Many voices echo the prophet's contrast nowadays. Our travelling
countrymen, especially those of them who have no great love for earnest
religion, are in the habit of drawing disparaging contrasts between
Buddhists, Brahmins, Mohammedans, any worshippers of other gods and
Christians. One may not uncharitably suspect that a more earnest
Christianity would not please these critics much better than does the
tepid sort, and that the pictures they draw both of heathenism and of
Christianity are coloured by their likes and dislikes. But it is well
to learn from an enemy, and caricatures may often be useful in calling
attention to features which would escape notice but for exaggeration.
So we may profit by even the ill-natured and distorted likenesses of
ourselves as contrasted with the adherents of other religions which so
many 'liberal-minded' writers of travels delight to supply.
Think, then, of the rebuke which the obstinate adherence of idolaters
to their idols gives to the slack hold which so many professing
Christians have on their religion.
Think of the way in which these lower religions pervade the whole life
of their worshippers, and of how partial is the sway over a little
territory of life and conduct which Christianity has in many of its
adherents. The absorption in worship shown by Mohammedans, who will
spread their prayer carpets anywhere and perform their drill of prayers
without embarrassment or distraction in the sight of a crowd, or the
rapt 'devotion' of fakirs, are held up as a rebuke to us 'Christians'
who are ashamed to be caught praying. One may observe, in mitigation,
that the worship which is of the heart is naturally more sensitive to
surrounding distractions than that which is a matter of posturing and
repetition by rote. But there still remains substance enough in the
contrast to point a sharp arrow of rebuke.
And there is no denying that in these 'heathen' religions, religion is
intertwined with every act of life in a fashion which may well put to
shame many of us. Remember how Paul had to deal at length with the duty
of the Corinthians in view of the way in which every meal was a
sacrifice to some god, and how the same permeation of life with
religion is found in all these 'false faiths.' The octopus has coiled
its tentacles round the whole body of its victim. Bad and sad and mad
as idolatry is, it reads a rebuke to many of us, who keep life and
religion quite apart, and lock up our Christianity in our pews with our
prayer-books and hymnaries.
Think of the material sacrifices made by idolaters, in costly
offerings, in painful self-tortures, and in many other ways, and the
niggardliness and self-indulgence of so many so-called Christians.
III. The contrast suggests the greatness of the power which can
overcome even such obstinate adherence to idols.
There is one, and only one, solvent for that rock-like obstinacy--the
Gospel. The other religions have seldom attempted to encroach on each
other's territory, and where they have, their instrument of conversion
has generally been the sword. The Gospel has met and mastered them all.
It, and it only, has had power to draw men to itself out of every
faith. The ancient gods who bewitched Israel, the gods of Greece, the
gods of our own ancestors, the gods of the islands of the South Seas,
lie huddled together, in undistinguished heaps, like corpses on a
battlefield, and the deities of India and the East are wounded and
slowly bleeding out their lives. 'Bel boweth down, Nebo stoopeth, the
idols are upon the beasts,' all packed up, as it were, and ready to be
carried off.
The rate of progress in dethroning them varies with the varying
national conditions. It is easier to cut a tunnel through chalk than
through quartz.
IV. That contrast carries with it a call for Christian effort to spread
the conquering Gospel.