Chapter XII: Islam and the Christian

'So while the World rolls on from change to change
And realms of thought expand,
The letter stands without expanse or range,
Stiff as a dead man's hand.
While as the life-blood fills the glowing form,
The spirit Christ has shed
Flows through the ripening ages, fresh and warm,
More felt than heard or read,'
MILNES' 'PALM LEAVES'
(quoted in Stanley's _Eastern Church_).

[Sidenote: The Story of Islam.]

We have reached the end of the telling of our story. Let our minds move over it again once more. Thirteen hundred years ago in Arabia, an insignificant, untamed, untaught 'Land of the Desert,' there arose an Arab man who, forsaking idols, believed utterly in God. His followers poured forth into the world with a Faith that carried all before them. That Faith broke the great imperial civilizations of its day, and bore down the timid standards of a corrupt and palsied Church. Occupying {189} the Mediterranean countries and the sites of the ancient empires, it established itself as the greatest ruling force the world had ever known. In spite of the rise of younger nations, the magnificence of medieval Europe, the growth of science and the arts of civilization and of war, in spite of many rival empires in the modern 'scramble for the world,' Islam still holds with its tenacious grip the thoughts and hearts of men. It dominates to-day one-seventh of mankind, moving still to fresh conquests of the Faith. We have traced that Faith in history and seen it settling like a deadly blight upon the nations, chilling and paralyzing the moral life of man. We have examined it in its essential meaning and significance.

Islam rises up before us in its tremendous rugged strength, leagued with the wild nature of 200 millions of our fellow-men, and overshadowing Christendom.

[Sidenote: The Challenge of Islam.]

'The only one of the great religions to come after Christianity: the only one that categorically denies the truth of Christianity: the only one that has in the past signally defeated Christianity: the only one that seriously disputes the world with {190} Christianity: the only one which, in several parts of the world, is to-day forestalling and gaining on Christianity.'[1]

[Sidenote: Isaiah.]

In another Eastern land 1,200 years before Mohammed, there lived another Prophet. The country that he loved with a passionate devotion was in sore straits. Two mighty kingdoms, one on either side, were driving their highways across it, and threatening to overwhelm it. The very religion which had been the secret of its greatness was challenged and endangered. Men's hearts were full of fear. To one man was given a vision of hope. He alone among his people pierced the clouds that overcast the sky, and saw the light, and believed with all his soul in the vision that he saw--the vision of the kingdom that should be, the rule of righteousness and joy and peace, whose ensign should be Holiness to the Lord. And seeing the future till to him it was present, he worded it thus:--

UNTO US A CHILD IS BORN, UNTO US A SON IS GIVEN; AND THE GOVERNMENT SHALL BE UPON HIS SHOULDER: {191} AND HIS NAME SHALL BE CALLED WONDERFUL, COUNSELLOR, MIGHTY GOD, EVERLASTING FATHER, PRINCE OF PEACE. OF THE INCREASE OF HIS GOVERNMENT AND OF PEACE THERE SHALL BE NO END ... TO ESTABLISH IT AND TO UPHOLD IT WITH JUDGMENT AND WITH RIGHTEOUSNESS FROM HENCEFORTH EVEN FOR EVER.

And St. John upon the summit of a later day painted with a fuller glory the vision of the City that shall be:--

AND I SAW NO TEMPLE THEREIN: FOR THE LORD GOD THE ALMIGHTY, AND THE LAMB, ARE THE TEMPLE THEREOF. AND THE CITY HATH NO NEED OF THE SUN, NEITHER OF THE MOON, TO SHINE UPON IT: FOR THE GLORY OF GOD DID LIGHTEN IT, AND THE LAMP THEREOF IS THE LAMB. AND THE NATIONS SHALL WALK AMIDST THE LIGHT THEREOF: AND THE KINGS OF THE EARTH DO BRING THEIR GLORY INTO IT. AND THE GATES THEREOF SHALL IN NO WISE BE SHUT BY DAY (FOR THERE SHALL BE NO NIGHT THERE): AND THEY SHALL BRING THE GLORY AND THE HONOUR OF THE NATIONS INTO IT: AND THERE SHALL IN NO WISE ENTER INTO IT ANYTHING UNCLEAN, OR HE THAT MAKETH AN ABOMINATION AND A LIE: BUT ONLY THEY WHICH ARE WRITTEN IN THE LAMB'S BOOK OF LIFE.

