Before a full hundred years were ended, Arabia, Syria, Persia, Egypt, and part of the east and west coasts of Africa, had received his faith. With the power thus founded and wide-spread, European youth was now to contend, and that on ground sacred to the Mahommedan and himself. BEFORE saying the little we mean to say of the grapple of European and Mahommedan life in the crusades, it may be allowed us to put the following question: How, when Christianity was in the world, within a stonecast, one might say, did Mahommedanism-a younger faith-a mere echo of itself caught up at the fairs of Syria, succeed in seizing the whole Eastern world, and confining for many ages European life to Europe?
Not by imposture, not by quackery, we freely answer, quoting Thomas Carlyle. But neither by "Hero Worship," as is virtually main- tained by him. He works out his theory with European materials. The lecture on Mahomet finds place as Carlyle's word, on the early struggle of European and Mahommedan life.
This being the case, it follows that the philosophy of European history is " Hero Worship. He had faults-faults of the kind David had, "but we shall err widely if we consider him a common voluptuary. Sometimes, for months together, not a fire was lighted in his hearth. He stood face to face with them; bare, not enshrined in any mystery-visibly clouting his own cloak, cobbling his own shoes, fighting, counselling, ordering in the midst of them.
They must have seen what kind of man he was. No emperor with his tiaras was obeyed as this man in a cloak of his own clouting. During three and twenty years of rough actual trial!
I find some- thing of a veritable hero necessary for that. The man Mahomet must have been a better, truer man than any Arab of his day, or he would not have obtained the influence and homage he did.
But we have not the secret of his religious suc- cess in this. No doubt it carries us a good way. All men are incarnations either of good or evil; the "hero," the incarnation of good, is the highest figure upon earth while he is present. But, after all, it is not the "hero "-the incarnation-which is the working power in social influences, but that which makes him heroic-the truth of which he is the incarnation.
He was dead, and a mere name, when Persia, Syria, Egypt, and Africa, received his faith. We shall look, therefore, not into the man, but into the faith which the man had, for the secret of its brilliant success; and concerning this success there are three things to be said.
The first is, that Mahommedanism displaced nothing better than itself. This is abundantly plain with respect to the religions which it super- seded in Egypt and Persia, for they were at the time decrepit, worn out, and ready to die. In the prophet's own country, where his religion had its first and sorest battle to fight, it displaced sheer idol worship. At Mecca the old mosque was full of idols ; and, standing without, there was an idol for every day in the year-an army which Maho- met in his old age threw down and broke to pieces.
In the Koran, he protests again and again against idol worship. We have been much struck with one chapter; he is dealing with the Sabeans, or star worshippers. What can your star-god do for you? Behold him, he rises, he sets ; a true god does not set. Remember Abraham, he continues, star-worship did not suffice for him, neither did the clay idols in the house of his father; O father, he said, these images are not gods; so he went out on the approach of evening; the heavens rose over him, piercing far upwards into eternity ; and the young man cried for God.
A star came out and stood on the breast of the sky. My Lord t my Lord! Then rose the moon, beautiful, two-horned, like a living face in the liquid deep. My Lord! The moon also set. High over the summits of far receding hills came the tints of morning. Flaming into daylight rose up the sun. My very God, at length!
In the evening this god, too, departed, and it was night once more. With parables such as these he displaced, not better, but worse than he gave. It is said that one sect among the Arabians had some notion of a hereafter before this time. When one of this sect died, his camel was tied to his grave, and allowed to starve, that it might follow its master into the other world, and serve him there. Mahomet put the Koran in the place of the famishing and solitary camel.
Most decidedly a better way of proclaiming a hereafter A better way, we would also add, of setting forth the cha- racter of God than by stars and blocks of wood and clay! And in itself, moreover, a proof of Maho- met's practical worth as a prophet. The great difficulty, with respect to the pro- position we have advanced, is Christianity; but this difficulty decreases the moment we remember that the Christianity with which we are acquainted did not exist in that age. Recall the extent of the Roman empire to your minds.
