and, in proportion as the fulfilment of the prophecy was felt to be
singular and striking, the doctrine blended with it would attract
notice. Its force was both felt and acknowledged, as we have seen, in
the decree of Cyrus for the rebuilding of the temple. In that Cyrus
acknowledged the true God to be supreme, and thus renounced his former
faith; and the example, the public example, of a prince so beloved, and
whose reign was so extended, could not fail to influence the religious
opinions of his people. That the effect did not terminate in Cyrus, we
know; for, from the book of Ezra, it appears that both Darius and
Artaxerxes made decrees in favour of the Jews, in which Jehovah has the
emphatic appellation repeatedly given to him, the God of heaven,” the
very terms used by Cyrus himself. Nor are we to suppose the impression
confined to the court; for the history of the three Hebrew youths, of
Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, sickness, and reformation from idolatry, of the
interpretation of the hand writing on the wall by Daniel the servant of
the living God, of his deliverance from the lions, and the publicity of
the prophecy of Isaiah respecting Cyrus, were too recent, too public,
and too striking in their nature, not to be often and largely talked of.
Beside, in the prophecy respecting Cyrus, the intention of almighty God
in recording the name of that monarch in an inspired book, and showing
beforehand that he had chosen him to overturn the Babylonian empire, is
expressly mentioned as having respect to two great objects, first, the
deliverance of Israel, and, second, the making known his supreme
divinity among the nations of the earth. We again quote Lowth’s
translation:--
For the sake of my _servant Jacob_,
And of Israel my chosen,
I have even called thee by thy name,
I have surnamed thee, though thou knewest me not.
I am JEHOVAH, and none else,
Beside me there is no God;
I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me,
_That they may know, from the rising of the sun_,
And from the west, that there is NONE BESIDE ME.”
It was therefore intended by this proceeding on the part of Providence
to teach, not only Cyrus, but the people of his vast empire, and
surrounding nations, 1. That the God of the Jews was Jehovah, the
self-subsistent, the eternal God; 2. That he was God alone, there being
no deity beside himself; and, 3. That good and evil, represented by
light and darkness, were neither independent nor eternal subsistences,
but his great instruments, and under his control.
The Persians, who had so vastly extended their empire by the conquest of
the countries formerly held by the monarchs of Babylon, were thus
prepared for such a reformation of their religion as Zoroaster effected.
The principles he advocated had been previously adopted by Cyrus and
other Persian monarchs, and probably by many of the principal persons of
that nation. Zoroaster himself thus became acquainted with the great
truths contained in this famous prophecy, which attacked the very
foundations of every idolatrous and Manichean system. From the other
sacred books of the Jews, who mixed with the Persians in every part of
the empire, he evidently learned more. This is sufficiently proved from
the many points of similarity between his religion and Judaism, though
he should not be allowed to speak so much in the style of the Holy
Scriptures as some passages in the Zendavesta would indicate. He found
the people, however, prepared of the Lord” to admit his reformations,
and he carried them. This cannot but be looked upon as one instance of
several merciful dispensations of God to the Gentile world, through his
own peculiar people, the Jews, by which the idolatries of the Heathen
were often checked, and the light of truth rekindled among them. In this
view the ancient Jews evidently considered the Jewish church as
appointed not to preserve only but to extend true religion. God be
merciful to us and bless us; that thy way may be known upon earth, thy
saving health unto all nations.” This renders Pagan nations more
evidently without excuse.” That this dispensation of mercy was afterward
neglected among the Persians, is certain. How long the effect continued
we know not, nor how widely it spread; perhaps longer and wider than may
now distinctly appear. If the magi, who came from the east to seek
Christ, were Persians, some true worshippers of God would appear to have
remained in Persia to that day; and if, as is probable, the prophecies
of Isaiah and Daniel were retained among them, they might be among those
who waited for redemption,” not at Jerusalem, but in a distant part of
the world. The _Parsees_, who were nearly extirpated by Mohammedan
fanaticism, were charged by their oppressors with the idolatry of fire,
and this was probably true of the multitude. Some of their writers,
however, warmly defended themselves against the charge. A considerable
number of them remain in India to this day, and profess to have the
books of Zoroaster.
