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 TO BB < >!'. I \ I N I I> i'.\ ADDRESSING 
 
 ALFRED W. MARTIN, BOX &&7, SEATTLE, WN.
 
 THE 
 
 WORLD'S GREAT RELIGIONS 
 
 BY 
 
 ALFRED w. MARTIN. 
 
 A Series of Lectures on the Gospel of the 
 Seven Extant Great Religions 
 
 HINDUISM, BUDDHISM, ZOROASTRIANISM, 
 
 CONFUCIANISM, JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY AND 
 
 MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 with appropriate Readings from the Bibles of these Religions, 
 
 and 
 
 Portraits of Gotama (the Buddha), Zoroaster, Confucius, 
 Lao-Tze, Moses, and Jesus (the Christ) 
 
 Published by the 
 
 FIRST FREE CHURCH OF SEATTLE 
 1906
 
 THE WORLD'S GREAT RELIGIONS. 
 
 THE SYMPHONY OF RELIGIONS. 
 
 POEM. 
 
 Jesus, thy teachings oft have made me smart 
 When I have failed in love for fellow-men. 
 Siddartha, grief has been my portion when 
 Thy selflessness has taught my feverish heart 
 Its vain ambitions. When some coward start 
 Has seized me, thou, Mohammed, then 
 Hast stirred to bravery. Thy moral ken, 
 Confucius, spurs me when I fail life's better part. 
 O saviors many, of time old and new 
 Alike ye lead from darkness to the light. 
 O words as high within my own calm breast, 
 Xo less ye summon Wisdom to pursue. 
 Still sound, clarions of love and right, 
 Till I win freedom serving your behest. 
 
 James H. West. 
 
 SCRIPTURE SELECTIONS. 
 FROM THE HINDU BIBLE. 
 
 Altar flowers are of many species, but all worship is one. 
 Systems of faith differ, but God is one. 
 
 The object of all religions is alike, all seek the object of their 
 love and all the world is love's dwelling. 
 
 FROM THE BUDDHIST. 
 
 The root of religion is to reverence one's own faith and never 
 to revile the faith of others. My doctrine makes no dis- 
 tinction between high and low, rich and poor; it is like 
 the sky, it has room for all, and like water, it washes all 
 alike.
 
 FROM THE PARSEE. 
 
 Have the religions of mankind no common ground? Is there 
 not everywhere the same enrapturing beauty? Broad in- 
 deed is the carpet which God has spread and many are the 
 colors He has given it. Whichever road I take joins the 
 highway that leads to Thee. 
 
 FROM THE CHINESE. 
 
 Religions are many and different, but reason is one. Humanity 
 is the heart of man, justice is the path of man. The broad- 
 minded see the truth in different religions; the narrow- 
 minded see only the differences. 
 
 FROM THE JEWISH. 
 
 Wisdom is the breath of the power of God and in all ages en- 
 tering into holy souls she maketh them friends of God and 
 prophets. Behold how good and pleasant a thing it is for 
 brethren to dwell together in unity. 
 
 FROM THE CHRISTIAN. 
 
 Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons, but 
 in every nation he that revereth God and doeth \vli;it is 
 right is accepted of Him. Are we not all children of one 
 Father? Hath not one God created us? 
 
 FROM THE MOHAMMEDAN. 
 
 Whatever be thy religion associate with men who think dif- 
 ferently from thee. All have a quarter of the heavens to 
 which they turn and whichever way they turn, there is 
 God. 
 
 THE DISCOURSE. 
 
 Four great discoveries in the modern world have com- 
 pelled a reconstruction of religious beliefs. The first of these 
 was the discovery made by Copernicus in 1543, affecting the 
 Christian conception of God as it had been held for a millen- 
 ium and a half. Next, in the order of time, came the discov- 
 ery of the Sacred Books of the East, causing a reconstruction 
 of beliefs about the Bible and also as to the "solitary" grand- 
 eur of Christianity. In 1830 Sir Charles Lyell discovered that 
 the earth is vastly older than the book of Genesis indicates 
 and in 1859 Charles Darwin discovered the nature and origin 
 
 6
 
 of man to be wholly different from what the Bible teaches 
 on these two points, compelling surrender of the doctrine of 
 "the fall of man" and also of the "atonement and redemp- 
 tion," doctrines that logically follow from the premise of man's 
 fall from a pristine state of perfection. Our concern in this 
 series of discourses is with the second of these discoveries. 
 When the sacred scriptures, or bibles, of Arabia, China, Persia 
 and India were discovered a change began to take place in 
 the attitude of Christians toward the non-Christian faiths of 
 these countries, a change that has meant a remarkable increase 
 of tolerance, catholicity and appreciation. 
 
 In 711 when the Moors of Northern Africa invaded Spain, 
 it was rumored that these Mohammedans had a book which 
 they described as "the word of God" and of which they said 
 an exact copy exists in heaven. In the course of the next few 
 centuries the book was translated into the chief languages of 
 Europe and is known to us as the Koran. 
 
 In the fourteenth century certain European travellers 
 found their way to a rich and thickly populated country which 
 they called "Cathay." Returning they reported on conditions 
 in what proved to be the oldest existing empire and which 
 they now pronounced "China." They told of the immense 
 literary productions of the people and more especially of the 
 books dealing with the philosophy of life among which was a 
 series of volumes containing a highly developed system of 
 rules for the conduct of life and which proved to have been 
 partly compiled by Confucius and partly the work of the great 
 sage himself. These books too were translated into English 
 and are known as the "Chinese Classics," or Bible of the fol- 
 lowers of Confucius. 
 
 In 1760, Anquetil du Perron, while inspecting some dusty 
 manuscripts in the royal library at Paris came upon a frag- 
 ment of a book called the "Zend Avesta" which turned out to 
 be part of the sacred book of the Parsees, or followers of 
 Zoroaster, or Zarathustra, as he is more properly called. Eager 
 to read the remainder of this book he went to the Parsee prov- 
 ince in India and at the end of three years mastered the Zend 
 language and came into possession of 180 manuscripts which 
 represent all that remain of the Bible of the Zoroastrians. With
 
 these he returned to Paris and in 1771 appeared the first trans- 
 lation of this Bible into a European language. A few years 
 later the British took possession and occupancy of India. That 
 commercial enterprise led to the discovery of the "Rig-Veda" 
 the oldest portion of the oldest Bible in the world, that of the 
 Hindus. It is a collection of 1,028 hymns of ten or eleven 
 verses each with 32 syllables in each line, making, together with 
 the metrical commentaries, a book four times the size of the 
 Old and New Testaments combined. Add to this Veda the 
 three later Vedas, the ceremonial and homiletical books, the 
 philosophical treatises, the book of precepts and laws and the 
 great epic poems of the "Mahabbarata" and "Ramayana" and 
 we include all the sacred books of the Hindus. Then were 
 brought to light other Indian books, the Bible of the Buddhists, 
 so extensive that its letters (considered "holy" like those of the 
 Christian Bible) when counted number more than eight times 
 as jiiany as the letters of the two Testaments. 
 
 The first effect of the discovery of these sacred books and 
 their translation into European languages was the creation of 
 a new science, the science of Comparative Religion. This 
 science proceeding with the method of observation, hypothe- 
 sis and verification, produced a series of surprising results. 
 By the application of this scientific method it was proved (1) 
 that the moral ideas of justice, temperance, charity, loyalty, 
 truthfulness, patience, love, are common to all the Bibles of 
 the great religions. (2) that the religious sentiments awe, rev- 
 erence, worship, aspiration are likewise common to all systems 
 of faith. (3) that differences of climate and environment, of 
 culture and racial origin have given different forms of ex- 
 pression to one and the same ethical and spiritual substance, 
 so that whether it be the Papuan, squatting in dumb me<lita- 
 tion before his feathered god ; or the Moslem, prostrate before 
 his mosque ; or the Christian, praying to his Father in Heaven ; 
 or the Free Religionist, silently communing with the Infinite 
 and Eternal One; it is one and the same yearning for a hiirli 
 and a deeper life that is expressed by each and all. (4) This 
 science demonstrated that the ten commandments in slightly 
 varying form are to be found in other Bibles besides the Je\\'sh 
 Bible and that the golden rule is older than Jesus ;md common
 
 to all of the seven great religions, however different the 
 phrasing used to express its essence. (5) This science of 
 comparative religion promptly destroyed the old and false 
 classification which placed Christianity in a class by itself as 
 true, and the rest elsewhere as false. (6) It shattered the no- 
 tion that there were passages in the Christian Bible that could 
 not be matched elsewhere and Emerson as a champion of the 
 new science quietly said in reply to this assertion when made 
 by a bumptious individual at a Boston meeting, "Sir, that 
 contention of yours only proves how narrowly you have read." 
 Thus the first great result of this science has been the dis- 
 covery of these remarkable resemblances and the destruc- 
 tion of these false and antiquated distinctions. 
 
 As an illustration of the first of these undisputed con- 
 clusions resulting from a study of these sacred books, take the 
 moral sentiment of humility and see how it has been inculcated 
 by the various teachers of the great religions. In the Hindu 
 scriptures we read: "The soul is its own witness therefore 
 offend not thy conscious soul. " The Buddhist version is : "Be 
 lowly in thy heart that thou mayst be lowly in thy actions." 
 In the Zoroastrian Bible it runs: "Haughty thoughts, like 
 thirst for gold, are sins." The Confucian form is: "To in- 
 dulge a consciousness of goodness is to lose it." The Moham- 
 medan maxim reads: "Defer humbly to thy superiors, out of 
 deference speak to them with respectful speech." In the Old 
 Testament we find it stated: "The greater thou art the more 
 thou shouldst humble thyself." The New Testament affirms: 
 "Whosoever shall humble himself as a little child the same 
 is greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven." As an example of the 
 oneness of these sacred books in their presentation of the re- 
 ligious sentiments, take the consciousness of man's kinship to 
 God and his sense of immortality. Note how the seven Bibles 
 of the seven religions deliver a uniform message in varying 
 words of man's hope of a hereafter based on the conviction that 
 he is a soul and comes from the Eternal. "Give to the plants 
 and waters thy body, but there is an immortal part of thee 
 which belongs to the world of the holy" is what we read in 
 
 9
 
 the Hindu scriptures. In those of Buddhism we are told "the 
 soul is myself, the body is only my dwelling place." Says the 
 Zoroastrian Bible, "I fear not death, I fear only not having 
 lived well enough. ' ' The Confucian affirmation reads : ' ' Man 
 never dies. Because men see only their bodies do they hate 
 death." And the Mohammedan Qur'an records the invitation, 
 "0 thou soul which art at rest return unto thy Lord well 
 pleased with thy reward and well pleasing unto God." The 
 Jewish Bible declares "the memorial of virtue is immortal. The 
 righteous shall be held in everlasting remembrance." The New 
 Testament states that though ' c our outward man perish our in- 
 ward man is day by day renewed." 
 
 Speak the Golden Rule in a Christian church and its echo 
 is heard in every temple, synagogue and mosque: The seven 
 statements recorded by the seven religions of "the Golden 
 Rule" are these: 
 
 Hindu: "The true rule is to do by the things of others as you do 
 by your own." 
 
 Buddhist: "One should seek for others the happiness one desires 
 for one's self." 
 
 Parsee: "Do as you would be done by." 
 
 Confucian: "What you would not wish done to yourself do not 
 to others." 
 
 Mohammedan: "Let none of you treat a brother in a way he 
 himself would dislike to be treated." 
 
 Jewish: "Whatever you do not wish your neighbor to do to you 
 do not unto him." 
 
 Christian: "All things whatsoever ye would that men should 
 do to you do ye even so to them." 
 
 The second great result of the discovery of these sacred 
 books was none other than the famous convention called at 
 Chicago in 1893 the World's Parliament of Religions. But 
 for the realization of the first great result of this discovery, the 
 second could not have been achieved. It followed naturally 
 and spontaneously as a consequence of the first, the World's 
 Fair being simply the adequate occasion for realizing the 
 dream of such an assembly. Since the discovery of America 
 nothing has marked the advance of civilization so decisively 
 as this mammoth convocation. Here was something bigger 
 than the Ferris wheel, brighter than the splendor of the great 
 
 10
 
 white city itself. Yes, even that magnificent panorama of 
 architecture afforded by the exposition buildings, paled be- 
 fore the procession of the world's great faiths. At the head 
 of that procession walked a Swedenborgian layman, C. C. 
 Bonney, president. of the Parliament, arm in arm with scarlet- 
 robed Cardinal Gibbons, the highest dignitary of the Roman 
 Catholic Church in the United States. Then followed Jew and 
 Greek, Christian and Confucian, Buddhist and Brahmin, Meth- 
 odist missionary and Hindu monk ; all in one triumphal march 
 of brotherhood. Would that some painter had been present 
 to put on canvass that memorable scene, the assembling on one 
 platform of these representatives of the world's religions, 
 prophetic of the death-knell of sectarian exclusiveness, rivalry 
 and pride, and symbolic of the coming peace among conflict- 
 ing systems of faith. 
 
 The parliament was conceived and planned by a Pres- 
 byterian preacher, Dr. J. Henry Barrows. The closing 
 speech was made by a Swedenborgian, Charles C. Bon- 
 ney; the final prayer was offered by a Jewish rabbi and 
 the benediction pronounced by a bishop of the Roman Catholic 
 church. What is called Christian courtesy was manifested to 
 a much more marked degree by the "heathen'' delegates than 
 by the "Christian." The one discordant note came not from 
 any "pagan" source, but from the Reverend Joseph Cook of 
 "Boston Monday Lectureship" fame, who took occasion to 
 cast aspersions upon the beliefs of those who did not acknow- 
 ledge Jesus as the Christ of God, the soje savior of mankind. Of 
 the one hundred and thirty-nine sects into which Christianity 
 has thus far been divided, all those having a large following 
 were represented at the parliament except the Episcopalian. 
 Officially this branch of the Christian church was not repre- 
 sented but many Episcopal clergymen were present on their 
 own responsibility, notably Revs. A. W. Momerie of London 
 and Heber Newton of New York. The American church fol- 
 lowed the lead of the Anglic'an church in declining to par- 
 ticipate in the proceedings of the parliament. The archbishop 
 of Canterbury, head of the Anglican church, took the ground 
 that for Christianity to be represented on the platform with all 
 
 11
 
 the non-Christian faiths placed it on a level of equality with 
 these and as this could not be admitted by the archbishop, the 
 only alternative was to withhold the representation of his 
 church. Given his viewpoint there was no alternative open. 
 He could not make Christianity part of the parliament without 
 admitting thereby that the other religions had equal claims with 
 it and in this he was indisputably correct. For when Christian- 
 ity through its representatives did consent to sit in the parlia- 
 ment on equal terms with the other faiths, it surrendered, 
 whether intentionally or unintentionally, the claim to be the 
 one only divine religion in the world. 
 