At the death of Constantine it broke into two parts-Rome the centre of the one, Constantinople the centre of the other. Around Rome gathered the Roman Church; the Greek Church, with a patriarch or pope of its own, took its rise in Constantinople. A word or two on the state of religion in these churches will show you that Mahommedanism dis.
In the Western, or Roman Church, Christianity was still striving to lay hold of Germanic life, was working its slow way almost imperceptibly through pagan thought and feudal lawlessness into the human principle beneath. It had hardly obtained more than an acknowledgment of external ordi- nances when the Arabs appeared in Europe.
Its inner meaning at that moment was misunderstood; it was not felt that it had an inner meaning. And yet, feeble though this hold vas, external though it was, in Western Europe Christianity could say to Mahommedanism, Depart, I am stronger than thou. The places of worship were full of pictures and images; actually, there was the adoration of dead images. The Greek Astarte had become the Virgin Mary, and was paganly prayed unto. In true, simple statement, Christianity did not exist here.
And do not wonder at this. Remember what was said in a previous paper about the "honest" or recep- tive heart. There was no such heart in the East; Christianity found only voluptuousness and luxury refusing to be leavened.
Even the ascetics, the monks who at that time were seeking in desert places, away from the bustle of city life, the peace which passeth understanding-what were they? Voluptuaries too!
Men too luxurious to take their part in the battle of life, and help to turn confusion into order. Then the bishops of the Greek Church, the men who were to be ensam- ples to the flock? If you open a church history and turn to the chapters which portray their pastorate, you will not know which to loathe most -the unblushing avarice and lust of power they displayed, even to the length of arming their partisans in their cause, or the trifles and worse than inane nostrums which were the staple of their preaching.
Mahommedanism did displace all this. The second thing we have to say will require less space to say it in. Some of our readers know the meaning of the word heresy-literally, a choos- ing, a choice; theologically, the choice of a par- ticular doctrine. It is not necessarily the choice of a false doctrine ; but only, as Coleridge suggests, a false choosing-a choosing of one truth, out from the organic whole to which it belongs, and cleaving to it in its separated, isolate state.
As we all know, heresies do not usually die in birth. They step into the world with certain signs of robust perseverance, which make them always formidable to the orthodox. They have vitality, and root, and spreading; their progress is brilliant, rapid, extensive; and, by virtue of this obvious quality, that they do not demand so much-do not appeal to so much of our mind as the truth does.
Truth covers our entire being; heresy appeals mostly to the understanding, always to a mere portion of our faculties. We receive it with greater ease, and submit to it more readily, than is possible with the truth. The natural develop- ment of heresy is sectarianism. Every sect repre- sents some half-truth-some doctrine wrenched from its place and lifted into undue prominence.
The doctrine believed in is a truth; in most cases, undeniably so. Attention is directed to it. It is clear, simple, easy of apprehension, credible. We give this as the secret of the rapid spread of Mahommedanism. It was not falsehood.
It was heresy-a religion built upon a single doc- trine. There is a will above man's will, above nature's-one will-the will of God. This is slam, the doctrine on which Mahommedanism stands. Taken by itself, it is true-a virtual portion of all truth.
It is the Arabian way of saying, "The Lord reigneth. For we are not free to act as we choose. This will has a lord's place over us. It streams through all nature; it is supreme; it is God.
The will has no moral character. It is not, as the Bible puts it, a father's will-a will of love and mercy; it is simply will. Now nothing but my understanding is appealed to by this doctrine.
My moral life is hardly touched. I am to remain a wild soldier-a robber, if I please-provided I rob those only who do not yield to this will.
The controversy which Christianity had with the military life cannot be understood by Mahommedanism. Military life is its highest, freest development. My conversion to this faith is a sort of external enlisting; is not, cannot be, inwardly a difficult process. What I am asked to believe is truth, unequivocal truth. My intellect receives it without protest, wel- comes it even as actual light, and is not lowered, but exalted, by possessing it.
It is in the nature of things, therefore, that Mahommedan- ism should have spread more rapidly than Chris- tianity. The third thing we have to say grows out of this second and is part of it.
