ion than the philosophizing of a score of years. No religion in the totality and complexity of its phenomena is wholly false or wholly true. The death of a religion is not always an evidence of its decay and corruption, its inadequacy to meet the wants of man. There are certain phases of living religious life which every sane man would prefer to see removed and their place supplied by the doctrines and practice of some dead religions. In the search for the laws of religious life and the results of religious activity the dead religions are particularly valuable because these laws and forces have in them worked out to the end. They have formed a completed structure or produced a ruin, both of which disclose with equal fidelity and equal adequacy the workings of invariable and irresistible law.

Generalizations on these phenomena, if correctly made, have a satisfying quality and a validity which afford a basis for instruction and guidance. Thus these religions themselves constitute what may be after all their most valuable bequest, and as such, they have a peculiar interest for the student of religion.

The proofs of this statement throng in upon us and we can select but a few. Among the problems of present religious life that of the relations of church and state receive light from these dead religions. In antiquity these relations consisted in almost complete identification of the two organisms. Most frequently the church existed for the state, its servant, its slave. The results were most disastrous to both parties, but religion especially suffered. Its priesthoods either became filled with ambitious designs upon the state, as in Egypt, or fell into the position of subserviency and weakness, as in Babylonia and Assyria, Rome and Greece. The aims and ends of truth were narrowed and trimmed to fit imperfect social conditions, and the fate of religion was bound up with the success or failure of a political policy. The destruction of the nation meant the disappearance of the religion. Assyria dragged into her grave the religion which she professed. A similar fate attended many of the cults of Semitic antiquity through the conquest of the great world-empires which successively dominated Western Asia. The finished experience of these dead faiths, therefore, speaks clearly in favor of the separation of religion from the state.

Another problem which they enlighten is that of religious unity and the consequent future of religious systems, the ultimate religion. Where these systems survived the ruin of the nationality on which they depended, they met their death through a mightier religious force. The most brilliant example of this phenomenon is the conflict of Christianity with the religions of the ancient world. Christianity's victory was achieved without force of arms. Was it merely that its foes were moribund, that the religious forces of antiquity had all but lost their power? This is not by any means all the truth. I cannot glory in the victory of a Christianity over decaying religions that would have died of themselves if only left alone, but I am proud of her power in that, when "the fullness of the times" was come, when Egypt and Syria,

Judea, Greece and Rome offered to the world their best, she was able to take all their truths into her genial grasp, and incarnating them in Jesus Christ make them in Him the beginning of a new age, the starting point of a higher evolution.

These religions were crippled by their essential character. They had no real unity of thought. Their principle of organization was the inclusion of local cults, not the establishment of a great idea. There was broad toleration in the ancient religious world, both of forms and ideas, but the toleration of ideas existed because of the want of a clear thought-basis of religion or, to speak more precisely, the want of a theology. With the absence of this the multiplicity of forms produced a meaningless confusion. Even where each of these systems reveals to us the presence of a common idea traceable through all its forms, this one idea is only a phase of the truth. Assyria's doctrine of the Divine transcendence, and Egypt's view of the divine nearness, and Greece's tenet of the divineness of man or the humanness of God, were valid religious ideas, but each was partial. These religions so inclusive of forms could not include or comprehend more than their own favorite idea. But when Christianity came against them with a wellrounded theology, a central truth like that of the incarnation, a truth and a life which not merely included but reconciled all elements of the world's religious progress, none of these ancient systems could stand before it.

They seem to tell us that the true test of a religious system is the measure in which it is filled with God. So far as they saw him they led men to find help and peace in him. They proclaimed his laws, they sought to assure to men his favor. So far as they accomplished this, so far as they were filled with God, both as a doctrine and as a life, they fulfilled their part in the education and salvation of the human race. By that test they rose and fell; by that measure they take their place in the complex evolution of the world. And it was because they failed to rise to the height of Christianity's comprehension and absorption of God that they perished.

We are sometimes inclined, amid the din of opposing creeds, to long for a religion without theology. These dead faiths warn us of the folly of any such dream. In the presence of a multitude of religions, such as are represented in this Parliament, we are tempted to believe that the ultimate religion will consist in a bouquet of the sweetest and choicest flowers of them all. The graves of the dead religions declare that not selection but incorporation makes a religion strong; not incorporation but reconciliation, not reconciliation but the fulfillment of all these aspirations, these partial truths in a higher thought, in a transcendent life. The system of religion here represented, or to come, which will not merely elect but incorporate, not merely incorporate but reconcile, not merely reconcile but fulfill, holds the religious future of humanity.

Apart from particular problems these dead religions in clear tones give two precious testimonies. They bear witness to man's need of God and

man's capacity to know him. Looking back to-day upon the dead past, we behold men in the jungle and on the mountain, in the Roman temple and before the Celtic altar, lifting up holy hands of aspiration and petition to the Divine. Sounding through Greek hymns and Babylonian psalms alike, are heard human voices crying out after the Eternal.

