[321]. Deutsch on the Talmud: Quarterly Review, 1867.
[322]. Evidently. Its cosmogony is a myth read literally: its history is, for the most part, a highly immoral distortion, and its ethics are those of the Talmudic Hebrews. It has done good work in its time; but now it shows only decay and decrepitude in the place of vigour and progress. It is dying hard, but it is dying of the slow poison of science.
[323]. These Hebrew Stoics would justly charge the Founder of Christianity with preaching a more popular and practical doctrine, but a degradation from their own far higher and more ideal standard.
[324]. Dr. Theodore Christlieb (“Modern Doubt and Christian Relief,” Edinburgh: Clark, 1874) can even now write;—“So then the ‘full age’ to which humanity is at present supposed to have attained, consists in man’s doing good purely for goodness sake! Who sees not the hollowness of this bombastic talk. That man has yet to be born whose practice will be regulated by this insipid theory (dieser grauen Theorie). What is the idea of goodness per se? * * * The abstract idea of goodness is not an effectual motive for well-doing” (p. [104]). My only comment is c’est ignoble! His reverence acts the part of Satan in Holy Writ, “Does Job serve God for naught?” Compare this selfish, irreligious, and immoral view with Philo Judæus (On the Allegory of the Sacred Laws, cap. lviii.), to measure the extent of the fall from Pharisaism to Christianity. And the latter is still infected with the “bribe-and-threat doctrine:” I once immensely scandalised a Consular Chaplain by quoting the noble belief of the ancients, and it was some days before he could recover mental equanimity. The degradation is now inbred.
[325]. Of the doctrine of the Fall the heretic Marcion wrote: “The Deity must either be deficient in goodness if he willed, in prescience if he did not foresee, or in power if he did not prevent it.”
[326]. In his charming book, “India Revisited.”
[327]. This is the answer to those who contend with much truth that the moderns are by no means superior to the ancients of Europe: they look at the results of only 3000 years instead of 30,000 or 300,000.
[328]. As a maxim the saying is attributed to the Duc de Lévis, but it is much older.
[329]. There are a few, but only a few, frightful exceptions to this rule, especially in the case of Khálid bin Walíd, the Sword of Allah, and his ferocious friend, Darár ibn al-Azwar. But their cruel excesses were loudly blamed by the Moslems, and Caliph Omar only obeyed the popular voice in superseding the fierce and furious Khalid by the mild and merciful Abú Obaydah.
[330]. This too when St. Paul sends the Christian slave Onesimus back to his unbelieving (?) master, Philemon; which in Al-Islam would have created a scandal.