It did not humble a man to become a Mussulman-did not require him to make large spiritual sacrifices. Mr Carlyle finds great fault with Prideaux and others for de- scribing Mahommedanism as "an easy religion. External things are always easy. At one time it was counted easier to build the Tower of Babel, than lead the life which God required. Fasts, lavations, formulas! If these had been ten times as numerous, the religion which prescribes them might nevertheless be an easy one.
It is within the sphere of the moral conduct alone, you can determine whether a reli- gion is easy or not. What does religion require of the man there? How much submission?
This is difficult. Less than this is less difficult. Read Oakley's "History of the Saracens," a veracious history, we venture to affirm, by internal evidence alone. It is a history of conversions. The greatest number of the conversions take place on the field of battle, and one is the description of all. There was but one alternative. One of the texts which Maho- met quotes with precision from the Bible is thatword in the thirty-seventh psalm: The meek shall in- herit the earth.
And everything else in their history chimes in with this. There was a perpetual pandering to the external, the sensual, in them. When the re- poit came to the Caliph Omar that Antioch was taken, and that the army was i moved to a dis- tance because the men wished to possess them- selves of the Greek women of that place, the caliph, with true Mahommedan instinct, lamented that his general had been so hard upon the Mus- sulmans, and ever after remembered to direct his generals differently.
We do not doubt but they are. In maintaining this much of the old theory, however, we have no wish to continue the notion that the man Mahomet proposed those easy methods to himself as a means of his own getting on in the world. His sincerity need not be called in question. To him undoubtedly, Islam was all truth-was the centre and ground of life.
There is a great deal in what Carlyle says, that he did not invent the sensuality of his religion, but only limited what of this he found existing. Neither is there any need to deny that he was a prophet. In so far as he was a speaker of truth he deserved the name; and truth to some extent he did speak, as we have seen.
Moreover, he seriously believed himself that he had a divine commission. After the banquet in Mecca, his kinsmen sent Abu Taleb, his uncle, to remonstrate with him. They were keepers of the old mosque; his preaching would hurt the family interest. Each kinsman was to give one stab, so the guilt would be diffused, and fasten upon no one. When they burst into his bed-chamber for this purpose he was fled.
His nephew Ali, his brave young vizier, had taken his place. Among other adventures, they lay three days in a cave. The pursuers came seeking them into its neighbourhood. Three," answered the prophet; "you are forgetting God. In the interval a pigeon had laid two eggs on the "step," and a spider had woven a web across the mouth.
They are not here," they said, "or they would have broken these in going in. There were three in the cave. In the battlefield he reminds one of our own Cromwell. He preached to his soldiers as well as fought; and he knew how to make use of passing occurrences as tokens of the will of Providence.
More than enough has been said about his nu- merous wives. It should be remembered that he lived in the east, and was not a Christian. More- over, these eleven wives were married when he was turned of fifty. Up till this age he was the hus- band of one wife, a wife older than himself.
When he was twenty-five, his mistress, the widow of a rich merchant, offered to marry him for his faithful management of her business ; and he was true to her while she lived-a rare virtue in his day and generation. He never was ashamed of his old wife, never disowned his love for her.
She was his first convert. The young Ayesha, his favourite among the eleven who succeeded, said once to him, "Your first was old and ugly; you have younger, more beautiful, better wives now! She became my friend when I was friendless, and she believed in me when no other did. They were paid, and with thanks.
The angel of death found him reclining on the ground. Mahomet lifted his eyes to heaven, and, as a man truly hoping after his own paradise, uttered, in broken sentences, these words and fell asleep : Oh, Allah!
And now a brief word on the struggle. WE shall not fatigue our readers with a narrative of the wars in Palestine. Of all histories which have been written, the history of the Crusades is the least satisfactory. It would be a difficult his- tory to write. The historian has to deal with people who to a certain extent are all heroic, who yet produce no thorough hero. The aim they proposed to themselves is grand, only when we examine it in relation to the faith of those who sought it.
In itself it is a rather paltry aim. In the attempt to accomplish it, too, the Crusaders fairly break down; on the very threshold of the business the leaders sputter into quarrelling about precedence.
