FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 97: Sprenger's Life of Mohammed, pp. 40, 41.]
[Footnote 98: It is a suspicious fact that the first chapter of the Koran begins with protestations that it is a true revelation, and with most terrible anathemas against all who doubt it. This seems significant, and contrasts strongly with the conscious truthfulness and simplicity of the Gospel narrators.]
[Footnote 99: Nor have later defenders of the system failed to derive alleged proofs of their system from Biblical sources. Mohammedan controversialists have urged some very specious and plausible arguments; for example, Deut. xviii. 15-18, promises that the Lord shall raise up unto Israel a prophet from among their brethren. But Israel had no brethren but the sons of Ishmael. There was also promised a prophet like unto Moses; but Deut. xxxiv. declares that "There arose no Prophet in Israel like unto Moses."
When John the Baptist was asked whether he were the Christ, or Elijah, or "that prophet," no other than Mohammed could have been meant by "that prophet.">[
[Footnote 100: Rev. Mr. Bruce, missionary in Persia, states that pictures of the Father, the Son, and Mary are still seen in Eastern churches.—Church Missionary Intelligencer, January, 1882.]
[Footnote 101: Sales, in his Preliminary Discourse, Section 1st, enumerates the great nations which have vainly attempted the conquest of Arabia, from the Assyrians down to the Romans, and he asserts that even the Turks have held only a nominal sway.]
[Footnote 102: China owes her present dynasty to the fact that the hardy
Manchus were called in as mercenaries or as allies.]
[Footnote 103: Dr. Koelle: quoted in Church Missionary Intelligencer.]
[Footnote 104: Sales: Koran and Preliminary Discourse, Wherry's edition, p. 89. One of the chief religious duties under the Koran was the giving of alms (Zakat), and under this euphonious name was included the tax by which Mohammed maintained the force that enabled him to keep up his predatory raids on the caravans of his enemies.]
[Footnote 105: Mohammed and Mohammedanism, p. 123.]
[Footnote 106: Dr. Koelle gravely questions this.]
[Footnote 107: One of the most wicked and disastrous of all Mohammed's laws was that which allowed the free practice of capturing women and girls in war, and retaining them as lawful chattels in the capacity of concubines. It has been in all ages a base stimulus to the raids of the slave-hunter. Sir William Muir has justly said, that so long as a free sanction to this great evil stands recorded on the pages of the Koran, Mohammedans will never of their own accord cease to prosecute the slave-trade.]
[Footnote 108: According to Dr. Koelle, the number of women and children who fell to the prophet's share of captives at the time of his great slaughter of the surrendered Jewish soldiers, was two hundred.]
[Footnote 109: Mohammed, Buddha, and Christ, p. 112.]
[Footnote 110: Mohammed, Buddha, and Christ.]
[Footnote 111: Ibid, p. 112.]
[Footnote 112: Says Sir William Muir: "Three radical evils flow from the faith, in all ages and in every country, and must continue to flow so long as the Koran is the standard of belief. First, polygamy, divorce, and slavery are maintained and perpetuated, striking at the root of public morals, poisoning domestic life, and disorganizing society. Second, freedom of thought and private judgment in religion is crushed and annihilated. The sword still is, and must remain, the inevitable penalty for the denial of Islam. Toleration is unknown. Third, a barrier has been interposed against the reception of Christianity. They labor under a miserable delusion who suppose that Mohammedanism paves the way for a purer faith. No system could have been devised with more consummate skill for shutting out the nations over which it has sway from the light of truth. Idolatrous Arabia (judging from the analogy of other nations) might have been aroused to spiritual life and to the adoption of the faith of Jesus. Mohammedan Arabia is to the human eye sealed against the benign influences of the Gospel…. The sword of Mohammed and the Koran are the most stubborn enemies of civilization, liberty, and truth which the world has yet known."—Church Missionary Intelligencer, November, 1885.]