 The effect of the Parliament on the non-Christian foreign 
 delegates was to give them a better impression of Christianity 
 than they ever had before. Christianity had come to them in 
 war ships and at the point of the bayonet. It had come with 
 a missionary and a Bible, indeed, but with opium and the rum- 
 bottle besides. Moreover, when the missionary came it was 
 with a haughty, presumptuous, un-Christian air, seeking to 
 persuade these pagan people that unless they adopted his re- 
 ligion they were utterly, hopelessly lost. But at the Parlia- 
 ment of Religions, these so-called pagan people had an op- 
 portunity to see some of the finest representatives of Chris- 
 tianity, some of the noblest products of western civilization ; 
 consequently they returned to their homes in the Orient with 
 new and corrected conceptions of Christianity and its repre- 
 sentatives. The effect of the Parliament on i'lirist inns was to 
 alter the Pharisaic tone with which they had thanked God 
 that they were not blasphemers, atheists, infidels or evon as 
 these idolators. The Parliament opened Christian eyes to the 
 fact that only one third of the world's population has adopted 
 Christianity, that all of the great religions excepting Mo- 
 hammedanism, are older than Christianity and rich in moral 
 and spiritual precept and example. The Parliament made it 
 thenceforth impossible for any Christian missionary ever again 
 to go to India or China or any other foreign country with the 
 message, carried thither for centuries before, that two thirds 
 of God's children are doomed eternally unless they become 
 converted to the Christian system of theology. In the spring 
 of 1893 the American Board of Foreign Missions debated the 
 
 12
 
 question whether or not missionaries should be allowed to go 
 to the Orient unless they were prepared to teach the doctrines 
 of the "fall of man" and "hell" for unbelievers therein. But 
 sine*- the autumn of that year no such qualification has been 
 ivijuiivd and never again will be. In short, the one grand 
 effect of the Parliament has been a broadening of sympathies, 
 a removing of prejudices and misunderstandings, a revealing 
 of common, moral and religious ideas and ideals, irresistibly 
 making for the brotherhood of man to a degree unprecedented 
 in the history of civilization. Each year sectarian barriers 
 are being removed, creeds being revised or rejected and em- 
 phasis is being increasingly laid upon the forces that make for 
 spiritual union and practical co-operation. The movement, 
 however slow or dimly perceived, is yet unmistakably in the 
 direction of greater freedom of thought, more allegiance to the 
 scientific method in solving open questions of morals and 
 faith and the assumption of a more catholic, appreciative, cos- 
 mopolitan attitude among people of different persuasions. 
 
 Of the world's great historical religions there are but seven 
 extant. The Assyrian and Babylonian religions lost their in- 
 dependent existence more than twenty-five centuries ago. The 
 Egyptian religion perished as a separate system of faith with 
 the decline and fall of the civilization that had professed it. 
 The Greek religion gave place to the Roman and the Roman in 
 due time was replaced by the Christian, which in the process 
 of Roman conversion adopted and adapted many pagan customs 
 and beliefs. 
 
 Herder, the German dramatist, compared the world's great 
 religions to the strings of a harp, each of which gives forth 
 a peculiar note of its own, while the harmonious blending of 
 all produces a symphony of music. Each of the seven extant 
 great religions has its dominant note, its distinctive feature, a 
 doctrine that differentiates it from all the rest, the several melo- 
 dies constituting, when blended, a symphony of universal re- 
 ligion. The dominant note of Hinduism is the Divine Presence 
 pervading nature; of Buddhism, renunciation; of Parsism, 
 purity; of Confucianism, reverence for the past; of Judaism, 
 righteousness; of Christianity, love; of Mohammedanism, sub- 
 mission. 
 
 13
 
 Even as the seven primary colors of the prism when 
 blended give us a ray of pure white light, so the seven great 
 religions, having each its individual color, when blended create 
 the pure white light of non-sectarian or universal religion. 
 To the end, then, that we may learn our indebtedness to these 
 great systems of faith, see what permanent contribution of 
 moral and spiritual helpfulness each has made and profit prac- 
 tically in the conduct of life by our study, let us go, like pil- 
 grims, with the scrip of sympathy and the staff of sincerity 
 to the shrines of the world's great faiths, to find, on each of 
 the seven Sundays, moral inspiration and spiritual refreshment 
 at the shrine. 
 
 -14-
 
 THE GOSPEL OF HINDUISM. 
 
 POEM. 
 From the "Rig-Veda," Mandala X; translated by late F. Max Mueller. 
 
 Nor aught nor naught existed ; yon bright sky 
 
 Was not, nor heaven's broad roof outstretched above; 
 
 What covered all? What sheltered? What concealed? 
 
 There was not death, hence was there naught immortal 
 
 There was no light of night, no light of day, 
 
 The only One breathed breathless in itself, 
 
 Other than it there nothing since has been. 
 
 Darkness there was, and all at first was veiled ' 
 
 In gloom profound, an ocean without light. 
 
 Then first came Love upon it, the new germ 
 
 Of mind; yea poets in their hearts discerned 
 
 Pondering this bond between created things 
 
 And uncreated. Came this ray from earth 
 
 Piercing and all-pervading, or from heaven? 
 
 Then seeds were sown and mighty powers arose, 
 
 Who knows the secret? Who proclaimed it here, 
 
 Whence, whence this manifold creation sprang? 
 
 The most high Seer that is in highest heaven, 
 
 He knows it or perchance e'en He knows not. 
 
 SCRIPTURE SELECTIONS. 
 PENITENTIAL, PSALM, FROM THE "RIG- VEDA." 
 
 (Compare Ps. CXXX in the Old Testament; also the "Litany" of the 
 Episcopal Prayer Book.) 
 
 Varuna, Thou bright and strong God have mercy. 
 Through want of strength have I gone astray, have mercy 
 
 Almighty, have mercy. 
 
 1 go along trembling like a cloud driven before the wind, have 
 
 mercy Almighty, have mercy. 
 
 It was not my will that led me astray; wine, anger, dice, 
 thoughtlessness; have mercy Almighty One. 
 
 15
 
 Not yet, Varuna, cause me to enter the grave, have mercy, 
 
 Almighty, have mercy. 
 Absolve us all from the sins of our fathers and from those we 
 
 ourselves commit. 
 O Varuna, it was necessity, it was temptation, have mercy, 
 
 Almighty, have mercy. 
 
 PRAYER, FROM THE "RIG-VEDA." 
 
 O Thou Almighty One, thine we are; we who go on our 
 way are upheld by Thee. Day after day we approach Thee 
 with reverence. In Thy friendship we are at home. Deliver 
 us this day from heinous sins, give us understanding as a father 
 his sons and keep us in Thy blessed protection forever. 
 
 THE DISCOURSE. 
 
 "I first call Agni hither, for our happiness, 
 
 I then call Mitra-Varuna to shield us here, 
 
 I call on Ratri (night), sending all the world to rest, 
 
 I call for help on Savitri (Sun) the brightest god." (Rig Veda I, 35.) 
 
 The effort to deal with seven great religions, each com- 
 pressed into a single discourse of forty minutes would appall 
 even the most audacious of speakers . My task is humbler and 
 more limited in scope. Instead of trying to give a detailed and 
 critical account of these religions I shall seek to indicate the 
 peculiar message of each, showing what each has that serves to 
 differentiate it in some marked degree from all the rest. Re- 
 verting to Herder's comparison, I shall endeavor to sound the 
 note which each contributes to the symphony of universal 
 religion and make this the main purpose, the positive and 
 constructive aim of each discourse. A religion can be under- 
 stood only by sympathy and freedom from bias ; a religion can 
 be expounded only as the speaker puts himself, for the time 
 being, into the heart of that religion, and so presents its par- 
 ticular gospel that any one of its most devout and learned ad- 
 herents would endorse the presentation and feel that the aim 
 in view had been in large measure fulfilled. 
 
 16
 
 Partiality is just as fatal to equity as is prejudice, when 
 judging the world's great religions. Consequently he who 
 stands outside of them all has an advantage which discipleship 
 to any one of them is apt to forbid. When the forester in 
 Aesop's Fable, wished to persuade the lion that a man is, 
 stronger than a lion he showed him the statue which repre- 
 sented a man in the act of throwing down a lion. Whereupon 
 the lion remarked, "their positions would have been reversed 
 had a lion been the sculptor." The fact that Christians have 
 been for the most part the sculptors of the non-Christian re- 
 ligions explains in some measure the lack of justice done them 
 in Christian books. He whose position is wholly non-sectarian 
 is much more likely, by reason of his universality, to arrive at 
 just conclusions regarding these religions than is he who stands 
 already committed to one of them. From a non-sectarian 
 view point, with no other desire than to see the truth as it is, 
 animated by sympathy and appreciation, with no pre-estab- 
 lished preference for one religion rather than another, let us 
 approach these great religions and seek the distinctive gospel 
 of each, beginning with Hinduism, which, in its earliest form, 
 as "Vedism," represents probably the oldest of all. Hinduism,, 
 like every other great religion, has had its evolution and it can 
 therefore be intelligently studied only in the light of its de- 
 velopment. Perhaps in no better way can we determine and 
 appreciate what the gospel of Hinduism is than by tracing 
 the successive stages of its growth. 
 
 India, or Hindustan, is an immense country to be com- 
 pared, not with Spain, Germany, or France, but only with Eu- 
 rope itself, for 'it is as large as all Europe minus Russia. Down 
 its western slope flows the mighty river "Indus," which means 
 "great stream" and Hindustan denotes "land of the great 
 stream." 
 
 Four thousand years ago this vast country was inhabited 
 by a variety of ferocious tribes who were gradually conquered 
 by a new and warlike people from beyond the Himalayas, on 
 the table-lands of Central Asia. These invaders called them- 
 
 17
 
 selves "Aryas," i. e., lordly, or worthy ones. They were gifted 
 
 with poetic imagination, memory, language, keen intellectual- 
 ity and, above all, with a strong religious instinct. While still 
 a migratory people, before they had crossed the Indus and en- 
 tered India proper, they had composed hymns which testify 
 to intense religious feeling, fostered in the presence of the 
 Himalayas, the Indus, and other nature-marvels of their en- 
 vironment. The oldest hymns of the collection known as the 
 " Rig- Veda" belong to this primitive period, showing that at 
 first these Aryas were simple nature worshippers, personifying 
 the forces and phenomena of nature, singing hymns to these 
 deities and offering to them sacrifices because of the relation 
 in which they believed their gods stood to human affairs. Grad- 
 ually and by a perfectly natural process, a pantheon of gods 
 was formed consisting eventually of 3,338 deities, classified 
 in three main groups, suggested by the three divisions of 
 nature about them, viz: gods of the earth, of the air, and of 
 the sky. Along with this polytheistic process went the 
 development of the sacrifices, becoming increasingly elaborate 
 and ritualistic and giving rise in due time to a system of 
 "castes." Thus there grew up a systematic religion with its 
 sacred book, "The Vedas," its ceremonial of hymns and sac- 
 rifices and its castes. This stage of India's religious develop- 
 ment is usually called "Brahmanism," even as the unorganized 
 primitive type of religion with its Vedic hymns, simple sacri- 
 fices is known as "Vedism." Brahmanism took its name from 
 "Brahma," the soul of the universe, the underlying essence 
 of all that is, a religious concept dimly perceived in the Vedic 
 period, definitely expressed in the Brahmanic period and de- 
 veloped in true philosophical fashion in the "Vedanta" and 
 other systems of philosophy, all of which are rooted in the 
 "Rig- Veda." But the excessive devotion of Brahmanism to 
 ceremonial usages and the increasing exclusiveness caused by 
 the caste-system led inevitably to a reaction in favor of prac- 
 tical piety as opposed to ritualism and in favor of the brother- 
 hood of man as opposed to castes. This reaction occurred about 
 550 B. C. and was led by Siddartha, or Gotama, the Buddha. 
 
 18
 
 Long and obstinate was the struggle between Buddhism and 
 Brahmanism in India. By wisely adopting some of the former's 
 best elements Brahmanism succeeded in checking the Buddhis- 
 tic reaction and keeping its hold on the masses. By the end of 
 the tenth century of our era Buddhism had been practically 
 banished from India to the islands of the Indian Ocean. Thus 
 the more familiar reaction represented by Protestantism in the 
 sixteenth century and the counter-Reformation of Cath- 
 olicism had a prototype and parallel in the history of India 'a 
 religion. Today the vast majority of the people of India are 
 Hindus. They belong to the third period in the evolution of the 
 Vedic faith, and which may be distinguished from "Vedism"^ 
 and "Brahmanism" by the term "Hinduism." The masses 
 worship "Vishnu" and the other Vedic gods. They also avail 
 themselves of idols, lirst introduced at the time of the counter 
 reformation. But it should be understood that these idols 
 are used simply as aids to concentration in worship of the 
 gods. The Hindu idols are not worshipped as gods, but serve 
 simply to help the worshipper in concentrating his thought 
 and feeling on the real object of his worship. The cultured 
 people of India, who hold to "Hinduism" worship "Brahma" 
 and retain all the finer elements of the two older faiths. A few 
 decades ago the "Brahmo-Somaj (Society of God) was or- 
 ganized in India, under Ram Mohun Roy, an independent and 
 truly catholic thinker. This is an eclectic movement which 
 claims several "thousand adherents and with which our two- 
 societies for Universal Religion have much in common. Both 
 the masses and the cultured Hindus agree in regarding the 
 Vedas as the chief of their sacred books and the oldest of 
 lhis< ;is containing the root of their religion. They believe 
 moreover, that these hymns of the "Rig-Veda" (hymns of re- 
 ligious knowledge) were first recited by the "Rishis" or sacred 
 bards of the various Aryan tribes, but not that they origin- 
 ated tin 1 hymns. These the Rishis "saw in vision," they were 
 "revealed" to them, having existed from all eternity. Such is. 
 the Hindu doctrine of the inspiration of their scriptures. These 
 hymns were not committed to writing till about 1500 A. 
 
 19
 
 D. Prior to this date they were memorized and transmitted 
 orally from one generation to the next by students selected for 
 the sole purpose of memorizing the Vedas. 
 