At one moment in Asia, these leaders would have returned to Europe and aban- doned their enterprise, if the common people had not protested; in their entire conduct they acted like headstrong youths, which, socially, as we have seen, they still were.
We must forget names and contemplate the movement in mass in order to be interested. Up to precisely such a movement the religion that was in the European mind could carry the people. It was like fighting for the grave of one's mother; it actually was that. To us it would not be religion ; to them it was.
The rich become poor that they might join the solders of the cross. The poor be- came rich, finding that they had lives to give to the cause. Each man hastened to wind up his own affairs that he might devote himself to the blessed work. All Europe was stirred by it. It was the first great Event in the life of Europe; the first time that its different peoples and classes had wrought together towards one aim. How the excitement searched into the chambers of European life Not a district where it failed to find soldiers to fight, and priests to pray for them, ready to set out!
In our newspapers and electric telegraph days, when news is tossed from one land to another with almost the speed of light, we have seen excitements spreading, and did not wonder. The advertisement of a "share list," a few years ago, drew ventures from all classes and countries. The other day, New York and London simultaneously sents ships to California. At length the movement gathers to a head.
An eye witness shall place it before our minds :- 'The greater part of those who had not deter- mined upon the journey joked and laughed at such as had; prophesied that their voyage would be miserable and their return worse. Such was ever the language one day; but the next- suddenly seized with the same desire as the rest -those who had been most forward to mock abandoned everything for a few crowns, and set out with those whom they had laughed at but a day or two before.
Who shall tell the children and the infirm that, animated with the same spirit, hastened to the war? Who shall count the old men and the young maids who hurried forward to the fight? The poor shoeing their oxen as we shoe horses, and harnessing them to two-wheeled carts, in which they placed their scanty provisions and their young children, and proceeding onward, while the babes, at each town or castle that they saw, demanded eagerly whether that was Jerusalem. Walter the Penniless, of Godfrey, of anybody who would take the lead, these masses of human beings, old and young, capable and incapable, un- disciplined, unfurnished, began to move towards the Holy Land.
The issue was most disastrous. If we could credit the numbers we find in the old chronicles, more than a quarter of a million perished through sheer misguidance, without reaching their desti- destination.
They had carried the loose notions of the times about property along with them. They ate when they were hungry, without asking leave. Farmers who offered opposition were put to the sword; towns which did not provision them for the next stage were sacked.
The religion which carried them through toils and dangers to fight with Mahommedans left room within them for open pillage and murder. The first bands passed through Hungary. The Hungarians would not tolerate their extortions and freebootery. Car- loman the king, being the head of a Christian people, would give these pilgrims free passage, but not free license.
The Crusaders would not hearken to reason; and the first of the holy wars had to be fought between Christians. It was said that "the waters of the Danube ran red for days together with Crusaders' blood. By thousands and tens of thousands they sank exhausted on the burning soil of Asia.
Then women, children, horses, dogs, and falcons began to die daily for want of water. Still the survivors move on to Jerusalem; through storms of Mahom- medan valour, through obstacles material and spirit- ual, through long sieges and hard fought battles, they continue to advance. At length, on a summer morning, Jerusalem is in view. The dream is a reality! The golden city rises before them-there, precipitous, crowned with the hate- ful crescent.
They are on holy ground. The air resounded with their mingled cries: "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem," shouted some; others had ho words to utter; many knelt down and prayed. The siege was terrible. But Christian Europe, wasted, weary, decimated by famine, was stronger than Mahommedan Asia.
A brave knight plants the banner of the cross on Olivet; the walls are breached in a hundred places; the Crusaders pour in through the breaches, and Jerusalem is won! A Christian kingdom was set up in Jerusalem, which lasted some ninety years: a beggarly affair. At the end of that time the city fell back into the hands of Saladin, and the crescent once more dis- placed the cross, and managed to maintain its place from that time forth.
We have only referred to the first Crusade. There was a second, a third, a fourth; some count as many as eight. One is the picture of all the others.