But there is a nobler heritage of ours in these oldest of religions. The capacity to know God is not the knowledge of him. They tell us with one voice that the human heart, the universal human heart that needs God and can know him was not left to search for him in blindness and ignorance. He gave them of himself. They received the light which lighteth every man. That light has come down the ages unto us, shining as it comes with ever brighter beams of Divine Revelation. "For God, who at sundry times and in divers manners, spake unto the fathers,”—and we are beginning to realize to-day, as never before, how many are our spiritual fathers in the past—" hath in these last days spoken unto us in the Son."

THE POINTS OF CONTACT AND CONTRAST

BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY AND

MOHAMMEDANISM.

BY PRESIDENT GEORGE WASHBURN, D.D., ROBERT COLLEGE, CON

STANTINOPLE.

I. It is not my purpose to enter upon any defense or criticism of Mohammedanism, but simply to state, as impartially as possible, its points of contact and contrast with Christianity.

The chief difficulty in such a statement arises from the fact that there are as many different opinions on theological questions among Moslems as among Christians, and that it is impossible to present any summary of Mohammedan doctrine which will be accepted by all.

The faith of Islâm is based primarily upon the Koran, which is believed to have been delivered to the Prophet at sundry times by the angel Gabriel, and upon the traditions reporting the life and words of the prophet; and, secondarily, upon the opinions of certain distinguished theologians of the second century of the Hegira, especially for the Sunnis, of the four Imams, Hanifè, Shafi, Malik, and Hannbel.

The Shiites, or followers of Aali, reject these last with many of the received traditions, and hold opinions which the great body of Moslems regard as heretical. In addition to the two-fold divisions of Sunnis and Shiites and of the sects of the four Imams, there are said to be several hundred minor sects.

It is, in fact, very difficult for an honest inquirer to determine what is really essential to the faith. A distinguished Moslem statesman and scholar once assured me that nothing was essential beyond a belief in the existence and unity of God. And several years ago the Sheik-ul-Islâm, the highest authority in Constantinople, in a letter to a German inquirer, stated that whoever confessed that there is but one God, and that Mohammed is his prophet, is a true Moslem, although to be a good one it is necessary to observe the five points of confession, prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and pilgrimage; but the difficulty about this apparently simple definition is that belief in Mohammed as the prophet of God involves a belief in all his teaching, and we come back at once to the question what that teaching

was.

The great majority of Mohammedans believe in the Koran, the traditions and the teaching of the school of Hanifè, and we cannot do better than to Copyright, 1893, by J. H. B.

take these doctrines and compare them with what are generally regarded as the essential principles of Christianity.

With this explanation we may discuss the relations of Christianity and Mohammedanism as Historical, Dogmatic, and Practical.

It would hardly be necessary to speak in this connection of the historical relations of Christianity and Islâm if they had not seemed, to some distinguished writers, so important as to justify the statement that Mohammedanism is a form and outgrowth of Christianity, in fact essentially a Christian

sect.

Carlyle, for example, says, "Islâm is definable as a confused form of Christianity." And Draper calls it "the Southern Reformation, akin to that in the North under Luther." Dean Stanley and Dr. Döllinger make similar statements.

While there is a certain semblance of truth in their view, it seems to me not only misleading, but essentially false.

Neither Mohammed nor any of his earlier followers had ever been Christians, and there is no satisfactory evidence that up to the time of his announcing his prophetic mission he had interested himself at all in Christianity. No such theory is necessary to account for his monotheism. The citizens of Mecca were mostly idolaters, but a few, known as Hanifs, were pure deists, and the doctrine of the unity of God was not unknown theoret ically even by those who, in their idolatry, had practically abandoned it. The temple at Mecca was known as Beit ullah, the house of God. The name of the Prophet's father was Abdallah, the servant of God; and by Allah was a common oath among the people.

The one God was nominally recognized, but in fact forgotten in the worship of the stars, of Lat and Ozza and Manah, and of the 360 idols in the temple at Mecca. It was against this prevalent idolatry that Mohammed revolted, and he claimed that in so doing he had returned to the pure religion of Abraham. Still, Mohammedanism is no more a reformed Judaism than it is a form of Christianity. It was essentially a new religion.

The Koran claimed to be a new and perfect revelation of the will of God, and from the time of the Prophet's death to this day no Moslem has appealed to the ancient traditions of Arabia or to the Jewish or Christian Scriptures as the ground of his faith. The Koran and the traditions are sufficient and final. I believe that every orthodox Moslem regards Islâm as a separate, distinct, and absolutely exclusive religion; and there is nothing to be gained by calling it a form of Christianity. But after having set aside this unfounded statement, and fully acknowledged the independent origin of Islâm, there is still a historical relationship between it and Christianity which demands our attention.

The Prophet recognized the Christian and Jewish Scriptures as the Word of God, although it cannot be proved that he had ever read them. They are mentioned one hundred and thirty-one times in the Koran, but there is only