 When we consult the "Vedas" to determine what the gos- 
 pel common to Vedism, Brahmanism and Hinduism is we 
 find it to be the existence of a power within each of the forces 
 and phenomena of nature, ruling it and also influencing human 
 affairs. Open the Rig- Veda anywhere and you read the daily 
 drama of sunrise and sunset, of dawn and twilight, of sunshine 
 and rain, of wind and storm, of light and darkness. "What 
 else," asks Max Mueller (to whom we are chiefly indebted for 
 what we know of the Vedas) "was there to interest these 
 Aryan shepherd-folk, but this very drama." Yet 'twould be a 
 sorry mistake to see in these descriptions merely an account 
 of nature-processes. These Aryas addressed the sun, the wind, 
 the rain, the storm, etc., with the pronoun "Thou." In the 
 words of one of the Bishis, "we are not sun worshippers, not 
 fire-worshippers, not wind-worshippers, but sun, fire, wind are 
 symbols of a power within them ruling them and related in 
 various ways to man." When, therefore, the Hindu says 
 "Savitri, Thou sun," he is not thinking of the fiery ball 
 that rises over the Himalayas and sets behind the Indus, but 
 of the power within or behind the sun, which is responsible for 
 all that the sun does, as giver of heat, or of light, as creator or 
 as destroyer. Agni, Indra, Vaiyu, Ushas, Dyaus, Maruts ; what 
 are all these names but attempts on the part of these people 
 to express the infinite in the finite, the invisible in the visible, 
 the supernatural in the natural. And when the worshipper in 
 ancient India addressed any one of his 3338 gods he for the 
 time being was regarded as the supreme god. Moreover, each 
 god had various functions and in many instances these were 
 interchangeable among gods. Hence arose the at first dim 
 but steadily clarifying conception of an underlying unity or 
 single universal power; Prajapati, Atman, Brahma, being the 
 names by which this cosmic god was calle'd in the later sin-red 
 literature. In this connection let me quote a few passages 
 
 20
 
 from the foremost authority on onr subject. He says:* 
 
 "When we take day and night, spring and winter, as they 
 come and 1:0. \\.- shall find in these hymns, thoughts such as 
 would naturally spring up in the minds of any unsophisticated 
 observers who feel that there must be something behind the 
 visible world, some powers or persons directing the course 
 of nature, possibly some power even beyond the powers, whom 
 they called Devas or Bright Ones whose daily proces- 
 sion began with the twin Asvins (Day and Night) fol- 
 lowed by Ushas (Dawn) Surya (wife of the sun), Saranyu, 
 (early dawn) Savitri (the enlivening sun) Bhaga, (the sun be- 
 fore sunrise) Surya (the risen sun) .... Originally the 
 Asvins were meant for the morning and evening, for the two 
 halves of the diurnal twenty-four hours. Then, by sim- 
 ply being addressed in the second person, day and night be- 
 came personified, became human and even divine and almost 
 every blessing that comes from day and night, especially health 
 and length of days, would naturally be ascribed to them. 
 Thus they gradually assumed the general character of saviors 
 and of physicians, their chief work being to restore life to 
 renew youth, or to give sight to the blind." 
 
 The same tendency and process reappears in the hymns 
 to Savitri, the sun, as giver of light and of life, to Agni, fire 
 on the hearth and on the altar; also light, and more espe- 
 cially the light of the sun; to Ratri. night; and to Varuna, 
 night as the coverer. Nay more, belief in and worship of these 
 gods, the powers within or behind the phenomena of nature, 
 trrew into belief in and worship of mortal attributes. In one 
 of the hymns to Varuna the worshipper, deeply conscious of 
 sin. first questions whether he can really approach the god and 
 find favor in his sight and then bursts out into a passionate 
 plea for forgiveness and redemption from his sins, feeling that 
 Yanma is a moral no less than a physical god, a god of moral 
 actions no less than of the all-covering night. Every aspect 
 of nature gave to the Aryas cause for reflection and produced 
 the belief that some power resided within or behind each force, 
 
 Max Mueller, "Auld Lang Syne," Second Series, pp. 209 sq.
 
 phenomenon, or law, so that no part of the universe was regard- 
 ed from a physical or material standpoint alone, but always 
 as embodying or expressing a power higher than man and 
 capable of influencing human affairs. 
 
 And now, I ask, in what sense have we outgrown the 
 theism of the Vedas, the gospel of the Divine in nature 
 as set forth in the oldest and most precious part of the Hindu 
 Bible? Only in this: we have dropped the letter "s." They 
 recognized deities, we know only Deity. They spoke of gods, 
 we speak of God. They thought of the universe as split up 
 into innumerable parts, each superintended by a particular 
 deity of its own ; we think of the universe as a unit, an organic 
 whole, superintended by a Power, indestructible, omnipotent, 
 infinite and manifested in myriad forms. They derived their 
 theory of the universe mainly from abstract speculation, we 
 derived ours from concrete dealing with the forces and phen- 
 omena of nature themselves. For we owe our conception of the 
 unity of the universe and our modern conception of God to 
 the labors of Count Rumford, Joule, Tyndall, Helmholz and 
 a host of other physicists, who, through actual contact with 
 nature, furnished the cumulative evidence which proves that 
 the universe is "a living whole," the product of an infinite 
 and eternal Power, whence nature and human nature have 
 been derived. But despite this difference between the Hindu 
 pantheon and our scientific theism the former still lias its 
 value for the modern world, serving to bring home to us the 
 helpful truth that all nature is divine, that there is no such 
 thing as "dead matter," that wherever we turn we are face 
 to face with the Divine. When we look up into the night sky, 
 and feel the grandeur and solemnity of the starry march we 
 cannot stop at the stars any more than could the Rishis \vh<> 
 sang the Vedic hymns. It is the power, the majesty, the mys- 
 tery of the infinite life of God that shines down upon us out 
 of the firmament. With the aid of the spectroscope we analy/e 
 a beam of light as it passes through a cubic inch of space. We 
 note the billion heat-waves and light-waves. The devout Hindu 
 would not pause at these but proceed in thought to the divini- 
 ties of heat and light. Even so should we observe not only 
 
 22
 
 the independent, myriad waves, but also the exactness of God, 
 the economy of God, the love of God revealed in that cubic 
 inch of space. Similarly, when looking into the eyes of a 
 friend, contemplating his beauty of soul and the inspiration he 
 is to me, I am reminded by the message of Hinduism with its 
 gospel of the Divine in nature and in man, that I see in all 
 this beauty of soul and inspiration and friendship, a manifesta- 
 tion of the infinitely Divine that wells up in my friend as the 
 vitalizing force of his moral and spiritual life and which the 
 sacred bard of ancient India merely pluralized because the 
 scientific conception of the unity of the universe had not yet 
 been discerned. Therefore I hold that Hinduism has its help- 
 fulness for us today by reminding us that spirit is bound up with 
 matter in all its forms, that the universe is throbbing, thrill- 
 ing, pulsing with divine energy and divine meaning. Nay more, 
 the gospel of Hinduism is not only the revelation of God in 
 nature; it suggests also the deeper truth that all things and 
 beings, according to their capacity, contain God. A stone con- 
 tains less than a crystal, a crystal less than a plant, a plant less 
 than an animal, an animal less than a savage, a savage less than 
 a civilian, a Nero less than an Aurelius, a Judas less than a 
 Jesus. Even as a pint-pot cannot hold a gallon, so a low, crude, 
 undeveloped soul cannot contain as much of God as one re- 
 fined and purified. Hence our mission in life is none other than 
 that of the Hindu. His highest' aim in life must be also ours, 
 to become so developed, so refined, so purified as to contain ever 
 more and more of God throughout the eternity in which we live. 
 
 -23-
 
 THE GOSPEL OF BUDDHISM. 
 
 BUDDHIST BEATITUDES. 
 (TRANSLATED, FROM THE PALI. BY T. W. RHYS-DAVIDS ) 
 
 Not to serve the foolish, 
 
 But to serve the wise; 
 
 To honor those worthy of honor; 
 
 This is the greatest blessing. 
 
 To support father and mother, 
 To cherish wife and child, 
 To follow a peaceful calling; 
 This is the greatest blessing. 
 
 To bestow alms and live righteously, 
 To give help to kindred, 
 Deeds which cannot be blamed, 
 This is the greatest blessing. 
 
 To abhor and cease from sin, 
 Abstinence from strong drink, 
 Not to be weary in well-doing; 
 This is the greatest blessing. 
 
 Reverence and lowliness, 
 Contentment and gratitude, 
 The hearing of the Law at due seasons ; 
 This is the greatest blessing. 
 
 To be long-suffering and meek, 
 To associate with the tranquil, 
 Religious talk at due seasons; 
 This is the greatest blessing. 
 
 Beneath the stroke of life's changes 
 The mind that shaketh not, 
 Without grief or passion, and secure; 
 This is the greatest blessing. 
 
 24
 
 
 THE GREEK CONCEPTION OF BUDDHA THE 
 ENLIGHTENED ONE. 
 
 Found in Gandhara and now in the Museum at Calcutta; presumably the oldest Buddha 
 Statue in existence. Second Century, B. C. 
 
 Hy kiiidptrmittioii of the Open Court Pub. Co.
 
 On every side are invincible 
 They who do acts like these, 
 On every side they walk in safety, 
 And this is the greatest blessing. 
 
 SCRIPTURE SELECTIONS. 
 
 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF THE BUDDHA. 
 (From the Buddhist Bible "The Pitakas," Mahasudassana-Sutta.) 
 
 1. Ye shall slay no living thing. 2. Ye shall not take 
 that which has not been given. 3. Ye shall not act wrongly 
 touching the bodily desires. 4. Ye shall speak no lie. 5. Ye 
 shall drink no maddening drink. 6. Accept no gold or silver. 
 7. Shun luxurious beds. 8. Abstain from late meals. 9. 
 Avoid public amusements. 10. Abstain from expensive dress.* 
 
 FROM THE "DHAMMAPADA. 
 (Corresponding to the "Sermon on the Mount" In the Christian Bible.) 
 
 Hatred does not cease by hatred at any time; hatred 
 ceases by love : this is an old rule. 
 
 If one man conquer in battle a -thousand times a thou- 
 sand men, and if another conquer himself, he is the greatest 
 of conquerors. 
 
 He who lives a hundred years, not seeing the highest 
 law, a life of one day is better, if a man sees the highest law. 
 
 Let no man think lightly of evil, saying in his heart, it will 
 not come near me. Even by the falling of water-drops a water- 
 pot is filled ; the fool becomes full of evil, even if he gathers it 
 little by little. 
 
 Do not speak harshly to anybody; those who are spoken 
 to will answer thee in that same way. Angry speech is painful, 
 blows for blows will touch thee. 
 
 If anything is to be done, let a man do it, let him attack 
 it vigorously. 
 
 Let each man make himself as he teaches others to be; 
 he who is w^ell subdued may subdue (others) ; one's own self 
 is difficult to subdue. 
 
 The first five were imposed on both clergy and laity alike; the last 
 five upon the clergy alone . 
 
 25
 
 Let a man overcome anger by love, let him overcome evil 
 by good, let him overcome the greedy by liberality, the liar 
 by truth. 
 
 Speak the truth, do not yield to anger, give, if thou art 
 asked, from the little thou hast; by those steps thou will go 
 near the gods. 
 
 THE DISCOURSE. 
 
 "That path which opens the eyes, bestows understanding which leads 
 to peace, to the higher wisdom, to full enlightenment, to Nirvana, verily, 
 It is th.e noble eight-fold path." Dhamma-Kakka Ppavattana-Sutta.4. 
 
 One-third of the human race, four hundred and fifty mill- 
 ion souls, find their strength and stay and inspiration in the 
 doctrines of Buddhism. Its founder was Gotama, the Buddha ; 
 Gotama being the name of the tribe to which his family be- 
 longed, a name as common in India as was the name of Jesus 
 in Palestine. "Buddha," on the other hand, is the title of a 
 function or office, corresponding in this respect to the name 
 "Christ." For, as the latter means "deliverer," or "anoint- 
 ed," so the former signifies "enlightened." Other names by 
 which the founder of Buddhism was called are: "Siddartha," 
 the name given him by his father; and meaning "he in whom 
 wishes are fulfilled;" "Cakya-muni," or monk of the Cakya 
 order; "Bhagavat," fortunate one; "Tathagata," as his prede- 
 cessors. 
 
 He was born about 550 B. C. at Kapilavistu, some eighty 
 miles from Benares, in the valley of the Ganges, and his 
 parents were King and Queen of Northern India. 
 
 The story of his life has been most charmingly told in Sir 
 Edwin Arnold's "Light of Asia," a poetical version that 
 makes free use of legendary and mythical lore concerning the 
 Buddha, and so presents the man and his message that the read- 
 er readily orients himself and enters into the very heart of the 
 reformer's thought and spirit. The poet's story is one of a 
 "great renunciation." 'Tis the story of a prince, born in a 
 palace, surrounded by luxury, provided with every available 
 source of pleasure, shielded most carefully from the sight of 
 sorrow and suffering. But one day, while driving in the royal 
 park, he who had never seen anything but health and beauty 
 
 26
 
 saw in quick succession human forms that expressed old age, 
 disease and death. That series of distressing sights marked 
 the turning point of his life. Returning to the palace, he 
 resolved the same night to discover the way of escape from 
 sorrow, sickness, old age and death. In the fourth book of the 
 "Light of Asia" is the thrilling narrative of the circumstances 
 of his departure in the dead of night to find the supreme de- 
 sideratum of human life. After six years passed in study 
 among Hindu recluses, the Buddha concludes that not in their 
 finespun speculations lies the way of escape. He then turned 
 to ' asceticism as a possible avenue to the way he seeks, but 
 almost loses his life through the severe austerities to which he 
 subjected himself and in vain. His third effort lay in the direc- 
 tion of meditation and aspiration. Seating himself under a tree 
 (the sacred "bodhi-tree" it was afterward called), he gave 
 hi ins -If up to profound thought, vowing not to rise until the 
 long-sought solution was reached. There the conviction 
 dawned upon him that extinction of desire, lust, hatred and 
 ignorance is the way to salvation, rather than reflection 
 and meditation, as taught by the Hinduism of his time. 
 
 And the story reads that his fame spread abroad in the 
 land. His anxious father and distracted wife got news of his 
 noble work, and whpn he ^eturns to them he appears clad in 
 the yellow robe of the monks of Cakya, the order he had 
 founded. Forthwith father", wife and little son unite in 
 joyous acceptance of the new way of salvation. 
 
