"You have hit it exactly; and now let me tell you that ever since Dr. Bellows set out on the foreign tour in which he is still occupied, I have watched for the record of his impressions of Oriental life, feeling certain, from what I knew of him, that he would find an attraction in Mohammedanism which he never saw in Christianity. I was not mistaken. He is not a polygamist: he has no taste for a sensual heaven; I don't suppose he prefers the Koran to the Bible; and I never heard of his keeping the inordinate fasts of Ramadan; still, the creed of Islam seems, in its main features, to have caught his fancy, and he loads it with indirect praises, which he never thought of bestowing upon any form of Christianity. Let me read you an extract from one of his recent letters to The Liberal Christian:
"'These people,' he says, referring to the Egyptians, 'know nothing of Christianity which ought to give it any superiority in their eyes over Mohammedanism. When the Arabian prophet commenced his marvellous work, there is little doubt that he was animated by the sincere enthusiasm of a religious reformer. Mohammed recognized both dispensations, the Mosaic and the Christian; and his intelligent followers to this day speak reverently of the Christ. They evade the authority and use of our Scriptures, by asserting that they have been thoroughly corrupted in their text. A learned Mohammedan in India, however, has just written the introduction to a new Commentary on our Bible, in which he ably refutes the Mussulman charge of general corruptness, and adduces all the passages quoted out of the Old and New Testaments in the Koran. But what have Mussulmans seen of Christianity to commend it greatly above their own faith? Is it alleged that Mohammedanism has owed its triumphs and progress to the sword? Is it the fault of Christians if the Cross has not advanced by the same weapon? What infidel rage of the Crescent has ever exceeded the fanatical soldiering of the Crusades, and what has Coeur de Lion to boast over Saladin in enlightenment or appreciation of the Christian spirit? And if we come to bowing, and fasting, and washing, and external forms, I confess that the degrading prostrations, and crossings, and mummeries of the Greek and Catholic churches, with the gaudy trappings of robes and jewels, the worship of saints and images, and the deification of a humble Jewish woman, appear to me to have nothing in the presence of which Mussulmans could feel the lesser reasonableness, purity, or dignity, or the lesser credibility of their own unadorned and simpler superstition. Compared with Catholic and Greek legends, the Koran is a model of purity and elegance of style, and its worst superstitions do not much exceed in grossness the popular interpretation given to monkish fables. As it respects ecclesiastical interference and tyranny, Mohammedanism is a whole world in advance of Romanism or the Greek Church. It is essentially without priest or ritual, in any Catholic sense. The Mussulman is his own priest. He finds Allah everywhere, and he has only to turn toward Mecca, and bow in prayer, and his field, his boat, the desert, is as good an altar as the mosque. It is truly affecting to see the fidelity of the common people to their faith, the apparent heedlessness of observation, the absorption in their prayers, the careful memory of their hours of devotion.'
"And, speaking of the absence of symbols and rites in the mosques, he adds: 'Surely there is something grand in this simplicity, and something vital in a faith which, aided by so little external appliance, has survived in full vigor twelve hundred years'"
"Why don't he admire the vitality of the devil? Satan has survived in full vigor a good deal more than twelve hundred years."
"That would be about as logical. But is it not melancholy to see how far a man whom we would like to respect can be carried by his uncontrolled vagaries! He demanded a 'historical church:' there is only one in Christendom, and that he will not have; and now it almost seems as if he felt an occasional temptation to search for one outside of Christendom. Protestantism, he finds, has run its course. Catholicism he will have nothing to do with. What, then, is left him, if he will be a religious man at all? That seems to be the question which perplexes him and the small but intelligent school of thinkers of whom he is the representative. As the Jews are still waiting for the Christ they crucified eighteen hundred years ago, so the Bellows school are watching for the coming of that Christianity which they have already rejected. And both, it seems to me, are sick at heart with hope long deferred."
