Arab
writers.--H.
[188] At the time of the appearance of the false prophet, Arabia
contained within its bosom every then known religious sect. This was
owing not only to the central position of that country, but also to the
liberty which was then as now a prerogative of the Arab. Among them
every one was free to select or compose for himself his own private
religion. While the adjacent countries were shaken by the storms of
conquest and tyranny, the persecuted sects fled to the happy land where
they might profess what they thought, and practice what they professed.
A religious persecution had driven from Persia many who professed the
religion of the ancient Magi. The Jews also were early settlers in
Arabia. Seven centuries before the death of Mohammed they had firmly
established themselves there. The destruction of Jerusalem brought still
greater numbers of these industrious exiles, who at once erected
synagogues, and to protect the wealth they rapidly acquired, built and
garrisoned strongly fortified towns in various portions of the
wilderness. The Bible had at an early day been translated into the
Arabic tongue. Christian missionaries were not wanting, and their active
zeal was eminently successful. Several of the Arab tribes had become
converts. There were Christian churches in Yemen; the states of Hira and
Gassan were under the jurisdiction of Jacobite and Nestorian bishops.
The various heretical sects found shelter and safety among the
hospitable Arabs. But this very fact proved detrimental to the progress
of the Christian religion, and opened the path for the creed of
Mohammed. So many and various were the Christian sects that crowded
together in that country, and so widely departed from the true spirit of
Christianity were some of them, that bitter hostilities sprung up among
them, and their religion fell into contempt. The Eastern Christians of
the seventh century had insensibly relapsed into a semblance of
paganism, one of the sects (the Collyridian heretics) had even gone so
far as to invest the virgin Mary with the name and honors of a goddess.
This is what the author alludes to in saying that Christianity was
losing favor in Arabia at the time of the appearance of Mohammed.--H.
[189] The student of ecclesiastical history knows what a number of sects
had sprung up about that time to distress and harass the Church. It is
not so generally appreciated, however, that for the first hundred years,
the progress of Islamism was almost exclusively at the expense of
Christianity. The whole of the present Ottoman empire, and almost the
whole northern coast of Africa were previously Christian countries.
Whether the loss is greatly to be regretted, I know not, for the Syrians
and Egyptians, from being very indifferent Christians, became good
Mohammedans. These populations were to the Christian Church like a
cankered limb, the lopping off of which may have been ordained by an
all-wise Providence for the salvation of what was yet sound in the
body.--H.
[190] W. Von Humboldt. _Ueber die Karo-Sprache, Einleitung_,
p. 243. "Durch die Richtung auf diese Bildung und durch innere
Stammes-verwandschaft wurden sie wirklich für griechischen Geist und
griechische Sprache empfänglich, da die Araber vorzugsweise nur an den
wissenschaftlichen Resultaten griechischer Forschung hiengen."