 Towards the close of the sixth century, then, Buddhism 
 came into being as a new religion, and so popular did it be- 
 come that in the reign of King Asoka, about 250 B. C., it was 
 made the state religion of India. Then followed a long and 
 obstinate struggle for supremacy with the earlier religion, 
 Brahmanism, terminating in the expulsion of Buddhism from 
 India to the islands of the Indian Ocean, which, with Thibet, 
 China and Japan, are the chief centers of Buddhism today. In 
 passing it should be noted that among the Mongolian people 
 who have adopted Buddhism, it has undergone considerable 
 modification by the introduction of strange superstitions, in- 
 cluding deification of the IJuddha and the worship of him as a 
 god; even as in Christianity there occurred the deification of 
 
 27
 
 Jesus, within a century of his death, and forthwith the worship 
 of him as "coequal with the Father." While Heraclitus and 
 Pythagoras, in Greece, were shaping their philosophy, while 
 Ezra and Nehemiah were reorganizing the Hebrew nation at 
 Jerusalem after the Babylonian captivity, and while Confucius 
 in China was fulfilling the part of statesman and moral teacher, 
 in India the founder of Buddhism was inaugurating one of the 
 first protestantisms on record. For Buddhism arose as a protest 
 against the Hinduism of the sixth century before our era, even 
 as did the Christian Protestantism of the sixteenth century 
 against the Catholicism of that time. Nay, more, the Buddha's 
 relation to Hinduism was like that of Luther to Catholicism 
 in so far that both instituted their respective reforms from 
 within the existing religion. As Luther had sought to remain 
 a Roman Catholic, so Gotama had hoped to reform Brahmanism 
 without involving the rise of a new, independent movement. 
 The nature of his protest is understood when we recall the 
 Brahmanic tendencies and developments of his time. The 
 pure, simple religion of the "Vedas" had given place to an 
 elaborate ceremonial, with costly and showy sacrifices; a pro- 
 gramme of penances, austerities and meditations; a four-fold 
 system of caste and a succession of six philosophical schools 
 with their conflicting theories of the universe, God and man. 
 This ritualism, asceticism, class distinction and intellectualism 
 inevitably provoked protest. Siddartha, himself a Hindu, 
 trained in the Sankya, or rationalistic school of philosophy, 
 led the protestants. He agreed with his Hindu brethren that 
 the supreme desideratum of life is to stop the process of rein- 
 carnation, to get rid of "ceaseless rebirths," but he denied 
 that the way to this cessation is by offering sacrifices, by ascetic 
 living, by metaphysical speculating on deity and destiny. He 
 denied the infallibility and authority of the Veda which en- 
 dorsed and advocated sacrifices and prayers. He denounced the 
 bloody sacrifices as cruel and inhuman. He condemned the sys- 
 tem of caste distinctions as degrading and undemocratic. He re- 
 pudiated asceticism and self-indulgence as fatal alike to health 
 of body and mind. Such was the protest of the Buddha on its 
 negative side. Had he stopped at these negations, no Buddhism 
 would have been born. All movements that seek to subsist on 
 
 28
 
 negations, or on ieonoclasm, da-, as ilicy deserve to, for only on 
 affirmations, on a positive constructive gospel can human souls 
 feed. For every negation, the Buddha offered a corresponding 
 affirmation. He affirmed that the way to stop the series of re- 
 births is by living an absolutely pure and unselfish life, by 
 practicing the brotherhood of man, and by choosing a middle 
 path between asceticism and self-indulgence. For a dry theism 
 that had been reduced to ritualism, the Buddha substituted 
 a fervent morality. For the undemocratic system of castes he 
 substituted the ennobling inclusive doctrine of brotherhood. 
 For excessive fasting and feasting he substituted temperance, 
 enforcing it by his wonderful eloquence and the powerful 
 magnetism of a great personality. For the notion that the gods 
 in some way and degree determine a man's fate, he substi- 
 tuted the belief that every man holds his fortune in his own 
 hands, that each man has his "Karma." And this doctrine 
 may properly be said to have been the secret of the hold 
 Buddhism had on the Hindu population when the struggle 
 with Brahmanism began. Briefly stated, the doctrine of Kar- 
 ma implies that all acts, like seeds, bear fruit ; some soon, some 
 late. When a man dies, he is born again on earth into a con- 
 dition akin to heaven or hell. "Which of these two states it 
 shall be depends upon the character of his acts. In proportion 
 to the amount of sin and goodness he has registered, so will 
 his retribution and reward be, the reincarnation taking on a 
 correspondingly low or high plane. Neither gods nor men can 
 escape this law of Karma, or consequences. If a man be re- 
 born into a heavenly condition, life therein will be continued 
 until his good actions have been completely rewarded. But 
 he may thereupon be born into a hell-state for some evil action 
 done in an earlier existence. And, since he cannot remember 
 any of his past states, he cannot remember any of his good 
 or bad acts, and therefore cannot know what sort of a future 
 is before him. Let him, however, follow desire, and he 
 will meet the consequences; let him follow unselfishness, and 
 the effects of following desire will be gradually paid off in 
 successive reincarnations till ultimately he attains the peace 
 that passeth understanding Nirvana. Every action produces 
 
 29
 
 a "samskara" or "memory-structure" or "soul-form," and 
 the preservation of the samskaras of all past Karmas makes 
 rebirth possible and constitutes the immortality of the soul 
 and its evolution to ever higher planes of being until at length, 
 after countless rebirths, Nirvana is attained. 
 
 Such, in brief, on its constructive side was the gospel of 
 Gotama. And this protest of the Buddha, in its negative and 
 affirmative aspects, makes him, so far as we know, the first 
 Hindu radical, the first Indian iconoclast, the first positivist, 
 the first prophet of faith built on reason, of religion rooted in 
 science or exact knowledge of what is. In his dying hour 
 Gotama urged his disciples to rely on their own minds and not 
 on the Vedas in searching for truth. "Rely not on others, 
 rely not on me ; hold fast to the truth as to a lamp and avoid 
 dogmatic theorizing, which is a jungle, a wilderness, a puppet- 
 show, a fetter." This was his final appeal. 
 
 As we went to the "Vedas" to learn what the gospel of 
 Hinduism is, so also, do we go to the "Pitakas" for our knowl- 
 edge of the gospel of Buddhism. The word "Pitaka" means 
 basket, and there were in all three baskets, the "Tripitaka," 
 namely, "Vinaya," or rules of discipline, "Dhamma," or 
 ethical sermons of the Buddha preached in the course of forty 
 years, and "Abhiddhamma, " or the metaphysical parts of the 
 master's teaching. All these scriptures were, like the Vedas, 
 memorized by disciples and transmitted orally from generation 
 to generation till the year 260 B. C., when King Asoka, the 
 Constantine of Buddhism, ordered the sacred scriptures to be 
 committed to writing. The language in which they were writ- 
 ten is that which the Buddha spoke, the "Pali" dialect, which 
 is related to Sanskrit as is Italian to Latin, and this language 
 being therefore sacred to Buddhists, the manuscripts of the 
 "Pitakas" have not been tampered with to the extent we are 
 familiar with in the case of the Christian and Jewish manu- 
 scripts. 
 
 Turning, then, to the Bible of Buddhism we find its 
 gospel recorded in the founder's words. It consists of 
 four "noble truths" upon which Buddhists of whatever 
 sect or nation are agreed: First, the noble truth about sor- 
 
 30
 
 row, namely that it exists and that rebirth is dreaded because 
 it involves a rebirth of sorrow. Second, the noble truth about 
 the cause of sorrow, namely, that it is caused by desire, lust, 
 ignorance, hatred. Third, the noble truth about, the removal 
 of sorrow, namely, that the removal of the cause of sorrow 
 brings the cessation of sorrow. Fourth, the noble truth about 
 the path that leads to the cessation of sorrow, namely, the 
 noble eight-fold path, to-wit: Right views, right aspirations, 
 right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right 
 mindfulness and right meditation. How tame all this 
 must have sounded to a people steeped in sacrifices, penances, 
 austerities, castes and speculation. How tame, perchance, it 
 sounds to those of us who know not the wonderful wealth of 
 moral and spiritual significance contained in each of the con- 
 stituent parts of this noble eight-fold path. Read the 186 
 dialogues in which the Buddha has expounded the depth of 
 meaning in these eight requirements. For one, I cannot resist 
 the conviction, after reading the dialogues, that if Jesus could 
 have heard the Buddha's exposition of the noble eightfold 
 path he would have said, "brother, thou art not far from the 
 kingdom of heaven." That you may have some conception of 
 what is involved in the pathway to "Nivana" the blessed 
 state in which rebirth is no more let me synopsize the 
 content of the first of the eight needs, "right views, expounded 
 by the Buddha in the forty-third dialogue and a little more 
 briefly in the ninth. The man of right views understands what 
 is evil and what is good and the roots of each. He knows the 
 bases of bodily and mental life, how they arise and afterwards 
 cease. As a result, he gets rid of sensuality and ill-will toward 
 others. Moreover, he knows what sorrow is, its origin and ces- 
 sation, how it is bound up with the temporary individuality 
 resulting from the evanescent union of the five "skandas" or 
 groups of qualities that make up each individual; he knows 
 how sorrow results from craving and how it ceases in Nirvana. 
 Again, he knows what old age and death mean, how both of 
 them came from birth and how both are overcome byArahfttship 
 the soul-condition in which one is prepared to enter Nirvana. 
 He knows about birth and becoming, about the lust and 
 thirst from which they proceed and how all these cease in 
 
 31
 
 Arahatship. and he knows, too, about the sensations and the 
 ideas that follow thereon, how they arise and to what they 
 lead and when he knows all this, then is his insight right, his 
 views are correct and the man is endowed with an abiding 
 sense of truth. 
 
 Thus the note sounded by Buddhism is renunciation, 
 renounce desire, lust, ignorance, hatred and escape from sor- 
 row and rebirth is secured. 
 
 Like Hinduism, Buddhism begins with right knowledge as 
 the prime essential, but it is not right views of God, or of 
 prayer, or of the hereafter that are deemed of first rate import 
 ance ; rather is it right views of men and of things as they are 
 here and now. To this need of right knowledge Buddhism 
 added the necessity of purity, of integrity, or courtesy, of 
 humaneness, of peace and of a universal love. So bent was 
 the Buddha on turning people's thoughts away from theistic 
 speculation and theorizing about a hereafter, of which nothing 
 is really known, to the crying moral and social needs of the liv- 
 ing present, that when his disciples pressed him for an answer 
 to the question, what is Nirvana? he refused to answer and 
 turned their thoughts back to the path that necessarily leads 
 to Nirvana, saying, this is your only practical concern. Simi- 
 larly he was averse to discussing the theistic problem. Indeed, 
 the Buddhism of Gotama was practically atheistic in that the 
 God-idea is given no presentation, and only when he 
 himself had been raised to the rank of a God did his ethical 
 religion meet with any great degree of popular acceptance. 
 Buddhists praised and adored his memory. They made images 
 of him in various forms placing them in temples and at road- 
 sides a practice which Hinduism borrowed from its rival. To 
 Gotama the Buddhist offers no prayer, because he is in Nirvana. 
 Only to the gods of the Hindu pantheon, which "passably good 
 Buddhists" (as they came to be called) believe in, was pnivcr 
 offered. But the Buddhism of the founder recognized no 
 supreme deity, only the gods of the Hindu pantheon; but these 
 he considered finite, subject to Karma and the process of re- 
 births. The place above all these finite deities ho left vacant. 
 "Better," he said, "homage to a man grounded in the Dharn- 
 ma, than to Agni for a hundred years." 
 
 32
 
 Thus the ethics of Buddhism is at once intensely prac- 
 tical and thoroughly humanitarian. On the other hand its 
 philosophy of life is essentially pessimistic. This world is evil, 
 it is " Maya, ' ' illusion. To find a way of escape from it therefore 
 becomes man's chief end and aim. The way is found by living 
 the most completely unselfish life possible; renouncing desire, 
 accepting the four noble truths and taking the eightfold noble 
 path which leads to the cessation of rebirths and the absolute 
 rest of Nirvana. No wonder that Buddhism has been called 
 "the religion of organized weariness." If conscious personal 
 survival be involved in the meaning of Nirvana and on this 
 the authorities still differ while the founder himself was non- 
 committal then assuredly Nirvana at best can be no more 
 than a temporary resting place for tired souls, who will wish 
 to take the path of the more abundant life when rested and 
 refreshed. The "peace that passeth understanding" is not 
 statical, not stagnation, not simple, aimless rest, but new op- 
 portunity for putting forth more of the infinite possibilities of 
 the spirit, in thought and love and action. Unless man's 
 "heaven" means room for such growth, which is life, it 
 would not be desirable. What the soul wants is life, life ever 
 more abundantly and no Nirvana could permanently satisfy 
 the soul except as it made provision for that growth which is 
 life. 
 
 Finally it must be said that by fixing attention on this life 
 and its pressing moral and social needs, by refusing to answer 
 questions regarding another life which did not practically con- 
 cern him, by laying emphasis on character as more than creed, 
 on virtue as more than theosophizing, on temperance as more 
 than asceticism or self-indulgence ; by holding up the broth- 
 erhood of man as the ideal human relationship, by teaching 
 that every man must "work out his own salvation with dili- 
 gence," Gotama performed an indispensable service in the 
 evolution of Aryan religion and bequeathed to the race precepts 
 and an example of renunciation that will be an inspiration for 
 all time. 
 
 -33
 
 THE GOSPEL OF ZOROASTRIANISM. 
 POEM. 
 
 A ZOROASTRIAN PSALM. 
 (From the "A vesta.") 
 
 Teach me to know thy laws, O Lord. 
 
 That I may walk by the help of thy pure spirit. 
 
 Sim and stars, clouds and mountains, all move to Thy praise, O 
 
 righteous Ahura Mazda. 
 And I, with my mouth, will sing Thy praise as long as I have 
 
 breath. 
 
 Turn not away from the three best things ; 
 Right thoughts, right words, right deeds. 
 He who knows purity knows Ahura Mazda. 
 To such is He father, brother, friend. 
 Praise be to the name of Ahura, 
 Who always was, who is and ever shall be. 
 
 SCRIPTURE SELECTION. 
 FROM THE ZOROASTRIAN BIBLE. 
 
 (Fron? the "Gathas," the oldest portion of the Zoroastrian Bible, the 
 
 "Avesta." 
 
 Now will I proclaim to you who are drawing near and seek- 
 ing to be taught, those animadversions which pertain to Him 
 who knows all things. Hear ye then with your ears and be ye 
 wakeful, for I will tell you of the wisdom of the Creator and 
 sing hymns to the Mighty One. In the beginning there were 
 two principles, twins, the good and the evil. Side with one 
 of these ; both ye cannot belong to. Choose ye to be good and 
 not base. Between the opposing spirits let the wisely-acting 
 choose aright ; choose ye not as the evil-doers. Splendid things 
 are garnered up for residence in the good mind. Wisdom is 
 the shelter from lies, the destroyer of evil spirits. The prudent 
 man wishes to be only where wisdom dwells. May we be such 
 as those who make this world progressive, till its perfection 
 shall have been reached. And when perfection shall have been 
 attained, then shall the blow of destruction fall upon the Demon 
 of falsehood, but swiftest in the happy abode of the good mind 
 
 34
 
 ZOROASTER. 
 
 Copied from a Bas-relief at Persepolis. Examples of Persian Iconography in " Early 
 Sassanian Inscriptions," by Edw. Thomas, F. R. S. 
 
 Hy kind jttt mission of the Opfii d.urt Pub. Co.
 
 of Ahura, the righteous saints shall gather, they who proceed 
 in their walk on earth in good repute and honor. Wherefore, 
 O ye men learn the blessings that are in store for the righteous. 
 
 (Yasna xxx.) 
 
 PRAYER. 
 
 With venerating desire for the gift of Thy gracious help r 
 O Lord, and stretching forth my hands to Thee, I pray for the 
 blessing of Thy bountiful spirit. May my actions toward all 
 men be performed in the Divine Righteousness. Inspired by 
 Thy benevolent Mind, may I possess those attainments which 
 are to be derived from the Divine Righteousness. Do Thou, 
 Lord, the Great Creator, come to me with Thy good mind and 
 do thou who bestowest gifts through Thy Righteousness, be- 
 stow alike long-lasting life on us. And in order that this life 
 may be spent aright, do Thou bestow the needed powerful spir- 
 itual help, not for a time alone, but for all the ages. 
 
 (Yasna, xxviii.) 
 
 THE DISCOURSE. 
 
 "HFMATA, HFKHTA, HAVARSHTA." 
 <Good thoughts, good words, good deeds.) A vesta. 
 
 Tin- various races of the earth may be traced to one or the 
 other of three primordial gro.ups. Aryan. Semitic, Turanian. 
 The Aryans dwelt about the sources of the Oxus. on the table- 
 lands of Central Asia. Thence spread in seven successive mi- 
 grations the tribes that peopled Europe and most of Asia. Of 
 these migrations the two earliest were to India and to Persia. 
 Hence the primitive Aryan n-ligion diverged at this time in 
 two distinct directions, resulting in the religion of ancient 
 India and the religion of ancient Persia. 
 