"Yes; we hear little now of the confident prophetic tone in which Dr. Bellows some years ago discoursed of the glories of the new religion of humanity, and predicted a resettlement of worn-out creeds and a revival of suspended faith. He writes now rather of the desolation of the present than of brightness which he discerns in the future. And this brings us back to the point from which we started. While Protestant theologians in general are discarding vituperation, there are certain of our opponents who show us a bitterness to which they were not formerly accustomed, because they have been disappointed in their own religious aspirations, and have a vague, half-conscious, and wholly unwelcome impression that the Catholic Church alone is capable of satisfying them. Dr. Bellows, for instance, travels through Europe and finds that Protestantism is everywhere lifeless. He is bold enough to say so; but he takes his revenge in the next breath by trying to show that the Catholic Church is no better. He is powerless to arrest the decay which is destroying his own organization, but he seems to find a melancholy compensation in attacking Catholicism. He reminds me of what the boy said when he was thrashed by a school-fellow: 'If I can't whip you, I can make faces at your sister.' He visits Paris, and confesses that 'Protestantism makes next to no headway' in France, and is torn by internal dissensions. He goes to the heart of Protestant Germany, and finds the general aspect 'one of painful decay in the faith and spirituality of the people.' All over the continent, he observes that where the Catholic faith has died out, 'nothing vigorous has shot up in its place,' and the masses of the population are 'without aspiration, devoutness, or faith in the invisible.' 'Protestantism, as it appears here, is a chilled, repulsive, ungrowing thing, entering very little into the national or the social and domestic life, and apparently not destined in any of its present forms to animate the passions or win and shape the hearts and lives of the middle classes. ... Out of the present elements of faith and worship in Germany I see no prospects of any healthy and contagious religious life arising.' Nay, what is worse than all, the peculiar form of Protestantism upon which, if upon any. Dr. Bellows would rely for the regeneration of Europe, is in no better way than the others. 'It does not appear,' he says, 'that the liberal element in the Protestantism of Germany, I mean that branch of its Protestantism which we should consider 'most in sympathy with Unitarianism, is very earnest or creative. It seems still rather a negation of orthodoxy than an affirmation of the positive truths of Christianity. ... Forced to take positive ground, I fear that a large part of this extensive body would be compelled to abandon Christian territory altogether.' From Berlin he writes that 'the whole life of the national church is sickly and discouraging;' from Strasburg, that Protestantism 'must learn some new ways before it will become the religion of the people of France, Italy, or even Germany;' from Vienna, that the Protestantism of Austria is 'essentially torpid and unprogressive, presenting nothing attractive or promising.' These passages, and many more of similar purport, we may take as equivalent to the little boy's confession that he could not whip his antagonist. When it comes to the other part, the making faces at his sister, I am bound to say that Dr. Bellows shows more temper than strength. In Vienna, he deplored the lukewarmness of the Catholic people all through Germany, yet, in several previous letters, he had contrasted their zeal in church-going with the indifference of the Protestants. He accuses the clergy of avarice, though in Rome he compliments the priests for their personal merits, their 'seriousness, decorum, and fair intelligence.' He declares that 'the Catholic Church is an artful substitute for anything that a human soul ought to desire;' that she is 'the chief hinderance to progress;' that she has 'glorified the blessed Mother into the Almighty;' that she 'mutters spells and practises necromancy at her altars,' and all that kind of thing, which I need not repeat, because we have heard it in almost the very same words scores of times before. But the most curious of all his angry attacks was made—where, think you? Why, on a steamer in the Levant, where there was nothing whatever to provoke him: where the onslaught was so perfectly gratuitous that it burst upon the calm flow of his letter like a thunderbolt rending the summer sky. Here it is:
"'Roman Catholicism, weak in every member, is prodigious in its total effectiveness, because it is a unit. It is quietly seizing America, piece by piece, state by state, city by city. In a new state like Wisconsin, for instance, it has the oldest college, the largest theological school, the best hospitals and charities, the finest churches; and what is true of Wisconsin is equally true of many other Western states. Protestantism, with a hundred times the wealth, intelligence, public spirit, and administrative ability, by reason of its sectarian jealousies and divisions can have no parallel successes, and is losing rapidly its place in legislative grants and in public policy. The Irish Catholics spot the members of state legislatures who vote against the appropriations they call for, and are able in our close elections to defeat their return. Representatives become servile and pliable, and Romanism flourishes. A Quaker gentleman of wealth, in the West, (the story is exactly true,) married a Vermont girl who had become a Catholic in a nunnery where she was sent for her education. It was agreed that, if children were given them, the boys should be reared in the faith of their father, the girls in that of their mother. The Vermont mother gave her husband ten girls, but never a son! Eight of them grew up Catholics, married influential men, and brought up their children Catholics, and in some cases brought over their husbands, and so the Roman Church was recruited with Protestant wealth and Quaker blood to a vast extent. So much for sending Protestant girls to Roman Catholic seminaries, and then complaining that so many Protestants are lost to the superstitions of Romanism! There is an apathy about the Roman Catholic advances in the United States among American Protestants, which will finally receive a terrible shock. There is no influence at work in America so hostile to our future peace as the Roman Catholic Church. The next American war will, I fear, be a religious war—of all kinds the worst. If we wish to avert it, we must take immediate steps to organize Protestantism more efficiently, and on less sectarian ground.'
"Well, upon my word, the conduct of that Vermont girl was abominable. I suppose Dr. Bellows thinks she never would have been artful enough to swindle her husband out of all his expected boys if she had not been brought up in a convent. 'So much for sending Protestant girls to Roman Catholic seminaries!' I should think so, indeed!"
"The story is very ridiculous; but the moral Dr. Bellows draws from it is worse than ridiculous. If we wish to avert a religious war, he says, 'we must take immediate steps to organize Protestantism more efficiently, and on less sectarian ground.' That means that Protestantism must maintain an overwhelming preponderance in this country by fair means or foul. If it cannot convert the papists with the Bible, it ought to knock them on the head with a bludgeon. And the same atrocious sentiment is still more plainly expressed by an Irish writer in The Liberal Christian of Feb. 29th, who says, 'Popery and Fenianism are Siamese curses, withering every noble and humane feeling wherever they exist. ... They deserve no toleration; they should receive no mercy.' There's a 'liberal' Christian for you, with a vengeance!"