2. The term _magi_ was also anciently used generally throughout the
east, to distinguish philosophers, and especially astronomers. Pliny and
Ptolemy mention Arabi as synonymous with magi; and it was the opinion of
many learned men in the first ages of Christianity, that the magi who
presented offerings to the infant Saviour, Matt. ii, 1, came from
southern Arabia; for it is certain that gold, frankincense, and myrrh,”
were productions of that country. They were philosophers among whom the
best parts of the reformed magian system, which was extensively
diffused, were probably preserved. They were pious men, also, who had
some acquaintance, it may be, with the Hebrew prophecies, and were
favoured themselves with divine revelations. They are to be regarded as
members of the old patriarchal church, never quite extinguished among
the Heathen; and they had the special honour to present the homage of
the Gentile world to the infant Saviour.
MAGICIAN not unfrequently occurs in Scripture. Generally it signifies a
diviner, a fortune teller, &c. Moses forbids recourse to such on pain of
death: The soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits, and
after wizards, to go a whoring after them, I will even set my face
against that soul, and even cut him off from among his people,”
Leviticus xix, 31; xx, 6. The Hebrew is אל-האבת ואל-הידענים, which
signify literally,--the first, those possessed with a spirit of Python,
or a demon that fortels future events;--the second, knowers, they who
boast of the knowledge of secret things. It was such sort of people that
Saul extirpated out of the land of Israel, 1 Sam. xxviii, 3. Daniel also
speaks of magicians and diviners in Chaldea, under Nebuchadnezzar,
Daniel i, 20, &c; לחרטמים ולאשׁפים ולמכשׁפים ולכשדים. He names four
sorts: _Chartumim_, _Asaphim_, _Mecasphim_, and _Casdim_, Daniel ii, 2.
The first, _Chartumim_, according to Theodotion, signifies enchanters;”
according to the LXX, sophists;” according to Jerom, _hariolas_,
diviners, fortune tellers, casters of nativities.” The second word,
_Asaphim_, has a great resemblance to the Greek word σοφὸς, wise man;”
whether the Greeks took this word from the Babylonians, or _vice versâ_.
Theodotion and Jerom have rendered it magicians;” the LXX,
philosophers.” The third word, _Mecasphim_, by Jerom and the Greeks, is
translated _malefici_, enchanters;” such as used noxious herbs and
drugs, the blood of victims, and the bones of the dead, for their
superstitious operations. The fourth word, _Casdim_, or Chaldeans, has
two significations: first, the Chaldean people, over whom Nebuchadnezzar
was monarch; the second, a sort of philosophers, who dwelt in a separate
part of the city, who were exempt from all public offices and
employments. Their studies were physic, astrology, divination,
foretelling of future events by the stars, interpretation of dreams,
augury, worship of the gods, &c. All these inquisitive and superstitious
arts were prohibited among the Israelites, as founded on imposture or
devilism, and as inconsistent with faith in God’s providence, and trust
in his supremacy.
MAGOG. See GOG.
MAHANAIM, a city of the Levites, of the family of Merari, in the tribe
of Gad, upon the brook Jabbok, Joshua xxi, 38; xiii, 26. The name
_Mahanaim_ signifies two hosts,” or two fields.” The patriarch gave it
this name because in this place he had a vision of angels coming to meet
him, Genesis xxxii, 2. Mahanaim was the seat of the kingdom of
Ishbosheth, after the death of Saul, 2 Sam. ii, 9, 12. It was also to
this place that David retired during the usurpation of Absalom, 2 Sam.
xvii, 24; and this rebellious son was subdued, and suffered death, not
far from this city.