 Persia's place among the nations of antiquity was second 
 only to that of Greece and Rome. In the fifth century before 
 our era Persia had come into possession of Assyria and Baby- 
 lonia. She held the Hebrews in captivity abroad and under 
 Persian sway at home. Edicts, dictating various policies, po- 
 litical, social, religious, were sent from the Persian capital to 
 Scythia. India, Egypt and Greece. So great indeed was Persia's 
 power that the late Max Mueller, commenting upon it, de- 
 
 35
 
 dared .that if the battles of Salamis and Marathon had been 
 lost and Greece been conquered by Persia, Zoroastrianism, 
 which was the state religion of the Persian empire, would have 
 become the religion of the civilized world. If, by the grace of 
 God, of Ahura Mazda, Darius had been victorious over Alex- 
 ander the Great, the Olympian deities and myths would have 
 given place to the purer faith of Zoroaster. A thousand years 
 later, Persia was again in the ascendant, till the year 641, when 
 the Mohammedans established Islam where Zoroastrianism II.-K! 
 reigned. The great majority of the faithful, refusing to adopt 
 the new religion, were exiled and found refuge in the presidency 
 of Bombay. There today one may see most of the 100,000 souls 
 who are descendants of these exiles, a people world-renowned 
 for their intellectual and moral worth and for the perfervid en- 
 thusiasm with which they perpetuate the religion of their 
 fathers ; a religion that has contributed to Christianity, through 
 Judaism, several important doctrines; a religion, moreover, Hint 
 has left its solemn record not only in the pages of the " Avesta" 
 or Zoroastrian Bible, not only on the giant ruins at Persepolis 
 with their suggestive inscriptions touching the character of 
 those who espoused that religion, but also in the high-toned 
 lives of the Parsee colony in Bombay. 
 
 Carlyle once said "great men have short biographies," 
 but of Zoroaster we have no authentic biography at all. Less 
 is known of him than of any other of the world's great religious 
 teachers. Meagre as is the authentic, undisputed information 
 we have concerning the life of Jesus, what we positively know 
 concerning Zoroaster is still less. We do not even know bis 
 name, for Zoroaster or Zarathustra, is the title of an office or 
 function, precisely as are the names "Christ" and "Buddha," 
 the former signifying "deliverer," the latter, " enlightener. " 
 Zoroaster means "excellent singer" and the name '"Qpitama," 
 often applied to the founder of Parsism, means "sacred." 
 Again, of his birthplace we know not the town, only the pro- 
 vince. Bactria, it was called, in ancient times ; on the modern 
 map it is Afghanistan. Nor, again, do we know the date of 
 his birth. It has been set as far back as 6000 B. C. and as far 
 forward as 300 B. C., but the most generally accepted belief 
 among scholars is that Zoroaster was a contemporary of David 
 
 36
 
 and Solomon and therefore ilourlbhed about the year 1000 
 B. C. From the Avesta we learn that Zoroaster was a husband 
 and a father, a warrior and a farmer. In his capacity as founder 
 of the faith that bears his name we learn that he was the first 
 annunciator of the great moral triad which forms the corner- 
 stone of the faith, "humata, hukhta, hvarshta;" good thoughts, 
 irood words, good deeds. He was, moreover, the first priest of 
 the sacred fire. Just here let me interject a word of caution. 
 Do not commit the popular mistake of supposing that the 
 Parsees are fire-worshippers. That would be as serious an 
 error as to think the Buddhists idol-worshippers. As their idols 
 are merely aids to spiritual concentration upon the immediate 
 object of their worship so to the Parsees fire serves a similar 
 helpful purpose. To them fire is the most perfect symbol of 
 deity they know. Its refulgence, its purity, its power, its in- 
 corruptibility, its glory; all suggest the nature of deity and 
 consequently the sacred flame is ever kept burning as a help- 
 ful symbol of their God when concentrating thought upon him 
 and his attributes. As well speak of Christians being cross- 
 worshippers as to say of the Parsees they are fire-worshippers. 
 The lamented Jeneghier D. Cola, of Bombay, once quoted for 
 me, when discussing with him this subject, a sentence that 
 states very tersely and clearly the truth regarding the 
 Zoroastrian 's use of fire when worshipping his God. "While 
 our eyes are fixed on the sacred fire our hearts are humbled 
 before God." This choice of fire as the supreme symbol of deity 
 illustrates very forcibly the influence of environment upon re- 
 ligious sentiments and ideas. Iran, the official name of Persia, 
 was a veritable fire-country, bespread with naphtha springs, 
 meteoric lights and burning mountains. Even to this day the 
 hot winds parch the dry grass, needing but a spark to set it all 
 ablaze. In such a country, therefore, no symbolism could have 
 been more natural, spontaneous and inevitable than that of fire. 
 
 Just what the actual causes were that led to the separation 
 of Zoroaster and his followers from their Aryan brethren is in 
 large measure an open question. From various passages in 
 the Avesta we are led to infer that Zoroaster did not agree with 
 those of his Aryan compatriots who held sacrifices, penances 
 and fasting to be of paramount importance in religion, with 
 
 37
 
 those who looked on prayer as an end in itself and who felt it 
 right to pass half the day in begging food that the remainder 
 might be passed under a shady tree in undisturbed medita- 
 tion and prayer. From all this Zoroaster recoiled, claiming 
 that prayer should always be a means never an end, that 
 work is the completing of prayer, the hands fulfilling the 
 prayer of the heart, that industry is more than meditation and 
 settled agricultural life better than wandering nomadic life. 
 Such were the affirmations which supplemented the negations 
 of Zoroaster's protest and all those who agreed with him settled 
 down to farming life on the plains of Iran and under the in- 
 spiration of a great saying which Zoroaster declared had been 
 revealed to him by Ahura-Mazda. "Four places on earth are 
 most dear to God. First, where the sacred fire burns. Second, 
 where homes are established with wife and children, with fire 
 and plenty. Third, where the most corn and fruit are produced. 
 Fourth, where dry land is watered and marshy land drained." 
 What a mighty inspiration it must have been to these people, 
 who had settled on a soil that required persistent and most 
 arduous labor of irrigating and tilling to make it productive 
 and life-sustaining, to hear that the chosen place of their 
 abode was most pleasing to their God. That Zoroastrianism 
 should teach the dignity of toil, the sacred efficacy of hard 
 work was but natural. Turn to the teachings of Zoroaster 
 and his successors as recorded in the Avesta and note the re- 
 iterated emphasis on work as a sacred duty. I quote a few 
 sentences selected at random from that portion of the Parsee 
 Bible which contains most of the practical precepts of the great 
 teacher and is called the "Vendidad:" 
 
 "Indulge not in slothful sleep lest the good work which 
 needs to be done, remain undone. The cock lifts up his voice 
 with every splendid dawn and cries: Arise ye men and so 
 destroy the demon who would put back the world in sleep. 
 Long sleeping becomes you not; arise, 'tis day who rises first 
 comes first to paradise. 
 
 In whom does the Lord rejoice? In him who adorns the 
 earth with grain and grass and fruit trees, who dries up moist 
 lands and waters dry places. He who tills the ground is ,is 
 good a servant of religion as he who offors ten thousand 
 
 38
 
 prayers. He is a holy man who has built a home in which are 
 wife and children and the sacred fire. Whoso cultivates barley, 
 cultivates virtue. When the wheat appears the demons hiss 
 and when the grain is ripe they flee in rage and despair. He 
 who does not eat has no strength to live rightly nor to work. 
 To become enervated is the nature of a demon. 
 
 (Vendidad, xviii, iii.) 
 
 Thus the emphasis of the Zoroastrian ethics is on work and 
 these passages plainly show us why work was regarded as a 
 sacred duty. Simply because work is the most powerful instru- 
 ment for destroying the power of the demons and above all, 
 the arch-demon, "Ahriman," source and maintainer of all that 
 is evil in the world. Zoroaster taught that this world is under 
 the immediate control of two principles or forces, the good one, 
 Qpenta Mainyus, and the evil one, Angro-Mainyus, or Ahriman. 
 The good principle, or spirit, created the world and man ; then 
 the evil one crept in and marred the creation and ever since a 
 war has been on between these opposing powers ; the good one 
 ultimately to triumph over his adversary and become converted 
 to goodness himself. Not the annihilation but the conversion 
 of the Satan of the Parsee faith is what the followers of Zoro- 
 aster anticipate. In other words, there is but one living God, 
 Ahura Mazda, omnipresent, omniscient, but not as yet omni- 
 potent; for coeval with him 2 though not coeternal with him 
 lives Ahriman, limiting still the power of the good spirit, but 
 destined eventually to be conquered. Hence the deepest prayer 
 of the Zoroastrian is, "May Ahura-Mazda rule at will all 
 creatures." But not till the advent of the milennium can that 
 prayer be fulfilled, for God will rule "at will" all creatures 
 only when evil shall be no more. Thus the Zoroastrian religion 
 is not dualistic in the sense of recognizing two deities because 
 it recognizes but one supreme God Ahura Mazda and teaches 
 adoration of Him and the six lofty spirits (Amesha-Cpentas) 
 subject unto Him. Zoroastrianism is dualistic only in the 
 sense of placing in pronounced antithesis two separate king- 
 doms, the one of light, truth, purity, the other of darkness, 
 error and evil. And the ever-present sense of this dualism, of 
 the antithetical forces of light and darkness, truth and false- 
 hood, purity and impurity, is the note sounded by Zoroastrian- 
 
 39
 
 ism and contributed to the symphony of Universal Religion. 
 This world then, according to Parsism, is a great battlefield on 
 which the contending forces of good and evil are at war and 
 the weapons wielded by the good are not swords but plough- 
 shares, not guns, but "good thoughts, good words, good deeds." 
 In answer to the first question of the old catechism, "wh.tl is 
 the chief end of man," the Zoroastrian answer is, the conquest 
 of evil by work which shall keep pure the earth, the body, 
 the soul. The earth is the pure creation of God ; keep it pure 
 by tilling it and allowing no noxious weeds to grow. Water is 
 a pure creation of God; do not pollute it; never wash your 
 hands or linen in a running stream. If you see a corpse floating 
 on a river, remove it lest the water become polluted. Air is 
 a pure creation of God; keep it pure by ventilation, by dissi- 
 pating noxious gases and destroying noxious insects. Fire 
 is a pure creation of God ; keep 'it pure. Do not burn a dead 
 body lest you pollute the fire. Do not bury it, else you pollute 
 the earth. How, then, do the Parsees dispose of their dead? 
 On the "Towers of Silence," a four-walled enclosure, open to 
 the sky; there vultures congregate and devour the bodies of 
 the dead. 
 
 In addition to the gospel of purity and work as agencies 
 for the annihilation of evil and the conversion of Ahriiuan, 
 Zoroastrianism sets forth an elaborate and detailed system of 
 ceremonial aiming at the maintenance of purity. This we find 
 recorded in the books of the Avesta known as the "Vendidad" 
 and the "Vispered." All this ceremonial and ethical purity, 
 then, was intended simply as an engine for the extermination 
 of evil, for the ultimate conquest of Ahriman and his hosts of 
 attendant demons. Every stroke of work is a stroke that 
 means some measure of defeat for Ahriman. Every utterance 
 of the moral triad and of the various names of Ahura Mazda 
 is a blow dealt at the evil one.* 
 
 This emphasis on work, on the sacred efficacy of work, 
 necessarily made Zoroastrianism prohibit fasting, self-torturo, 
 austerities, excessive grief, everything calculated to enervate 
 the body, or reduce the power of the will. According to this 
 religion the deadliest of sins is suicide, because no one should 
 ever allow the sacred flame of enthusiasm over the conquest of 
 
 *See the Ormuzd Yast, "Sacred Books of the East," Vol. xxlil, pp. 26-29. 
 
 40
 
 evil to die out in his heart or to reduce by even one soldier 
 the valiant army of warriors battling against evil and sin. The 
 first three virtues of this religion are these : Speaking the 
 truth, keeping one's promises and keeping out of debt. Ahri- 
 man is the father of falsehood and deceit, and every truthful 
 word tends toward his conversion. So with unreliability and 
 getting into debt. These sins, too, are the joy of Ahriman and 
 tend to lengthen his days of power and must, therefore, be 
 sedulously shunned. 
 
 Such is the glorious and inspiring gospel of Zoroastrianism. 
 To every man and woman it says : You are a child of God ; by 
 birthright you belong to the kingdom of the good. You were 
 created a free moral agent and, therefore, you have liberty to 
 choose between good and evil. But on your choice will depend 
 your salvation and the joy of sharing the ultimate victory 
 of the good. Moreover, the strictest account is kept in heaven 
 of all you do and say, and on the judgment-day your thoughts, 
 words and deeds will be weighed in the balance and your future 
 destiny in hell or heaven decided. Of that destiny a detailed 
 description is furnished in the twenty-second Yast of the 
 Avesta. Therefore, it behooves you to choose the good life. 
 To help guide you in making that choice, Zoroaster was sent, 
 teaching that God's will is the victory of the good and that 
 c;ich soul should do physical and moral work as a co-operator 
 with God in the gigantic, age-long task of redeeming the world. 
 Hence, the Parsee's highest inspiration in the conduct of life 
 is the thought that he is a co-operator with God in the battle 
 ;i'_ r ;iinst evil and sin and destined to share the joys of victory 
 in store for all who fight on the side of Ahura-Mazda, sovereign 
 Lord. 
 
 What a contrast between this gospel of "up and doing" 
 and the gospel of meditations, penances, fastings, inculcated 
 by Brahmanism when the Buddha came to institute reform! 
 What a contrast, too, between the optimistic aim of Zoroaster, 
 to overcome evil, and the pessimistic aim of the Buddha to 
 overcome existence, seeing that the practically endless series 
 of rebirths means rebirth of suffering and sorrow. 
 
 How successful Zoroaster was with his gospel is evidenced, 
 first, in the writings of the historian Herodotus, who speaks 
 
 41
 
 In the highest terms of the nobility and purity of the Parsees 
 in the reign of Darius. It is evidenced next in the lives of the 
 10,000 living in Afghanistan and the 90,000 residing 
 in Bombay. Travelers tell us that these communities exemplify 
 the teachings of Zoroaster to a most remarkable degree. Truth- 
 fulness, temperance, industriousness, commercial integrity and 
 chastity, they say, are strikingly exhibited among them. One 
 does not meet with drunken men or with ' ' women of the town ' ' 
 the degraded creatures that are seen on the streets of every 
 Christian city. As for the generosity of the Parsees, it is un- 
 rivalled, extending far beyond the limits of Bombay ; to Russia, 
 at the time of the Crimean war, so that Florence Nightingale 
 spoke of the Parsee colony as ' ' the salt of the Bombay commun- 
 ity;" to France, in 1859, when the terrible inundation created 
 the need for foreign help, and the Parsees were among the first 
 and most liberal contributors ; to the United States, at the time 
 of the civil war, the sanitary commission having received a 
 handsome remembrance from the Parsees, sent because of their 
 deep sympathy with the suffering soldiers and with the cause 
 of freedom and of union. A decade or so ago George Peabody 
 was said to hold the record for generous giving to charity by 
 his gift of half a million dollars, but the record was broken 
 by a Parsee, who gave three and a half million dollars to charity. 
 