It is the purest form of the old-world vision of the 'Golden Age,' and our hearts acclaim it still.

[Sidenote: Christ's Kingdom.]

Here upon this present, prosaic earth to-day, God is laying by human hands the foundations, broad and deep and true, of {192} that City yet to be. To this world, where sin threw down the gage of battle, the Child was born. Here He fought and triumphed, and upon this earth was raised His cross, the token of the final victory. Here among men in _this_ present world, the battle must be waged, the Kingdom comes.

Every sin, every falsehood, every injustice, every cruelty, every wrong, may challenge but they do not deny that Kingdom--Islam does.

Bringing its ideals down to the level of our nature, it denies the best in man, and denies the Christ of God--the One who alone has triumphed and in whose triumph lies man's only hope. Give the world to Islam, and man's highest vision is gone for ever.

[Sidenote: Christian and Moslem.]

And so we go to meet the Moslem, and he stands before us strong, fearless, brave, determined. What have we Christians that we can say to him? What can we give? What has he already got?

First, he has God, God all-powerful, all-knowing, Master of the Universe and Lord of men. He has a Prophet, human also as himself, to be at the last day, so he says, his mediator in God's presence, pleading there {193} man's weakness before God.[2] Behind him, with him, around him, stands that great Moslem brotherhood of the 'believers' transcending all race, proud and isolated, mysterious in its kindling warmth and strange fanaticism. For himself, and for them he has his book--his Korân--the final word of God. In it he finds his simple rule of conduct, the things that he must do, his prayer, his almsgiving, the blessing of the pilgrimage, the rules for all his life--nothing impossible in them from first to last, no entanglement of conscience or of principles, no insistence upon the spirit in which they must be carried out. He has his call to service too, for the honour of the Prophet and the advancement of the Faith. And on beyond--his Paradise, the more attractive because so very like this earth without its pains.

What can we say? Talk about compromise between these two religions? Ask him, ask any Moslem, ask the Korân. The two are essentially, absolutely, and for ever, mutually contradictory and mutually exclusive. The Hindu and the Chinese {194} may indeed set Christ in their Pantheons. But a Moslem set Christ beside the Prophet? _Never!_

[Sidenote: The Proof of Christ.]

What then have we to offer? Must we Christians cringe in shame and weakness before his grim unthinking faith and rugged earnestness? It is a searching question. Superior knowledge, or as we think a more complete philosophy of things, does not give us a right to interfere with his belief. He starts with an inherent and determined disbelief in the claim of Christ, it is the very core of his religion. He will not listen to our story. He wants _the proof_ of Christ.

And where shall the proof of Christ be found? There is one only answer, Christ the Son of God, the Son of Man, staked all upon the Christian--His Spirit in the Christian,--all that story, wrought out in suffering and tears, and the shedding of His blood, His triumph over death, His ascension on high, to be told and retold and told again _in the life_ of the Christian. It was always so, He meant it to be so; it was His plan, part of the eternal purpose of God for the Redemption of the World.

[Sidenote: The Commission.]

And so the commission to teach all {195} nations[3] and the promise of the Spirit stand together--two things which God hath joined--the Witness and the Spirit.

In the power and fulness of that Spirit, the little company of weak and vacillating fishermen with their few companions went out fearlessly to win the world for Christ. They dared to believe what He had said--that 'greater works' remained for them to do _because_ He had gone to the Father.

What mattered then the frowning mask of things, the deadness of the decadent old world, the hateful lust of Grecian cities, the murderous gladiatorial games, scourgings, imprisonments, death? They never doubted the final triumph. Let St. Paul speak out his mind--the secret of the final triumph:

HAVE THIS MIND IN YOU, WHICH WAS ALSO IN CHRIST JESUS: WHO, BEING IN THE FORM OF GOD, COUNTED IT NOT A PRIZE TO BE ON AN EQUALITY WITH GOD, BUT EMPTIED HIMSELF, TAKING THE FORM Of A SERVANT, BEING MADE IN THE LIKENESS OF MEN; AND BEING FOUND IN FASHION AS A MAN, HE HUMBLED HIMSELF, BECOMING OBEDIENT EVEN UNTO DEATH, YEA, THE DEATH OF THE CROSS. WHEREFORE ALSO GOD HIGHLY EXALTED HIM, AND GAVE UNTO HIM THE NAME WHICH IS ABOVE EVERY NAME; THAT IN THE NAME OF JESUS EVERY KNEE SHOULD BOW, OF THINGS IN HEAVEN AND THINGS ON EARTH AND THINGS UNDER THE EARTH.