MAHOMETANISM. Mohammed, its distinguished founder, was born in Arabia,
toward the conclusion of the sixth century. Although he had been reduced
to poverty, he was descended from ancestors who had long been
conspicuous by rank and by influence; but having been shut out from the
advantages of education, which in his peculiar case might have rather
cramped than invigorated the astonishing powers of his mind, he had been
compelled to seek his subsistence by devoting himself to a menial
occupation. Yet although thus unfavourably situated, he was led, in
conducting the commercial transactions which, in the service of Cadijah,
a woman of great wealth, he was employed to arrange, to survey the state
of several of the neighbouring nations; became acquainted with the most
striking features in the characters of those by whom he was surrounded;
and he was enabled to profit by the information which he thus procured,
from his adding to the graces of personal elegance and beauty, the most
captivating manners, and the most winning address. Exalted by the
partiality of Cadijah, who conferred on him her hand and her extensive
possessions, he seems early to have formed the scheme of announcing
himself as the author of a new religion, and, in virtue of this sacred
office, of ascending to that supremacy of political influence which it
was his singular fortune, soon after he unfolded his pretensions, to
attain. Taking advantage of that insensibility into which, by the
attacks of epilepsy, he was occasionally thrown, he pretended that he
was wrapped in divine contemplation, or was actually holding
communication with higher orders of beings, who were committing to him
the divine instructions which he was to disseminate through the world.
When the time which he conceived to be favourable for the grand object
of his ambition had arrived, he openly declared that he was the prophet
of the most high God; but the magistrates of Mecca, despising his
pretensions, or dreading the evils which might result from religious
innovation, vigorously opposed him, and he found himself compelled, in
order to avoid the punishment which they were preparing to inflict on
him, to have recourse to flight. He did not, however, relinquish the
scheme upon which he had so long meditated, and which he was convinced
that he was qualified to carry into execution. After his departure from
Mecca, from which event the Mohammedan era of the hegira takes its
commencement, he was joined by a few followers determined to share his
fate; and having solemnly consecrated the banner under which he was to
extend his power and propagate his tenets, he commenced hostilities
against those by whom he had been opposed. His first efforts, however,
were not crowned with success, but he had infused into his attendants a
spirit which misfortune could not subdue: they renewed their enterprise,
and Mecca at length submitted to his arms. From this period his
exaltation was very rapid; he was venerated as the favoured messenger of
Heaven, and his countrymen bowed down before a sovereign protected, as
they believed, by the Omnipotent, and commissioned to reveal his will.
There were many causes which satisfactorily account for his success. The
Christian religion, in the corrupted form in which it existed in the
regions contiguous to the country of the prophet, was not interwoven
with the affections of its professors; they were split into factions,
contending about the most frivolous distinctions and the most ridiculous
tenets; and the sword of persecution was mutually wielded by them all,
to spread misery where there should have been the ties of charity and
love. Thus divided, they presented no steady resistance to the attempt
made to wrest from them their religion; and, indeed, as many of them had
adopted that religion, not from conviction, but from dread of the
tyranny by which it had been imposed on them, they only did what they
had previously done, when, shrinking from the ferocious zeal of the
emissaries of the prophet, they submitted to his doctrine. With
admirable address, too, he had framed his religious system, so as to
gratify those to whom it was announced. Laying down the sublime and
unquestionable doctrine of the unity of God, he professed to revere the
patriarchs, whose memory the Arabs held in veneration; he admitted that
Moses was a messenger from God; he acknowledged Jesus as an exalted
prophet; and he founded his own pretensions upon the intimation which
our Saviour had given that the Paraclete, or Comforter, was to be sent
to lead the world into all truth. Thus each party found in the Koran
much of what it had been accustomed to believe; and the transition was
in this way rendered more easy to the admission that a new revelation
had been vouchsafed.
This effect was facilitated by the ignorance which prevailed in Arabia.