 Such are some of the practical results of the gospel of him 
 whose name we do not know, whose birthplace and birthday we 
 do not know, the details of whose career we do not know, yet 
 who exerted an influence that has been felt for twenty centuries 
 or more. From his mind and heart has flowed a stream of 
 moral and spiritual inspiration that has made glad the waste 
 places of unnumbered human lives and made the desert of 
 drudgery, difficulty and darkness to blossom as the rose. 
 
 In your home and in mine there stands no altar devoted to 
 the keeping of the sacred fire, yet in the spirit of the Parsee 
 faith it behooves us to keep aflame on the spiritual altars of our 
 hearts the sacred fire of purity, so that our lives, too, may be 
 aglow with good thoughts, good words, good deeds. 
 
 -42-
 
 CONFUCIUS. 
 
 Hy kind permission of the Optn Court Pub. Co.
 
 THE GOSPEL OF CONFUCIANISM. 
 
 POEM. 
 
 MORAL LESSONS FROM NATURAL FACTS. 
 
 (From the "Shi-King," part of the canonical scriptures of the Confucian- 
 
 ists.) 
 
 All true words fdy, as from yon reedy marsh 
 The crane rings o'er the wild its screaming harsh. 
 Vainly you try reason in chains to keep 
 Freely it moves as fish sweep through the deep. 
 Hate follows love, as 'neath those sandal trees 
 The withered leaves the eager searcher sees. 
 The hurtful ne'er without some good was born 
 The stones that mar the hill will grind the corn. 
 
 All true words spread, as from the marsh's eye 
 The crane's sonorous note ascends the sky. 
 Goodness throughout the widest sphere abides, 
 As fish round isle and through the ocean glides. 
 And lesser good near greater you shall see, 
 As LITOWS the paper shrub 'neath sandal tree. 
 And good emerges from what man condemns 
 Those stones that mar the hill will polish gems. 
 
 SCRIPTURE SELECTIONS. 
 (From the "Analects" of Confucius.) 
 
 The superior man is exacting of himself; the common man 
 is exacting of others. 
 
 Not to retract after committing an error may itself be 
 called error. 
 
 In serving your prince, make your service the prime con- 
 cern and let salary be a secondary matter. 
 
 In sjx'akiim. perspicuity is all that is needed. 
 
 Three things the superior man greatly reveres: The ordi- 
 nances of Heaven, great men, the words of sages. 
 
 Possess good qualities yourself and then you may expect 
 I hem from others. Before you can blame others, you must be 
 free from fault yourself. The perfect man loves all men. He 
 is not governed by private interest, but considers the public 
 good. Without virtue, both riches and fame are like passing 
 clouds.
 
 Not to speak when we should is cowardly concealment. 
 
 Some one asked, "What say you to the remark, 'requite en- 
 mity with kindness'?" The Master answered: "How, then, 
 would you requite kindness? Requite enmity with straightfor- 
 wardness and kindness with kindness." 
 
 Tsz-Kung put to him the question : "Is there one word on 
 which the whole of life may proceed?" The master replied : "Is 
 not reciprocity such a word? What you do not wish done to 
 yourself, do not unto others. ' ' 
 
 FROM THE "DOCTRINE OF THE MEAN," BY CONFUCiL'S. 
 
 In the way of the superior man there are four things, to 
 not one of which I have as yet attained To serve my *f ather, as 
 I would require my son to serve me : to this I have not attained ; 
 to serve my prince, as I would require my minister to serve me : 
 to this I have not attained ; to serve my elder brother, as I 
 would require my younger brother to serve me : to this I have 
 not attained ; to set the example in behaving to a friend, as I 
 would require him to behave to me : to this I have not attained. 
 
 Is it not just an entire sincerity which marks the superior 
 man? 
 
 Sincerity is the way of Heaven. The attainment of sincer- 
 ity should be the way of man. 
 
 THE DISCOURSE. 
 
 "Behave toward others as you would have them behave toward you." 
 
 Confucius. 
 
 Thus far in this series we have dealt with three religions 
 of the Aryan branch of the human family, the Hindu, Buddhist 
 and Zoroastrian faiths. We come now to a religion of the 
 Turanian branch the Mongolian race of China; a people in 
 whom the understanding has been more highly developed than 
 the imagination, whose sacred literature contains poetry in- 
 deed, but poetry that partakes very much of the character of 
 prose ; a people whose interests are practical and scientific, 
 rather than speculative and metaphysical ; whose concern is for 
 order, system, decorum, moderation, rather than for meditation, 
 prayer and spiritual songs; a backward-looking race, whose 
 reverence for the past accounts, fundamentally, for many of the 
 peculiar characteristics of its present life. 
 
 China is a country that supports nearly one-third of the 
 
 44
 
 human lac- on an an-a eq&i . lo tiun. of the 1'nited States, with 
 twenty-five hundred miles of sea-coast and three immense river- 
 valley> an'-ireiratiii'r six thousand miles: a country that has wit- 
 (I the rise and fall of successive civilizations, the earliest 
 of which is so ancient as to make modern the pyramids and the 
 sphinx of Egypt; a country whose industry is world-renowned 
 and symbolized most impressively by the gigantic wall, twelve 
 hundred miles long, twenty-five feet high, and surmounted by 
 a parapet on which six horsemen may ride abreast, built twenty 
 eenturies ago, and its masonry still commanding the admiration 
 of the world. Of the nature and variety of that industry, let 
 tin- achievements of Peking and Nanking, of Canton and Hong- 
 KOII.LT tell. Nay, we have but to recall the fact that our own 
 English words, cotton, nankeen, silk, satin, are of Chinese origin 
 to appreciate the significance of that industry. The watchword 
 of China has ever been "education," and whatever limitations 
 there may be in her system of education and type of instruction, 
 China supports, besides a host of smaller institutions of learn- 
 ing, the University at Peking whose student-body outnumbers 
 that of our two largest American universities combined. 
 
 It seemed to me necessary to make these statements part 
 of my discourse because we of the Western world are altogether 
 too apt to think of the Chinese as a barbarous, half-civilized 
 people, remarkable for the peculiar arrangement of their hair, 
 their yellow skin and slanting' eyes; their opium, debauchery, 
 and dirt. We forget that China has her centers of culture and 
 refinement as well as her slums ; that she is no more to be judged 
 by the denizens of these districts than is America by the "Bow- 
 -ry " population of her great cities. Let it be remembered that 
 if China has her coolie cooks, canners and laundry-folk, she 
 has also her magnificent men of the stamp of Li-Hung-Chang, 
 and Minister Wu (who fairly electrified a New York audience 
 by his candid and unbiased discussion of the relative merits 
 <!' < ont'iicianism and Christianity), and Prince Pung Kwang Yu, 
 who read a most scholarly and exhaustive essay on "Confucian- 
 ism" at the World's Parliament of Religions. But, towering 
 above all these and all other splendid types of cultivated man- 
 hood, the supreme inspiration of the eighty million souls who 
 today profess Confucianism, is Kung-Fu-tse, i. e., Rung the Mas- 
 ter, or Confucius, as we have learned to call him in this Latin-
 
 ized form of his name, founder of the state religion of China. 
 He was born in Southwestern China, in the principality of Lu, 
 between May and December, 551 B. C., and was therefore a 
 contemporary of Gotama, the Buddha. It appears that already, 
 as a mere child, Kung showed a pronounced proclivity for 
 serious study, and at fifteen he had acquired an enviable repu- 
 tation for his intellectual attainments. At nineteen he man-it -d 
 and a son and daughter were born to him. When twenty years 
 of age he was made "keeper of the provincial stores," and a 
 little later transferred to the Agricultural Department as 
 ''superintendent of farms and lands." How profoundly he felt 
 the dignity of his office and the duty of faithfully fulfilling its 
 requirements is evidenced by the allusions he made to them 
 in the "Analects,' indicating a man of incorruptible honor and 
 utter consecration to high ideals. Holding somewhat radical 
 views on questions of government and venturing to air them, 
 his reward was dismissal and exile. For thirty years he trav- 
 eled from kingdom to kingdom, proclaiming his theories of 
 political reform. Everywhere he was greeted with a respectful 
 hearing, because of his royal ancestry and also on account of 
 his evident learning. When he had reached the age of fifty, 
 a crisis occurred in the affairs of his native province and he was 
 recalled to serve as "magistrate." This afforded him oppor- 
 tunity to convert some of his theories into practice, and we 
 are told that the effect was most remarkable. Under his 
 administration, children and elderly people were properly fed, 
 the poor were properly cared for, the dead were honored, 
 crime diminished, capital punishment and war were dis- 
 couraged, and even the "Magna Charta" was antici- 
 pated, in that he maintained the right of a 
 prisoner to trial by jury. So prosperous, power- 
 ful and peaceful was the principality of Lu under the Confiu-ian 
 regime that the princes of the neighboring province of Ts'i 
 became jealous and forthwith planned to undermine the safe's 
 success. Knowing the weakness of the King of Lu for sp'-etae- 
 ular entertainments, the chief officials of Ts'i secured the ser- 
 vices of eighty captivating dancing girls to present tin- Kiii<r. 
 with sixty spans of elegantly caparisoned horses, and to enter- 
 tain him with dance and song. So charmed was the Kinii that 
 he at once gave himself up to amusement, ignoring his duties as 
 
 46
 
 chief executive of the state and giving no audience to any 
 minister or other official who sought him for business inter- 
 views. This disgraceful conduct extended over three days. 
 Confucius, utterly disgusted, withdrew from the magistracy, 
 resolving to devote the remainder of his life to training a band 
 of disciples in the principles of morality and good government 
 and to editing the sacred books of his fellow-countrymen. All 
 this he accomplished, and in the seventy-third year of his age 
 he died, leaving a legacy of moral precepts, governmental 
 principles and personal example that has enriched and ennobled 
 countless lives within and without the confines of China. Min- 
 ister Wu assures us that the influence of Confucius is on the 
 increase, that his name is held in veneration throughout the 
 Chinese Empire not by Confucians alone, but also by the 
 Taoists, Buddhists, and devotees of other religions protected 
 by the Chinese government ; that his word is recognized as law, 
 by the emperor no less than by the poorest peasant, and that 
 his spirit, like an atmosphere, pervades the thought and life 
 of the four hundred million inhabitants of China. 
 
 Through his influence, there has been maintained in China 
 that reverence for parents, family affection, and love of order 
 and moderation upon which every traveler remarks. In him 
 the national trait of reverence for ancestors was so pronounced 
 that it made intellectual humility the most conspicuous of his 
 virtues. To him originality was a power never to be claimed 
 by anyone under any circumstances. "Yao" and "Shun," 
 two kings of remote antiquity, Confucius regarded as the real 
 sources of whatever of truth and goodness he possessed, and 
 to these somewhat mythical paragons of perfection he would 
 ever revert as the originators of that which he did but humbly 
 transmit to later generations. Thus it was that the traditional- 
 ism of China made Confucius, even as in due time Confucius 
 remade China. No sooner had he incorporated in himself 
 the race to which he belonged than it felt the reaction of his 
 mighty personality, eighty million souls turning to him as he 
 had turned to Yao and Shun ; his biography, however, unlike 
 theirs, being almost wholly free from mythical and legendary 
 admixture. Though primarily a systematizer and teacher of per- 
 sonal and political morality, no one ever believed more than he 
 in the power of example as the most efficacious of all moral 
 
 47
 
 agents. Though not to be described as a religious teacher, in 
 the conventional sense, Confucius was a deeply religious man, 
 profoundly conscious of his relation to "Heaven," the term 
 most frequently used by him to express his sense of a power 
 higher than man and upon whom all things and creatures are 
 dependent. No one can read the life of Confucius without 
 being particularly impressed by his firm belief thai he wa 
 under the special protection of Heaven. From the many inci- 
 dents illustrating his sublime confidence in the protection of 
 Heaven, let me cite two. When, with certain of his disciples, 
 in the city of Kuang, he was for five days imprisoned and it 
 seemed to his disciples that release would be indefinitely post- 
 poned, their signs of discouragement and despair knew no 
 bounds. Whereupon the Master reminded them that Heaven 
 protects the culture which he and they represent. Wlial harm, 
 then, can possibly come to those protected by Heaven? On 
 another occasion, when he was threatened with assassination, 
 the disciples urged him to hasten his flight. But Confucius 
 replied: "Heaven has endowed me with virtues; what, have 
 I to fear from oppressors?" 
 
 To determine what the gospel of Confucianism is, we must 
 go to the Confucian Bible, and more particularly to that portion 
 of it which includes the teachings of Confucius himself. In 
 its entirety, the Confucian Bible consists of "the five classics" 
 and "the four books." Only the former take rank as the canoni- 
 cal scriptures of the Confucianists. They are: (1) "The Spring 
 and Autumn Annals," a chronicle written entirely by Con- 
 fucius; (2) The Shi-King, a collection of songs; (3) The Shu- 
 King, an historical work; (4) The Yi-King, the Book of 
 Changes, or transformations magic; (5) The Li-Ki-King, the 
 Book of Rites. The word "King" signifies "web" or "string," 
 and these four Kings were compiled and edited by Confucius. 
 The four books contain the sayings of Confucius, and were col- 
 lected after his death by his disciples. These books are known 
 as the "Analects," or table-talk of Confucius, "The (ireat 
 Learning," "The Doctrine of the Mean," and "Mencius," the 
 stanchest of all champions of Confucianism, born about one 
 hundred years after Confucius' death. 
 
 Turning to those books which contain the teachings of 
 Confucius himself, we find that they deal for the most part with 
 
 48
 
 politics and morals, with the personal morality of the individual 
 and with his morality as a member of the body politic. Five 
 relations of man to man are recognized, sovereign and subject, 
 husband and wife, parent and child, elder and junior children, 
 friend and friend. To each of these five relations certain duties 
 are attached, the fulfilling of which makes one a desirable mem- 
 ber of society, and to become a desirable member of society 
 is the chief end of man. Let everyone do good to others by ful- 
 filling the duties of his position. Let everyone be good in him- 
 self by practicing the five cardinal virtues justice generosity, 
 truthfulness, humility and propriety ( sense of the fitness of 
 things). Let kings be benevolent and subjects loyal, husbands 
 affectionate and wives devoted, parents wise and children obe- 
 dient, brothers and sisters mutually attached, friend faithful to 
 friend. Let these various relations of life be governed by the 
 s;in 10 order and serenity that we see in the solar system, in the 
 daily drama of nature's phenomena, and a heaven on earth 
 must ensue. 
 