In the discipline of the contest, Mahom- medan life, on the one side, flowered up into the noble Saladin; European life, on the other, match- ing him, into the lion-hearted Richard. At length Europe leaves the field; not vanquished, but wiser. The youth has become a man. Forethought and experience have supplanted enthusiasm. European princes discover, while they are fighting in Palestine, that their own countries are lying waste.
Philip of France pretends sickness, and abandons the third Crusade. Richard of England, who had vowed to continue while he had the flesh of a war-horse to eat, turned back in the vicinity of Jerusalem.
At a distance he tried to obtain a glimpse of the Holy City; choking with emotion he hid his face behind his shield ; but nevertheless, he broke his vow.
The blunder was discovered. The holy land of home is revisited. And the efforts of European chivalry are henceforth given to redeem that from foes worse and more deadly than bands of Saracens in the East. All the glory attending Crusades can never bring them back. In the fifteenth cen- tury, when the Turks took Constantinople, the Pope preached a new Crusade. He tottered down to the harbour of Ancona to bless the mariners who should set sail. He would embark himself, if needful.
The mariners did not lift their anchors, The time of Crusades was past. And here we require to distinguish between material effects, by which we mean, effects traceable to the material facts of the Crusades, and effects of a spiritual kind, effects which flowed out of the very character of the movements, which these movements and no other could produce.
We have seen it gravely set forth as an effect of the Crusades, that they drew away hundreds of thousands of fanatics out of Europe and consumed them in Palestine; that they were, in other words, a sort of religion-safety-valve for the foul gas which had been gendered in Europe! On very different and far surer ground go those historians who give us statistics of the extension of commerce, which the wars operated. Our readers can easily understand how this would take place.
The European armies would require provisioning; commissaries would discover that supplies need not be taxed with the expenses and hazards of carriage from Europe. Corn as good was growing in the East. Some agent would start up to be a go-between. Merchants may make money al- though princes are wasting it. And thus trade would be opened between the buyers and sellers of the west and the east. When the wars were ended, the trade would still run in its old channels.
In political writers, again, the result which is insisted on is the change in the organisation of European society. Before the Crusades, Europe was covered with castles ; the family was the most real organisation manifest. After the Crusades, the family organisation, or, what is the same thing, feudal life, is absorbed into national life, and, instead of castles and barons, kingdoms and monarchs meet our view.
Of material results, we look upon this as beyond comparison the most im- portant. Feudalism was only the stepping on- wards. It could not be a resting-place.
We have, in the fourth picture, endeavoured to show how, by shutting up the baron, with his wife and children, in the castle-by giving scope and op- portunity to the maternal functions-family-life was developed. But we require now to add, that, as an organisation of European society, feudalism was a very inadequate affair.
In fact, it was not European at all. It was local, unsatisfactory, par- tial. The atoms of society were larger; but society was still a congeries of atoms. If I could main- tain myself in my castle-well; if not- not well. Nothing bound me and my neighbours together. We did not belong to each other; we did not love each other. A Savior, risen from the dead, with marks of pain in hands and feet, is known to us in breaking bread, and draws us closer when we meet: majestic love most humbly bends to raise us up, and make us friends.
The Spirit makes an open door and calls us, gathered here today, to praise the past that's gone before, then go along our pilgrim way: With Christ alive, and at our side, we'll take the future in our stride. Feedback Comments. Add Feedback. Product Rating. Religion , Answers: 1. Explanation: I have to poop some chopsticks brb. Ang alam ko baston Explanation:. Iba pang mga katanungan: Religion.
Religion, Paano mo maisasabuhay ang paggalang na ginagabayan ng katarungan at pagmamahal? What is the message in The Nothing People poem? The Bible tells us that he was a very nice looking person but that did not seem to take away his humility and walk with God. He wanted to serve his Master and be a good person. David had already been playing the harp for King Saul when he saw the armies of Israel needed to fight the Philistines.
Even though David was a young boy he knew where his help and strength were. After he killed the giant the people were very relieved of their fear. David was very much loved of the people and his fame spread even to other nations. God knew David would be a good king and protected him.
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