Accustomed to a wandering life, the Arabs had devoted no time to the
acquisition of knowledge; most of them were even unable to read the
Koran, the sublimity and beauty of which were held forth to them as
incontestable proofs of the inspiration of its author. Had Mohammed,
indeed rested his doctrine upon miracles, it might have happened that
the imposture by some would have been detected; but, with his usual
policy, he avoided what he knew was so hazardous; and, with the
exception of his reference to the Koran, as surpassing the capacity of
man, he explicitly disclaimed having been authorized to do such mighty
works as had been wrought to establish the previous dispensations of the
Almighty. The fascinating representation that he gave of the joys of
paradise, which he accommodated to the conceptions and wishes of the
eastern nations, also made a deep and favourable impression; the
wantonness of imagination was gratified with the anticipation of a state
abounding with sensual gratification raised to the highest degree of
exquisiteness; while the dismal fate allotted through eternity to all
who rejected the message which he brought, alarmed the fears of the
credulous and superstitious multitude whom he was eager to allure. When
with these causes are combined the vigour of his administration, and the
certainty of suffering or of death in the event of withstanding his
doctrine, there is sufficient to account for the success of his
religion; and there is in that success nothing which can, with the
shadow of reason, be employed, as, with strange perversion of argument,
it has sometimes been, to invalidate the proof for the truth of
Christianity deduced from its rapid diffusion. That proof does not rest
upon the mere circumstance that the religion of Jesus was widely and
speedily propagated; there might, under particular circumstances, have
been in this nothing wonderful; but on the facts that it was so
propagated, when all the human means to which they who preached it could
have recourse, would have retarded rather than promoted what actually
took place; that it employed no force; that it held out no earthly
advantages; that it accommodated itself to no previous religious
prejudices; and that it opposed and reproved all, and did not gratify
any, of the corruptions and lusts of human nature.
But Mohammed did not limit his views to the sovereignty of Arabia: he
was elevated by the hope of universal empire; and he moulded his system
so as to promote what he was eager to attain. For this purpose he
promised to all who enrolled themselves under his banner full license to
plunder the nations against which they were led; and he made it a
fundamental tenet of his faith that they who fell in the warlike
enterprises destined to enlarge the number of believers were at once
delivered from the guilt and misery of their sins, and were admitted to
the happy scenes prepared for the faithful. He thus collected around him
an army thoroughly devoted, prepared for meeting every danger,
stimulated to the most laborious exertions by the hope of plunder, and
steeled against all which can weaken courage or exhaust resolution, by
the enthusiasm of hope; whatever was their fate, they had nothing to
dread; if they escaped the weapons of their enemies, they were loaded
with spoil, and invited to indulgence; and if they fell, they were
canonized by those who survived, and exchanged the vicissitudes and
troubles of this world for the delights of a sensual paradise. An army
thus constituted and thus impelled must, under any circumstances, have
been formidable; against them the usual methods to defeat invasion and
to prevent conquest would have failed; they could have been successfully
encountered only by men who had imbibed a similar spirit, and who
identified patience and courage in the field with the most sacred duty
required by religion. Of the advantages which, after Arabia had
acknowledged his sway, and hailed him as the prophet of the Lord, he
might confidently anticipate, Mohammed was abundantly sensible; but
while he was preparing to bring into action the mighty machine which he
had erected, his earthly career was terminated, and he left to others to
execute the schemes which he had fondly devised.
The energy of the system remained after the author of it was removed
from the world; and his successors lost no time in extending their
dominions far beyond the bounds of Arabia. The obstacles opposed to them
instantly yielded; a feeble and degenerate empire sinking under its own
weight, and unable to resist any power acting against it, at once
submitted to the host of fanatical plunderers, who spread desolation as
they advanced; the richest provinces soon were wrested from it; and the
most fertile regions of Asia fell under the conquering fury of the
caliphs. Persia, which had long persecuted Christianity, was added to
their increasing territories; Syria submitted to their yoke; and, what
filled with horror and with anguish the believers in the Gospel,
Palestine, that holy land from which the light of divine truth had
beamed upon the nations, which had been the scene of those awful or
interesting events recorded in the inspired Scriptures, which had
witnessed the life, the ministry, the death, the resurrection, and
ascension of the Redeemer of mankind, bent under the iron sceptre of an
infidel sovereign, nominally, indeed, revering the Founder of its
religion, but filled with bigoted and implacable hatred against the most
attached and conscientious of his disciples. But the caliphs did not
accomplish their principal object when they reduced to subjection the
countries which they ravaged: to them it was of infinitely more moment
to propagate the Musselman faith; and, accordingly, although in the
commencement of that faith some indulgence was, from political
considerations, granted to the Christians, there was soon no alternative
left to the trembling captives but to embrace the doctrine of the
prophet, or to submit to slavery or death. We cannot wonder that tenets
thus enforced rapidly spread; they supplanted, in many extensive
regions, the religion of Jesus; and, incorporating themselves with civil
governments, or rather founding all governments upon the Koran, they
continue, at the distance of eleven hundred years, to be believed
through a large proportion of the world.