 The ideal state, according to this gospel, is reached when 
 three great requirements have been met: (1) Regulation of 
 the individual life, or cultivation of the person, calling for 
 study and rectification of the heart ; (2) Regulation of the fam- 
 ily, which becomes possible only when persons have been 
 cultivated, calling for filial piety and fraternal submission of 
 younger folk; (3) Regulation of the state, possible only when 
 families have been regulated, calling for integrity of character, 
 economy of expenditure, and mutual confidence between ruler 
 and ruled all of which requirements, when fulfilled, result 
 in material prosperity, learning and virtue, the three greatest 
 blessings the state can have. A quotation from the "Great 
 Learning' ' will serve to show exactly the relation of these three 
 steps in "the way of the superior man," and their mutual 
 dependence : 
 
 The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue through- 
 out the empire, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to regu- 
 late their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to 
 cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to 
 rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. 
 Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the 
 utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the 
 investigation of things.
 
 Things being investigated, knowledge became complete. Their 
 knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere. Their 
 thoughts being sincere, their hearts were then rectified. Their hearts 
 being rectified, their persons were cultivated. Their persons being 
 cultivated, their families were regulated. Their families being regu- 
 lated, their states were rightly governed. Their states being rightly 
 governed, the whole empire was made tranquil and happy. "The 
 Great Learning," I, 4-5. 
 
 Such, in brief outline, is the gospel of Confucianism. To re- 
 produce in all the various relations of human life the beautiful 
 calm and poise of Nature's order, this is the Confucian ideal 
 of life. To attain this ideal, the founder proposed a systematic 
 regulation of life by specific rules, these to be multiplied until 
 they covered every smallest department of life. 
 
 In bold and striking contrast to this plan stands that of a 
 noted contemporary of Confucius, Lao-Tze, also a statesman 
 and moral teacher, the founder of "Taoism." He shared with 
 Confucius the ideal of reproducing Nature's perfect order in 
 individual and social life, but he held that this should be 
 attempted, not by establishing innumerable rules and adjusting 
 souls to them, but by developing inner purity of being in each 
 individual. Spirituality, rather than political economy, ac- 
 cording to Lao-Tze, must be the basis of the model state. Rules 
 will be of little avail if the heart be not receptive and respon- 
 sive. Let each individual contemplate "Nature's inactive 
 activity," as illustrated in the vegetable kingdom, for example, 
 where we see vegetable life planting without seeking the fruit, 
 never marring by its efforts to accomplish, everything being left 
 to develop according to its own nature ; let this ideal be present 
 from moment to moment in each human consciousness and it will 
 prove efficacious as a deterrent from wrong-doing and an in- 
 centive to true thought, speech and action. The method of 
 Confucius was purely objective, that of Lao-Tze subjective. 
 The one proposed to work from the circumference to the center, 
 from rules to the soul ; the other from the center to the circum- 
 ference, from private, individual living by the spirit to the 
 harmoniously regulated life of the political and social organism. 
 Both Confucius and Lao-Tze turned to Nature as typing an 
 ideal for human life, but while the former read Nature's 
 message to man in terms of order, the latter read it in -terms of 
 that active passivity and passive activity seen most perfectly in 
 
 50
 
 LAO-TZE -THE OLD PHILOSOPHER. 
 
 After the Traditional Conception. 
 Hy kind permission of the Open Court Pub. Co.
 
 the vegetable realm, and bidding man be molded by spiritual 
 laws known within and that prompt now action, now inaction, 
 now receptivity, and now productivity; an interpretation of 
 Nature and of man's ethical relation to the Over-Soul that re- 
 minds us very forcibly of Emerson. 
 
 Thus the note contributed by Confucianism to the sym- 
 phony of Universal Religion is reverence for Nature's order. 
 Man has no higher lesson to learn than that taught him by 
 Nature, namely, to strive for the creation of a social order that 
 shall be as permanent, as calm, as unbroken as the orderly 
 movement of Nature's forces and phenomena. And such repro- 
 duction of Nature's order is possible, according to this religion, 
 only on a basis of reciprocity the very corner-stone of the 
 entire system of Confucian teaching. Nearly five hundred 
 years before Jesus of Nazareth enunciated the Golden Rule, 
 Confucius of Lu had given it both negative and positive expres- 
 sion in his teaching. 
 
 Confucianism, then, as represented in its scriptures, is 
 essentially an ethical religion, practical and prosaic, paying 
 little attention to what is metaphysical or extra-mundane ; con- 
 cerned almost wholly with life here and now. Of what lies 
 beyond this sphere, Confucius declined to speak. He held that 
 all speculation concerning it was profitless and futile. In all 
 this Confucius reminds us of the Buddha, who, when confronted 
 with questions concerning the nature of Nirvana, simply re- 
 fused to have anything to do with them, remarking that these 
 questions are of no practical concern and pointing his inquirers 
 back to the "path" that leads to Nirvana. So Confucius would 
 ever revert to the conditions and needs of life here on earth 
 the rules, obedience to which produced the ideal state when 
 interrogated concerning the nature of death and the hereafter. 
 
 Here are three sentences from his teachings which admir- 
 ably illustrate his attitude to eschatological questions : 
 
 "While you do not know about life, how can you know 
 about death ? While not able to serve men, how can you serve 
 their spirits?" "To give one's self earnestly to the duties due 
 to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof 
 from them, may be called wisdom." 
 
 On the question of God's nature and existence, Confucius 
 preferred not to speak, not because he was an unbeliever, but 
 
 51
 
 because this subject, like immortality, lay outside his immedi- 
 ate province as an ethical teacher. Plenty of passages there are 
 in the sacred books of Confucianism to show that the founder 
 believed himself related to a higher power, but, knowing noth- 
 ing of that power, he preferred to be silent on the subject. 
 He did not deny God's existence, he did not deny the reality 
 of a future life; he simply felt that theism and immortality 
 have no practical or necessary bearing on the moral life of a 
 practical people. In all this Confucianism is closely akin to the 
 "Ethical Culture Movement" of our own time, which also seeks 
 to set aside philosophical and theological questions in the 
 interests of the moral life. But I venture the assertion that the 
 suppressed theism which marks both Confucianism and the 
 Ethical Movement will eventually be brought to the surface 
 and found to be the indispensable basis for a truly valid moral 
 code, theism, in turn, having for its adamantine foundation, 
 science or exact knowledge of whatever is. I can see no future 
 for any religion that does not build its theism on science and 
 its ethics on theism, and the history of the vicissitudes of both 
 Confucianism and the Ethical Culture Movement give consider- 
 able support to this conviction. 
 
 But one religious ceremony did Confucius endorse and 
 advocate, the worship of ancestors. And every Confucian, 
 from the Emperor down, observes the injunction of the Master. 
 Besides the simple ceremony as conducted in Confucian homes, 
 there is held at Peking, once annually, in the red-walled Temple 
 of Confucius, a ceremony at which the Emperor burns incense 
 before the tablet of the Master and utters this solemn invoca- 
 tion : ' ' Great art Thou, O Perfect Sage ! Thy virtue is full, 
 thy doctrine complete. Among mortal men there has not been 
 thine equal. All kings honor thee. Thy statutes and laws have 
 come gloriously down. Thou art our pattern. Reverently 
 have the sacrificial vessels been set out. Full of awe we sound 
 our drums and bells." In these ceremonies, whether private 
 or public, there is nothing intercessory, nothing propitiative ; 
 they are simply commemorative. 
 
 If Buddhism may be described as a religion of the heart 
 and Zoroastrianism as a religion of the hand, Confucianism 
 may be spoken of as a religion of the head. For, precisely as 
 the Buddha declared the way of salvation to lie in a self- 
 
 52
 
 renouncing love, and Zoroaster in purifying work, so Confucius 
 affirmed that it lay in the intellectual mastery of a systematic 
 morality. He firmly believed that if people would but rever- 
 ently memorize and master his system of moral rules, it would 
 react on the will and so produce the moral life. People, he used 
 to say, are just like so much water, which takes exactly the 
 shape of the dish into which it is poured. If, now, one could 
 make a moral dish out of a series of precepts, and then, as it 
 were, pour the people into it, the desired moral types would 
 be the result. Confucius believed that by reverently assuming 
 certain physical postures, the very soul of the individual would 
 become informed with the graces of character of which the 
 postures were external signs. I cannot but think that this 
 faith of his in the efficacy of rules and attitudes to achieve 
 the desired reform, this method of working from the circumfer- 
 ence to the center, which has left its impress on the national 
 system of education, explains in large measure the arrested 
 development of China. 
 
 But, beside his reliance on rules, Confucius depended also 
 on the biographies of great men of the past, persuaded that by 
 contact with these a contagion of their noble deeds would ensue 
 and so make for the deepening of the moral life of the reader. 
 Still more, however, did Confucius rely on the power of exam- 
 ple as a more potent moral educational agent than either biog- 
 raphy or precepts. He found an incentive to set a worthy 
 example in the fact that imitation is so natural a tendency of 
 human nature. And it should be noted that the mighty lifting 
 power of his example was due, not so much to his exalted char- 
 acter and great learning as to his striving for an ideal of virtue 
 and of scholarship not yet attained. Others seeing that striving, 
 were moved to a like endeavor. So is it ever with a truly great 
 teacher. Not his intellectual or moral attainments, but his 
 spiritual passion to possess more of infinite truth and right 
 this it is that determines his lifting power over other lives. 
 Whosoever is a true servant of the ideal, even though failure 
 be his portion, makes the ideal contagious and so lifts other lives 
 toward the same height he himself would reach. So was it 
 with Confucius, who taught not only by moral precepts and by 
 appeal to the biography of illustrious ancestors, but also by the 
 mightier power of a magnificent personal example. 
 
 53
 
 THE GOSPEL OF JUDAISM. 
 
 POEM. 
 
 THE IDEAL, MAN. 
 Psalm XV, translated by Wellhausen for the "Polychrome Bible." 
 
 Yahweh, in thy tent who dares to sojourn? 
 
 On Thy holy mountain who dares to dwell? 
 
 He who lives blamelessly and practices righteousness, 
 
 And speaks from his heart what is true, 
 
 Who utters no slander with his tongue, 
 
 Does no wrong to another, 
 
 And his neighbor he does not calumniate, 
 
 Pompous arrogance he despises, 
 
 The God-fearing man he respects ; 
 
 He pledges his word to his neighbor and keeps it, 
 
 He who does this, for all time cannot be shaken. 
 
 SCRIPTURE SELECTIONS FROM THE "OLD TESTAMENT." 
 
 The righteousness of the perfect shall direct his way, but 
 the wicked shall fall by his own wickedness. The righteousness 
 of the iipright shall deliver them, but they that deal treacher- 
 ously shall be taken in their own mischief. He that is stead- 
 fast in righteousness shall attain unto life, but he that pursueth 
 evil doeth it unto his own death. Righteousness exalteth a 
 nation, but sin is a reproach to any people. Better is a little 
 with righteousness than great revenues with injustice. He that 
 followeth after righteousness and mercy findeth life, righteous- 
 ness and honor. Treasures of wickedness profit nothing, but 
 righteousness delivereth from death. The path of the righteous 
 is as the shining light which shineth more and more unto the 
 perfect day. (Proverbs.) 
 
 Wherewith shall I come before Yahweh and bow myself 
 before the most high God ? Shall I come before him with burnt 
 offerings ? Will Yahweh be pleased with ten thousand rivers of 
 oil? He hath showed thee, O Man, what is good. For what doth 
 Yahweh require of thee but to do justly, to love mercy and to 
 walk in humility before thy God (Micah vi, 6-8.) 
 
 54
 
 MOSES. 
 
 From the Sculpture by Michael Angelo. 
 By kind permission of the Open Court Pub. Co.
 
 PRAYER. 
 From the Old Testament. Ps. XVII. 
 
 Hearken, O Yahweh, to innocence, to my entreaties give- 
 heed, attend to my prayer from lips free from guile. From 
 Thee my right will proceed. Shouldst Thou prove my heart, 
 shouldst Thou search me at night, though like ore Thou shouldst 
 try me, Thou wilt find nothing. I have held fast to the law 
 Thou hast uttered. Aloof have I kept from the paths of the 
 violent. My steps have followed close in Thy footprints, my 
 feet have not faltered. I call Thee, O God, for Thou wilt answer 
 me. Incline Thine ear, listen to my speech. Of Thy favor 
 show noteworthy tokens, Thou helper of those seeking refuge. 
 
 THE DISCOURSE. 
 
 "In the way of righteousness is life, and in the pathway thereof there 
 is no death." Old Testament: Proverbs, 12:28. 
 
 We are to consider next in this series of discourses the 
 Gospel of Judaism the religion of a people whose story extends 
 over thirty centuries and is, without exception, the most re- 
 markable in the history of nations. A people, homeless, suspect- 
 ed, persecuted ; wanderers over the face of the earth, seeking a 
 home, yet finding none ; subjected throughout the Christian cen- 
 turies, even to our own day, to gross indignities from the people 
 of Jesus and Paul, both of whem were Hebrews ; a people vic- 
 timized by Gentile prejudice, so deep and so inhuman that 
 even little children of refined Jewish parents come home from 
 school crying because of abuses heaped upon them by the chil- 
 dren of "Christian" parents, whose finest religious inheritance 
 is from Moses and his successors; a people whose religious 
 patriotism has been intensified by persecution to such a degree 
 that, no matter how liberal his convictions may be, a Jew will 
 remain a Jew so long as the Christian makes it a reproach to 
 be a Jew ; a people numbering today eleven millions, and of the 
 American million or more it must be said that, as a class, they 
 represent the most self-respecting, self-reliant, self-supporting, 
 self-sacrificing, law-abiding portion of our mixed population. 
 Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism the three relig- 
 ions that remain to be considered are all of Semitic origin. 
 Just whence the Semites came is still one of the vexed ques- 
 
 55
 
 tions of ethnology, but in historical times we know they occu- 
 pied the Tigris-Euphrates valley, or Mesopotamia, and here it 
 was that the ancestors of the Hebrews lived. They were one of 
 many Semitic tribes that migrated to the Mediterranean shores. 
 After a relatively brief sojourn in Goshen, on the Egyptian 
 border, they marched, under Moses, northward to Canaan, 
 settling down to agricultural life and organizing a religion 
 which, like Vedism, early Buddhism and the most ancient 
 religions of Persia and China, underwent development, its evo- 
 lution ranging from the crude polytheism and ethics of patri- 
 archal times to the pure monotheism and highly specialized mor- 
 ality of the post-exilian prophets. 
 
