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But again, the first principle of Mahometanism wanting the support of some other which it does not acknowledge, must change, and is continually changing, into one which is the counterfeit and direct opposite of itself. The belief of a living, acting Will passes into the acknowledgment of a dead necessity, a Fate, against which there is no struggling, which drives the soul not to energy for some great object, but to indifference, languor, and the submission that means despair. Oftentimes indeed the patience of a Turk must even yet awaken our homage and our shame. Joyfully would we confess that God has not suffered the true principle to be wholly extinguished by its bastard product. But we would draw from that confession not a pretext for leaving this, or any feeble and beautiful plant of a better soil, to the hot-bed which has always impeded its growth, and now threatens to stifle it altogether; but a certain hope that it is intended to receive culture from without, and that, by help of that culture, it may yet blossom and bear fruit abundantly.

These remarks may prepare us to take notice of one great fact in the history of Mahometanism, which is the connecting link between it and the other systems of which I propose to speak hereafter.

I have talked of the victories of the Crescent in different quarters of the globe, and it is not easy to exaggerate the greatness of those victories. Yet we all know they were not complete; they did not exterminate that which they were

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meant to exterminate. I do not speak now of the resistance which this great power encountered from the hammer of the Mayor of Paris, or from the heroes in the Asturian mountains. I do not speak of anything which is directly connected with Christianity. I mean that the most remarkable of the old polytheistic faiths, though crushed, were not cast out; that some of the countries which yielded to Mahometans are not Mahometan. It behoves us to enquire into the meaning of this fact to ask ourselves what there was in their doctrines, compounded of all strange elements, sanctioning so many fearful crimes, for which the simple and purer Mahometan faith could provide no satisfaction. We may find that convictions which the Mahometan trampled down, do as much require recognition as those which he enforced; that man has demands for himself which will not be satisfied by being told that he is the servant of an absolute Will-demands which must, somehow or other, find their explanation, must in some way or other be reconciled with that great truth.

I will not anticipate the nature or the results of that enquiry; but I hope we may gather something from the one in which we have been engaged. You have found a set of men brought up in circumstances altogether different from yours, holding your faith in abhorrence, who say in language the most solemn and decisive, "Whatever else we part with, this is needful to us and to all human beings--the belief that God IS-the recog

nition of Him as a living personal Being." You have seen this faith growing weak for a time, and everything else growing weak with it; you have seen it re-appearing, finding a new set of champions to assert it, compelling nations to bow before it. Be sure that here is something which the heart and reason within you have need of which they must grasp. Be quite sure, that if you give them in place of it any fine notions or theories; if you feed them with phrases about the beautiful or the godlike, when they want the source of beauty, the living God; if you entertain them with any images or symbols of art or nature when they want that which is symbolized; if you talk about physical laws when you want the lawgiver, of mechanical properties when you want him who set them in motion, of secret powers when you want him who acts by them and upon you, you are cheating yourselves-cheating mankind. Remember further, that the acknowledgment of this Being may imply much more than the Mahometan perceived, but that it does imply that which he perceived. If such an One is, His will must be the law of the universe. Every creature in the universe must be in a right or wrong position, must be doing his work well or failing in it, as he yields himself to this will, or as he resists it. And let us not fancy that the early Mahometan was entirely mistaken as to the way in which this will ought to be obeyed. He may not have understood what enemies he had to fight with, what weapons he had to wield, but he did discover that the life

LESSONS FROM MAHOMETANISM.

33

of man is to be a continual battle, that we are only men when we are engaging in a battle. He was right that there is something in the world which we are not to tolerate, which we are sent into it to exterminate. First of all, let us seek that we may be freed from it ourselves; but let us be taught by the Mussulman that we shall not compass this end unless we believe, and act upon the belief, that every man and every nation exists for the purpose of chasing falsehood and evil out of God's universe.

M.B.L.

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PART I-LECTURE II.

Character of the Hindoo Faith. The Brahmin.

Worship

of the Pure Intelligence. The popular re-action. Vishnu and Siva. Relations of the English Government to Hindooism.

THE remarks which I made at the close of my last Lecture will prepare you to expect that I should speak in the present of HINDOOISM. That faith has been brought into conflict with Mahometanism, has succumbed to it, and yet has maintained its ground, leaving the victorious religion. the religion of a small minority. Though it may pretend to an antiquity which it does not possess, it has certainly lasted three thousand years. The language in which its holy books are composed is the mother-tongue-if I may use that phrase in its literal, rather than its ordinary sense of the Greek, the Latin, and the dialects of our Gothic ancestors; consequently, of nearly all which are spoken in Western Europe at this day. From this fact it might, I think, be inferred, if other evidence were wanting, that the mythologies of these nations could be traced to an Indian source. But there is abundant evidence, so much as to have misled those scholars who were first struck with it into a forgetfulness of the important historical principle, that we cannot determine the character of nations, or of their belief, merely by finding the point from which they started; that each must be

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