The effect of this signal revolution was first experienced by those
Christians who inhabited the eastern parts of the empire; but the
account of it must have been speedily conveyed throughout Christendom,
and the gigantic enterprises of the Saracens soon threatened all nations
with slavery and superstition. The successors of the prophet, in the
eighth century, directed their steps toward Europe; and having at length
crossed the narrow sea which separates Africa from Spain, they dispersed
the troops of Roderick, king of the Goths, took possession of the
greater part of his dominions, subverted the empire of the Visigoths,
which had been established in Spain for upward of three centuries, and
planted themselves along the coast of Gaul, from the Pyrenean mountains
to the Rhine. Charlemagne, alarmed at their progress, made a great
effort to crush them; but he failed in accomplishing his object, and
they committed, in various parts of Europe which they visited, the most
shocking devastations.
When a great part of the life of Mohammed had been spent in preparatory
meditation on the system he was about to establish, the chapters of the
Alcoran or Koran, which was to contain the rule of the faith and
practice of his followers, were dealt out slowly and separately during
the long period of three-and-twenty years. He entrusted his beloved
wife, Raphsa, the daughter of Omar, with the keeping of the chest of his
apostleship, in which were laid up all the originals of the revelations
he pretended to have received by the ministration of the Angel Gabriel,
and out of which the Koran, consisting of one hundred and fourteen
_surats_, or chapters, of very unequal length, was composed after his
death. Yet, defective in its structure, and not less exceptionable in
its doctrines and precepts, was the work which he thus delivered to his
followers as the oracles of God. We will not detract from the real merit
of the Koran; we allow it to be generally elegant and often sublime; but
at the same time we reject with disdain its arrogant pretensions to any
thing supernatural. Nay, if, descending to a minute investigation of it,
we consider its perpetual inconsistency and absurdity, we shall indeed
have cause for astonishment at that weakness of humanity which could
ever have received such compositions as the work of the Deity, and which
could still hold it in such high admiration as it is held by the
followers of Mohammed to the present day. Far from supporting its
arrogant claim to a supernatural work, it sinks below the level of many
compositions confessedly of human original; and still lower does it fall
when compared with that pure and perfect pattern which we justly admire
in the Scriptures of truth. The first praise of all the productions of
genius is invention; but the Koran bears little impression of this
transcendent character. It does not contain one single doctrine which
may not fairly be derived either from the Jewish and Christian
Scriptures, from the spurious and apocryphal Gospels, then current in
the east, from the Talmudical legends, or from the traditions, customs,
and opinions of the Arabians. And the materials collected from these
several sources are here heaped together with perpetual and needless
repetitions, without any settled principle, or visible connection. The
most prominent feature of the Koran, that point of excellence in which
the partiality of its admirers has ever delighted to view it, is the
sublime notion it generally impresses of the nature and attributes of
God. But if its author had really derived these just conceptions from
the inspiration of that Being whom they attempt to describe, they would
not have been surrounded, as they now are, on every side with error and
absurdity. By attempting to explain what is inconceivable, to describe
what is ineffable, and to materialize what in itself is spiritual, he
absurdly and impiously aimed to sensualize the purity of the divine
essence. But it might easily be proved, that whatever the Koran justly
defines of the divine attributes, was borrowed from our Holy Scriptures;
which, even from their first promulgation, but especially from the
completion of the New Testament, have extended the views, and
enlightened the understandings, of mankind.