FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 205: Holy Bible and Sacred Books of the East, p. 12.]
[Footnote 206: Mohammed was once asked whether he trusted in his own merit or in the mercy of God, and he answered, "The mercy of God." But the whole drift of his teaching belied this one pious utterance.]
[Footnote 207: Of the terrible darkness and bewilderment into which benighted races are often found Schoolcraft furnishes this graphic and painful picture in the condition of the Iroquois:
"Their notions of a deity, founded apparently on some dreamy tradition of original truth, are so subtile and divisible, and establish so heterogeneous a connection between spirit and matter of all imaginable forms, that popular belief seems to have wholly confounded the possible with the impossible, the natural with the supernatural. Action, so far as respects cause and effect, takes the widest and wildest range, through the agency of good or evil influences, which are put in motion alike for noble or ignoble ends—alike by men, beasts, devils, or gods. Seeing something mysterious and wonderful, he believes all things mysterious and wonderful; and he is afloat without shore or compass, on the wildest sea of superstition and necromancy. He sees a god in every phenomenon, and fears a sorcerer in every enemy. Life, under such a system of polytheism and wild belief, is a constant scene of fears and alarms. Fear is the predominating passion, and he is ready, wherever he goes, to sacrifice at any altar, be the supposed deity ever so grotesque. He relates just what he believes, and unluckily he believes everything that can possibly be told. A beast, or a bird, or a man, or a god, or a devil, a stone, a serpent, or a wizard, a wind, or a sound, or a ray of light—these are so many causes of action, which the meanest and lowest of the series may put in motion, but which shall in his theology and philosophy vibrate along the mysterious chain through the uppermost, and life or death may at any moment be the reward or the penalty."—Notes on the Iroquois, p. 263.]
[Footnote 208: History of Rationalism.]
[Footnote 209: And even the Buddha had spent six years in self-mortification and in the diligent search for what he regarded as the true wisdom.]
[Footnote 210: Henry Maudsley, in The Arena of April, 1891.]
[Footnote 211: "Barren Mohammedanism has been in all the higher and more tender virtues, because its noble morality and its pure theism have been united with no living example."—Lecky, History of Morals, vol. ii., p. 10.]
[Footnote 212: The most intelligent Mohammedans, as we have shown in a former lecture, admit the moral blemishes of his character as compared with the purity of Jesus and only revere him as the instrument of a great Divine purpose. His only element of greatness was success. Even the Koran convicts him of what the world must regard as heinous sin, and presents Jesus as the only sinless prophet.]
[Footnote 213: Douglass, Confucianism and Taouism.]
[Footnote 214: The apologists of Buddhism have made much of the story of a distressed young mother who came to the "Master" bearing in her arms the dead body of her first-born—hoping for some comfort or help. He bade her bring him some mustard seed found in a home where no child had died. After a wearisome but vain search he only reminded her of the universality of death. No hope of a future life and a glad recovery of the lost was given. As an illustration of Buddhism the example is a good one.]
[Footnote 215: "Men wanted a Father in heaven, who should take account of their efforts and assure them a recompense. Men wanted a future of righteousness, in which the earth should belong to the feeble and the poor; they wanted the assurance that human suffering is not all loss, but that beyond this sad horizon, dimmed by tears, are happy plains where sorrow shall one day find its consolation."—Renan, Hibbert Lectures, p. 42.]
[Footnote 216: See report of Missionary Conference, London, 1888, vol. i., p. 70.]
[Footnote 217: St. Paul and Protestantism, p. 79, quoted by Bishop
Carpenter.]
[Footnote 218: It is hardly necessary to remind the reader of the well-known tribute which Napoleon, in his conversations with his friends on the island of St. Helena, paid to the transcendent personality of Christ. He drew a graphic contrast between the so-called glory which had been won by great conquerors like Alexander, Cæsar, and himself, and that mysterious and all-mastering power which in all lands and all ages continues to attach itself to the person, the name, the memory of Christ, for whom, after eighteen centuries of time, millions of men would sacrifice their lives.]
[Footnote 219: Augustine appears to have been greatly moved by the life as well as by the writings of Paul. In an account given of his conversion to his friend Romanianus, he says, "So then stumbling, hurrying, hesitating, I seized the apostle Paul, 'for never,' said I, 'could they have wrought such things, or lived as it is plain they did live, if their writings and arguments were opposed to this so high a good.'"—Confessions, Bk. vii., xxi., note.]
[Footnote 220: Genesis, xvii. 1.]
[Footnote 221: The doctrine of human merit-making was carried to such an extreme under the Brahmanical system that the gods became afraid of its power. They sometimes found it necessary to send apsaras (nymphs), wives of genii, to tempt the most holy ascetics, lest their austerities and their merit should proceed too far.—See Article Brahmanism, in the Britannica.]
[Footnote 222: Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, vol. i., p. 40.]
[Footnote 223: De Nat. Deorum, iii., 36.]
[Footnote 224: Chips from a German Workshop, p. 304.]
[Footnote 225: See Murdock's Vedic Religion, p. 57.]
[Footnote 226: Hindu Philosophy.]
[Footnote 227: The most sacred of human victims offered by the Aztecs were prepared by a month of unbridled lust. See Prescott's Conquest.]
[Footnote 228: Nineteenth Century, July, 1888.]
[Footnote 229: Letters of Rev. Pentecost in The Christian at Work, 1891.]
[Footnote 230: The same principles are set forth with great emphasis in
Isaiah, Chap. iii.]