The Great Teacher had bidden men, 'Love your enemies.' He instituted a brotherhood embracing 'believers.'
The Great Teacher had sought men's hearts. He was content with a confession of belief.
The Great Teacher had taught principles. He left precepts for the guidance of his followers.
The Great Teacher had been tempted as all men are tempted, but had never faltered, never stumbled, never failed. The later teacher claimed a 'divine' indulgence for his sins.
The Great Teacher suffered and laid down His life for men—the other decreed that his dominion should be extended by the sword.
Mohammed's Claim to supersede Christ.
Islam is the one religion which throws down a challenge to the Gospel; others came before and knew not the Christ. Mohammed alone of all religious teachers has measured himself beside the holy JESUS, and, coming after Him, claims to supersede Him. That is Islam's challenge to the Church of Christ to-day.
The Crusades.
That challenge, if not in its full meaning, at least in its terror, was a very real and threatening thing to European Christendom in its early centuries, when Saracens and Turks had almost surrounded the Mediterranean, had conquered Spain, threatened France, sacked Moscow, and held Damascus and Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Olivet. And Christendom took up the gauntlet. If Islam attested its right by its conquests, so then would the Church. And the Christian countries of Europe poured forth their earnest, ignorant rabble and the glory of their chivalry, with crosses on their sword-hilts, and banners with 'Dieu le veult' floating above them, to the Holy War, to recover Jerusalem from the Turks. Hundreds of thousands of the nobility and yeomen of Europe laid down their lives with a feverish zeal in each Crusade, and a long and ghastly line of bones whitened the roads through Hungary to the East.
The Crusades present at once one of the grandest pictures of misguided zeal, and one of the blackest crimes in history; for they were the very denial of the Gospel for which they contended, and the arms of Christian knights were stained with acts of barbarity and cruelty more heathenish than those of their Turkish foes. Christendom was repulsed, fighting with the Moslem weapon, and it seemed to many as though the Church had tried in vain her only weapon—the weapon of force. Popes there were, and monks and priests, and those who should have been the shepherds of the flock, yet none saw that the Church had cast aside the one method that never fails.