The Mohammedan Religion Explained With an Introductory Sketch of Its Progress, and Suggestions for Its Confutation Classic Reprint

Excerpt from The Mohammedan Religion Explained: With an Introductory Sketch of Its Progress, and Suggestions for Its Confutation

Be the final revelation of God, subdues the reason, and attracts the affections of its members, who realize in their conduct its maxims of resignation to the divine will, in a de gree which is rarely equalled by Christians. Satisfied with his Koran, the professor of Islam condescends not to read the Scriptures of the old or the new dispensation, which his book tells him again and again have been corrupted; and while he honours Christ as superior to man, he chooses Mohammed for his lawgiver. Abdul Messeeh, the faithful convert of Corrie, who died a presbyter of our Church, ordained by Heber, stands out as almost a solitary instance. We can boast of hundreds, nay, thousands of converted idolaters, but where are the Moslems? To satisfy the gainsaying is no doubt far harder than to persuade the ignorant; and while improvement in secular knowledge will cause the Hindu to be ashamed of idolatry, and to renounce it for Atheism, or to discover Uni tarianism as enveloped in his hereditary belief, it will be hard to convince the Mohammedan, who boasts that he believes only in one God, and thinks that his religion is that of Abraham and of all the Prophets, and even of Jesus himself; accusing us, like our own Unitarians, of exalting Him to a dignity which does not belong to Him, by associating Him as an equal with the only God. The difficulty, no doubt, is great, for Islam is, in truth, a religion congenial to the unrenewed heart: it has no mysteries to bafile and mortify the intellect and in a great degree it gratifies pride, by making man his own saviour, in ascribing merit to good works and to religious ordinances, as fastings and prayers and pilgrimage. Every mission, however, has its peculiar difficulties, and he who has to dispute with the Moslem, who will turn against him his weapons, pervert ing passages of the Bible into predictions of his own Prophet, or maintaining that it has been corrupted, may derive comfort from the remarks of one who was placed under trials of an opposite character, and complains of the apathy of those who had no idea even of the existence of God. No fragments remain to the Bechuana, writes Moffat, a distinguished Mis sionarv in South Africa of the London Society, as mementos.

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