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These words, I think, show us the secret of Islam. They are a just
comment on that short and rugged chapter of the Koran which is said to
have been Mohammed's first attempt either at prophecy or writing; when,
after long fasting and meditation among the desert hills, under the
glorious eastern stars, he came down and told his good Kadijah that he
had found a great thing, and that she must help him to write it down.
And what was this which seemed to the unlettered camel-driver so
priceless a treasure? Not merely that God was one God--vast as that
discovery was--but that he was a God "who showeth to man the thing which
he knew not;" a "most merciful God;" a God, in a word, who could be
trusted; a God who would teach and strengthen; a God, as he said, who
would give him courage to set his face like a flint, and would put an
answer in his mouth when his idolatrous countrymen cavilled and sneered
at his message to them, to turn from their idols of wood and stone, and
become righteous men, as Abraham their forefather was righteous.
"A God who showeth to man the thing which he knew not." That idea gave
might to Islam, because it was a real idea, an eternal fact; the result
of a true insight into the character of God. And that idea alone,
believe me, will give conquering might either to creed, philosophy, or
heart of man. Each will be strong, each will endure, in proportion as
it believes that God is one who shows to man the thing which he knew
not: as it believes, in short, in that Logos of which Saint John wrote,
that He was the light who lightens every man who comes into the world.
In a word, the wild Koreish had discovered, more or less clearly, that
end and object of all metaphysic whereof I have already spoken so often;
that external and imperishable beauty for which Plato sought of old; and
had seen that its name was righteousness, and that it dwelt absolutely
in an absolutely righteous person; and moreover, that this person was no
careless self-contented epicurean deity; but that He was, as they loved
to call Him, the most merciful God; that He cared for men; that He
desired to make men righteous. Of that they could not doubt. The fact
was palpable, historic, present. To them the degraded Koreish of the
desert, who as they believed, and I think believed rightly, had fallen
from the old Monotheism of their forefathers Abraham and Ismael, into
the lowest fetishism, and with that into the lowest brutality and
wretchedness--to them, while they were making idols of wood and stone;
eating dead carcases; and burying their daughters alive; careless of
chastity, of justice, of property; sunk in unnatural crimes, dead in
trespasses and sins; hateful and hating one another--a man, one of their
own people had come, saying: "I have a message from the one righteous
God. His curse is on all this, for it is unlike Himself. He will have
you righteous men, after the pattern of your forefather Abraham. Be
that, and arise, body, soul, and spirit, out of your savagery and
brutishness. Then you shall be able to trample under font the
profligate idolaters, to sweep the Greek tyrants from the land which
they have been oppressing for centuries, and to recover the East for its
rightful heirs, the children of Abraham." Was this not, in every sense,
a message from God? I must deny the philosophy of Clement and
Augustine, I must deny my own conscience, my own reason, I must outrage
my own moral sense, and confess that I have no immutable standard of
right, that I know no eternal source of right, if I deny it to have been
one; if I deny what seems to me the palpable historic fact, that those
wild Koreish had in them a reason and a conscience, which could awaken
to that message, and perceive its boundless beauty, its boundless
importance, and that they did accept that message, and lived by it in
proportion as they received it fully, such lives as no men in those
times, and few in after times, have been able to live. If I feel, as I
do feel, that Abubekr, Omar, Abu Obeidah, and Amrou, were better men
than I am, I must throw away all that Philo--all that a Higher
authority--has taught me: or I must attribute their lofty virtues to
the one source of all in man which is not selfishness, and fancy, and
fury, and blindness as of the beasts which perish.
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