[Footnote 113: Osborne, in his Islam under the Arabs, and Marcus Dodds, in Mohammed, Buddha, and Christ, have emphasized the fact that Islam, however favorably it might compare with the Arabian heathenism which it overthrew, was wholly out of place in forcing its semi-barbarous cultus upon civilizations which were far above it. It might be an advance upon the rudeness and cruelty of the Koreish, but the misfortune was that it stamped its stereotyped and unchanging principles and customs upon nations which were in advance of it even then, and which, but for its deadening influence, might have made far greater progress in the centuries which followed.
Its bigoted founder gave the Koran as the sufficient guide for all time. It arrested the world's progress as far as its power extended. Very different was the spirit of Judaism. "It distinctly disclaimed both finality and completeness. Every part of the Mosaic religion had a forward look, and was designed to leave the mind in an attitude of expectation."
Mohammedanism, in claiming to be the one religion for all men and all time, is convicted of absurdity and imposture by its failures; by the retrograde which marks its whole history in Western Asia. As a universal religion it has been tried and found wanting.]
[Footnote 114: It has been claimed that the spread of Mohammedanism in India is far more rapid than that of Christianity. If this were true in point of fact, it would be significant; for India under British rule furnishes a fair field for such a contest. But it so happens that there, where Islam holds no sword of conquest, and no arbitrary power to compel the faith of men, its growth is very slow, it only keeps pace with the general increase of the population. It cannot compare with the advancement of Christianity. I subjoin an extract from Sir W. Hunter's paper in the Nineteenth Century for July, 1888:
"The official census, notwithstanding its obscurities of classification and the disturbing effects of the famine of 1877, attests the rapid increase of the Christian population. So far as these disturbing influences allow of an inference for all British India, the normal rate of increase among the general population was about 8 per cent, from 1872 to 1881, while the actual rate of the Christian population was over 30 per cent. But, taking the lieutenant-governorship of Bengal as the greatest province outside the famine area of 1877, and for whose population, amounting to one-third of the whole of British India, really comparable statistics exist, the census results are clear. The general population increased in the nine years preceding 1881 at the rate of 10.89 per cent., the Mohammedans at the rate of 10.96 per cent., the Hindus at some undetermined rate below 13.64 per cent., Christians of all races at the rate of 40.71 per cent., and the native Christians at the rate of 64.07 per cent.">[
[Footnote 115: Leaves from an Egyptian Note-book.]
[Footnote 116: Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race, p. 241.]
[Footnote 117: For the full text of the letter to the Standard, see Church Missionary Intelligencer, December, 1888.]
[Footnote 118: Church Missionary Intelligencer, 1887, p. 653.]
[Footnote 119: See Church Missionary Intelligencer, April, 1888.]
[Footnote 120: Over against Canon Taylor's glowing accounts of this broad and gentle charity we may place the testimony of Palgrave in regard to the remorseless rapacity practised by the Wahábees upon the Shiyaées of Persia while passing through their territory in their pilgrimages to a common shrine. He tells us that "forty gold tománs were fixed as the claim of the Wahábee treasury on every Persian pilgrim for his passage through R'ad, and forty more for a safe conduct through the rest of the empire—eighty in all….
"Every local governor on the way would naturally enough take the hint, and strive not to let the 'enemies of God' (for this is the sole title given by Wahábees to all except themselves) go by without spoiling them more or less….
"So that, all counted up, the legal and necessary dues levied on every Persian Shiyaée while traversing Central Arabia, and under Wahábee guidance and protection, amounted, I found, to about one hundred and fifty gold tománs, equalling nearly sixty pounds sterling, English, no light expenditure for a Persian, and no despicable gain to an Arab."—Palgrave's Central and Eastern Africa, p. 161.]
[Footnote 121: Dodds: Mohammed, Buddha, and Christ, p. 118.]
[Footnote 122: Church Missionary Intelligencer, November, 1887.]
[Footnote 123: Church Missionary Intelligencer, February, 1888, p. 66.]
[Footnote 124: Church Missionary Intelligencer, April, 1888.]