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Hear St. Paul again, revealing the secret of his own life, 'I live: yet not I, but CHRIST LIVETH IN ME.'

We may answer the Moslem just in proportion as that is true of us--made true by the Holy Spirit.

What else was it in Raymund Lull that made him the one apostle of the Moslems of his day? Whence else came Henry Martyn's quiet, dauntless faith? What else was the source of Ion Keith-Falconer's heroic devotion? To the deadness of Islam, they brought the living Christ: 'The Life was the Light of men.'

The Moslem has blessed us by asking us the question, by forcing us to ask it of ourselves!

The age of the apostles is not a closed chapter of history, like the departed glory of Athens or the Elizabethan age. God still moves amid His Church.

[Sidenote: The Stirring of the Nations.]

We have been called to live in this twentieth century amid the most tremendous events--save one--the world has ever known. Let us remind ourselves that before the guns of the Great War rolled their terrible thunder, things had been happening in Asia and the East, and particularly in the {197} Moslem world, which were of hardly less importance than the war itself.

The great nations of Asia awoke, as though shaken from an age-long sleep by some mighty galvanic shock. One after another the customs, traditions, and beliefs of centuries have been cast aside. Everywhere is felt the pulse of new ambitions and the desire to get abreast of the modern peoples of the world. Hence mighty and sweeping movements for education and reform, showing themselves hardly less in Turkey and Egypt than in China and India, in this twentieth century, creating a new desire to learn, a deeper sense of need, a readiness to consider and weigh new propositions, and an altogether new opportunity for preaching the eternal Gospel of life, the only true foundation upon which men and nations can build.

And now we are passing through times such as Britain has never known before. The whole nation is pouring out its best, giving them, as it believes, as sacrifices for the world's freedom and the life of generations to come.

The war will be over some day, and those who survive it and those who come {198} after will not forget their glorious dead. They will realize that these lives were given to redeem Britain's opportunity.

It will lie with the present generation of Britain's schoolboys to see to it that they did not purchase that opportunity in vain. To you for whom this book has been written, and for whom it has been revised in barracks, will come the nobler opportunity of the truly holy war--the rebuilding of the world's waste places, the healing of its sores, the substitution of truth and purity where now there is falsehood and wrong. It is the opportunity of the ages. What can we say of it all but this--'God fulfils Himself in many ways'? It is God, God moving behind and shaping history towards its goal.

'For I doubt not through the ages one
increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened with
the process of the suns.'

[Sidenote: The Call of Christ.]

Christ walks to-day upon our streets, He is with us in our homes, He draws near to our great schools, He stands over us as we kneel in prayer, seeking for young knights of His cross, weak enough to lean {199} on His great strength; dependent enough to trust with childlike faith; willing to be made pure enough to see God; true enough to reveal His love to men; brave enough to make a great adventure for His sake; utterly His, that in them for the sake of the great needy Moslem world He may fulfil His word:

VERILY, VERILY, I SAY UNTO YOU, HE THAT BELIEVETH ON ME, THE WORKS THAT I DO SHALL HE DO ALSO; AND GREATER WORKS THAN THESE SHALL HE DO; BECAUSE I GO UNTO THE FATHER.

AND WHATSOEVER YE SHALL ASK IN MY NAME, THAT WILL I DO, THAT THE FATHER MAY BE GLORIFIED IN THE SON.

'O may Thy soldiers, faithful, true, and bold,
Fight as the Saints who nobly fought of old,
And win with them the Victor's crown of gold,
Alleluia!'

[1] C. M. S. Day of Opportunity pamphlets, _The Moslem Menace_, by W. H. T. Gairdner.

[2] Cf. Illingworth, _Christian Doctrine of the Trinity_, Appendix.

[3] Acts i. 8.

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APPENDICES AND INDEX

Some Books on Islam (A)

Chronological Table (B)

Moslem Population of the World (C)

Political Survey of Moslem World (D)

Index

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