 As we turned to the Vedas to know what the gospel of 
 Hinduism is, to the "Pitakas" for that of Buddhism, to the 
 "Avesta" for the gospel of Zoroastrianism, to the "Kings" and 
 "Analects" for the Confucian gospel, so we turn to the Bible of 
 Judaism to learn what its gospel is. The Bible of Judaism 
 is the Old Testament, or Covenant, as it should be 
 called, because "testament" is a mistranslation of 
 a Greek word meaning covenant or agreement, and 
 refers to the agreement said to have been made be- 
 tween the Hebrews and their God, acording to which 
 he promised to show them his favor; even as the "\e\v Testa- 
 ment" stands for the pledge of God's favor through Jesus the 
 Christ. This Hebrew Bible consists of thirty-nine books divided 
 into three main sections, the "Law," the "Prophets" and 
 the "Writings." Modern criticism has discovered that many 
 of these books are of composite authorship and that they have 
 not been arranged in chronological order; but to discuss ihese 
 and other results of the "Higher Criticism" would take us too 
 far afield. Prior to the year 450 B. C., when the Pentat M li 
 appeared, many books had been written, but no one as yet had 
 thoiight of making a collection of sacred writings. \a tin-ally. 
 attention was turned first to the laws which it was believed 
 Yahweh had ordained for his people. Interest centered next 
 upon the story of the beginnings of the nation's history and of 
 the creation of the world. Then all this literary material was 
 brought together and passed through successive editions till 
 it finally appeared as we now have it in the Pentateuch. For a 
 
 56
 
 long time this "Torah" alone constituted the Bible of Judaism. 
 But as the people became increasingly interested in their past 
 history they grew to feel that the books of the historians and 
 prophets were also part of God's word to Israel and conse- 
 quently a second collection was made about the year 250 B. C., 
 kn>wn as "the former and the latter prophets." For a long 
 time "the law and the prophets," constituted the Bible of 
 Judaism, as the New Testament phrase, "the law and the 
 prophets," plainly indicates. Later, other books, Job, Prov- 
 erbs, .li.uah and most of the Psalms were written, and all these 
 wrn- collected to make the third group known as "the writ- 
 ings." It so happened that the Palestinian Jews did not agree 
 with the Egyptian Jews as to what books should go into thih 
 collection, and so the discarded ones were called the "Apoc- 
 rypha," meaning doubtful. These were never received by the 
 Palestinian Jews because not sufficiently authenticated, lack- 
 ing the authority of the canonical scriptures. To our Roman 
 Catholic brethren the books of the Apocrypha are canonical, but 
 not so to most of the Protestant sects, for they reject them. 
 
 The Torah, or book of the Law, it was found, needed e^ 
 planation. Accordingly an explanatory literature was started 
 covering the century before and after the beginning of our era 
 and constituting itself a book, the ' ' Talmud. ' ' It may be de- 
 scribed as the attempt to reduce to rule the spirituality of the 
 Hebrew legislators, prophets and psalmists. 
 
 Xow the significant fact concerning this great body of 
 Jewish sacred literature is that one particular message or 
 gospel is characteristic of every section of it. Hence one may 
 properly speak of "the gospel of Judaism," and it may be 
 summed up in the word Righteousness. That is the note which 
 Judaism contributes to the symphony of Universal Religion. 
 True, the word Righteousness gained in breadth and depth of 
 content with the experience and reflection of the people, but 
 throughout all stages of its growth the word invariably stood 
 for a standard of conduct of which God is the author. Accept 
 that standard, try to live up to it, fulfil the law of righteous- 
 ness, this has been the gospel of Judaism in all ages. Let 
 us review briefly the religious history of the Jews in Old Testa- 
 ment times to see how this statement is borne out. 
 
 Go back with me to the patriarchal age, in which Abraham 
 
 57
 
 overshadows all other personages. Though it be true that 
 Abraham is a composite figure, representing a tribe rather than 
 an individual, yet the personality as presented to us in the 
 book of Genesis makes us feel that he is typical of the tribe and 
 so may be treated as an individual. He is the first Jew, bidden 
 by a compelling voice in his own heart, to leave the land of 
 his fathers, to go from Ur in Chaldea westward and lay the 
 foundations of a new nation. Yahweh (Jehovah) is 
 represented as making a covenant with Abraham and in the 
 very heart of the agreement are these words: "Be thou per- 
 fect, be a source of blessing, recognize me thy God." (Gen. 
 12:2, 17:2). How admirable a summary we have here of the 
 triple content of righteousness, which the exilian author be- 
 lieved obtained in the patriarchal era! 
 
 Second only to Abraham in historical importance is Moses, 
 the most commanding figure in the sacred Scriptures of Juda- 
 ism. He is the father of Hebrew liberty, the author of Hebrew 
 legislation; framer of the original code out of which the ten 
 commandments as we know them, were eventually developed. 
 A masterpiece of Michael Angelo, now in the church of S;m 
 Pietro in Vincoli at Rome, represents the great legislator at the 
 most dramatic moment of his philanthropic career. It is the 
 moment when, having descended from Mount Sinai with the 
 revealed tables of the law under his arm, he sees the Israelites 
 dancing about an Egyptian idol. His eyes flash with scorn, 
 his beard trembles with emotion, his left foot is thrown wildly 
 back, in the next second he will have risen and dashed the 
 sacred tablets in pieces on the ground. Standing before this 
 colossal statue one hardly knows which to admire more. Hie 
 sculptor's genius as an artist, or his mastery of the Old Testa- 
 ment record. Granted that Moses derived the substance of his 
 original code from Hammurabi, as the inscription read on the 
 black marble pillar discovered recently at Persepolis. would 
 suggest, yet positive genius is apparent in the adaptation of 
 this Babylonian code to the needs of Hebrew life. And in pre- 
 senting to his people this code Moses declares it to have been 
 divinely sanctioned and ordained, an absolute imperative of 
 duty, hedging man about \vith its "thou shalt" and "thou shall 
 not," a transcendent law of righteousness for the conduct of 
 Hebrew life. To Moses, as to Abraham before him, the gospel 
 
 58
 
 of Judaism is righteousness and the Sinaitie code is its em- 
 bodiment. 
 
 Even the maxim, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a 
 tooth." which belongs to the ethics of this period, represents 
 not revenge, but righteousness, justice, as then understood. 
 
 In the course of the five centuries following the death of 
 Moses, Israel comes into closer relations with her neighbors, 
 causing her existence as an independent nation to be threat- 
 ened again and again and her future to become increasingly 
 involved and uncertain. There were those who felt that Yah- 
 w-h was all-powerful, so that if he suffered the surrounding 
 nations to attack Israel it could only be because of Israel's sin. 
 These were the prophets, i. e., forth-tellers to the nation of 
 wluit their study of existing political, social, moral and re- 
 ligious conditions had led them. They were politicians, in the 
 best sense ; statesmen, making predictions on the basis of care- 
 ful observations and mature reflection. They take the ground 
 that Israel is assailed by foreign powers because she has for- 
 saken the commandments of Yahweh. To these men, right- 
 eousness consists of two elements, recognition and worship of 
 Yahweh alone and obedience to his rules of personal and social 
 morality. First of these prophets in the order of time is Amos, 
 a cattle-herder and owner, moved by religious patriotism to 
 ]P;I\V his ranch and serve as a reformer of the conditions he has 
 been studying. He argues that national injustice, ingratitude 
 and idolatry (worship of foreign gods) must of necessity mean 
 the absorption of Israel by Assyria and other calamities be- 
 sides, but that if the people will fulfil the divine law of right- 
 eousness, the peace and prosperity of former days will be re- 
 stored. 
 
 Contemporary with Amos is Hosea, a man of finer and more 
 delicate mould. He does not argue, he pleads passionately, 
 tenderly, with the people, beseeching them to remember Ya- 
 hweh 's love for Israel and forsake their evil ways because 
 unrighteousness Yahweh will not tolerate. The fate predicted 
 by Amos and Hosea befell Israel. The northern kingdom be- 
 came a colony of Assyria, when Samaria, the northern capital, 
 was captured by Sargon in 722 B. C. Soon the southern king- 
 dom of Judah was attacked by Assyria and two southern 
 prophets appear, corresponding in large measure to Amos and 
 
 59
 
 Hosea in the north. These were the first Isaiah and Micah. 
 The former (called the first Isaiah to distinguish him from 
 the exilian Isaiah, to whom the last twenty-six chapters of 
 the book of Isaiah are ascribed, advises Judah to trust Yahweh, 
 obey him, otherwise he will not take care of his people. At 
 the same time, the younger contemporary of the prophet, Micah, 
 makes "holiness of life" the burden of his message, summing 
 up his stirring appeal in the familiar passage from the sixth 
 chapter of his book. "He hath showed thee, O man, what 
 is good, for what doth Yahweh require of thee but to do justly, 
 to love mercy and to walk in humility before thy God." Re- 
 form ensues in Hezekiah's reign, only however to be followed 
 by a violent reaction under his successor, Manasseh, who re- 
 stores the idols and idol-temples, violating the law of righteous- 
 ness in the extreme. Then the book of "Deuteronomy" ap- 
 pears with its impassioned plea for true piety, for free, willing 
 obedience to the Divine Will. King Josiah orders the book to 
 be read to him and thereupon proceeds to institute a drastic 
 reform, making a clean sweep of the various forms and sym- 
 bols of idolatry, extirpating the worship of foreign gods and 
 achieving the positive results so graphically described in the 
 twenty-third chapter of the second book of Kings. Meanwhile, 
 however, the Assyrian empire loses its supremacy and in the 
 year 606 B. C. surrenders to Babylonia. Judah becomes a vassal 
 of Nebuchadrezzar, King of Babylon, who besieged the city 
 of Jerusalem, captured it and took off the majority of its in- 
 habitants to his capital, where they remained for fifty years 
 (586 to 536 B. C.). All this had been predicted by that great- 
 est student of existing conditions, the prophet Jeremiah. He 
 could see plainly that the Babylonian captivity was inevitable 
 and his reason was that the people had grown to care more 
 for sacrifices than for righteousness. In his intense religious 
 patriotism Jeremiah stood one day at the temple gate declar- 
 ing to the people that their temple was nothing, that their 
 sacrifices were of no avail until they mended their w;iys ;md 
 that captivity alone could teach them what true righteousness 
 involves. He has his condemnation too for those kings and 
 courtiers who have brought calamity upon Israel. 
 
 "Woe unto them that build their houses, but not with 
 60
 
 righteousness;" that live in palaces while they hold the poor 
 in contempt ; that spread the foundation of their wealth on the 
 spoliation of the weaker members of society. Religious right- 
 eousness as a social potency is what this Jewish prophet pleads 
 for: ;iiMint social unrighteousness does he protest. 
 
 For those fifty years of exile in Babylon the two chief 
 prophets were Ezekiel and the second Isaiah. The former takes 
 tin- ground that the captivity was ordained by Yahweh pur- 
 posely to purify the people and to teach foreigners his power. 
 Ezekiel makes a special claim on our attention in that he de- 
 fined the required righteousness to be not simply formal obed- 
 ience to rules of conduct, but a spiritual obedience springing 
 from the heart, a spontaneous and free acting in harmony with 
 the divine will as revealed to Judah. The second Isaiah, with 
 sublime optimism, affirms that captivity is Yahweh's mode of 
 purifying the people so that they may become fitted for the 
 greatness and glory awaiting them in the near future, a picture 
 of which is drawn in glowing colors in the fifty-third chapter 
 of the book that bears his name. He, too, it is, who speaks of 
 the " suffering servant of Yahweh," the innocent people who 
 suffered exile yet had done no wrong, and of them he says, 
 they are the "saving remnant" of the nation through whom 
 Isniel will be redeemed. From the context of his address it 
 is clear that the second Isaiah -anticipated the Messianic era 
 in the very near future, consequently the assumption that the 
 historical Jesus is referred to in his prophecy is unwarranted 
 and groundless. Isaiah's conception of the coming Kingdom of 
 God, or Commonwealth of Man, was developed out of earlier 
 prophetic thought of Israel's future, and is perhaps the most 
 dictinctive peculiarity of Jewish religious thought. It repre- 
 sents, moreover, an essential element of the contribution made 
 by Judaism to Universal Religion, the belief in a coming City 
 of Light for ;i progressing world, a state in w r hich the divine 
 and humsm will blend, in which there will be complete con- 
 formity to the Divine Will and daily life be inspired by the 
 consciousness of the Divine Presence as entering into every 
 part of life. How striking is the contrast between the forward 
 outlook of the exilian prophets to a glorious future and the 
 backward look of their contemporary Confucius whose sources 
 
 61-
 
 of inspiration were derived from contemplation of a glorious 
 and somewhat mythical past ! 
 
 As Assyria had succumbed to Babylonia, so Babylonia gave 
 way to Persia. In the year 535 B. C. Cyrus, the Persian king, 
 permitted the exiles to return to Jerusalem, and some forty 
 thousand availed themselves of the privilege. The chief 
 prophets of the return were Haggai and Zechariah. They ex- 
 horted the people to rebuild their temple and when, in 515 B. C., 
 the temple had been rebuilt, Haggai remarked that its glory was 
 greater than that of the former temple, because it marked the 
 foundation of a new Jewish church in which the desirable 
 things of all the earth would fill the new building with glory 
 (II. 6-9.) About the year 450 B. C. Ezra, a great law student, 
 with Nehemiah, who was appointed governor of Judea by the 
 Persian king, came to Jerusalem and under their direction a new 
 era of Jewish life was begun, the gospel of righteousness re- 
 ceiving an unprecedented systematic presentation in the books 
 which constitute the Pentateuch. For one hundred years the 
 Jews enjoyed peace under Persian rule, all the while absorbing 
 much of Zoroastrian thought which left its mark on Jewish 
 theology, in the theory of demons and angels, duly transmitted 
 to Christianity. Nay more, the doctrine of "the fall of man," 
 can be traced through Jewish channels back to a Zoroastrian 
 source, no less than the New Testament belief in Satan, demons, 
 angels and ministering spirits (fravashis). 
 
 When, in the middle of the fourth century before our era, 
 Alexander the Great conquered the Persians, Palestine became 
 a. colony of the Greek kingdom of Syria. Soon there followed 
 the magnificent, heroic, successful struggle for escape from the 
 thrall of Greek rule, led by Judas Maccabeus, culminating in 
 the acquisition of Jewish independence and its maintenance for 
 a hundred years under a dynasty of priest-princes, known as 
 the Asmoneans, until the year 64 B. C., when Pompey captured 
 Jerusalem and Judea became a province of the Roman empire. 
 
 My purpose in this rapid review of Jewish history is to 
 point a most important fact, namely, that the continuous sub- 
 jection of Judah to foreign powers exerted a salutary influence 
 upon her religious convictions, that these successive subordina- 
 tions, while destroying national life and annihilating all hope 
 
 62
 
 of monarchical re-establishment yet were most favorable to- 
 the religious growth of the people. The Assyrian and Baby- 
 lonian captivities, the terrible hardships endured under the 
 dominion of the Greek Syrians, the Roman siege and capture 
 of Jerusalem, all tended to quicken Israel's consciousness of her 
 relation to her God, to deepen her appreciation of his truth 
 which she believed she possessed in her Bible, to intensify her 
 miuhty hope in the Messianic era soon to be ushered in and 
 to add new virtues to those already identified with the word 
 righteousness. We have only to read the literature of the Greek 
 and Maccabean periods to see these religious and moral effects 
 of Israel's political and social tribulations. Not only have we 
 the book of Jonah, teaching that righteousness involves show- 
 ing mercy to the heathen and that the divine mercy is not 
 bounded by national lines; the book of Job, demonstrating 
 how keen was the desire, on the part of some at least, to know 
 the ways of God with men ; the book of Proverbs, a compendium 
 of moral wisdom, with its ever-recurring emphasis on righteous- 
 ness as equivalent to salvation ; but we have also, belonging to 
 this later Jewish literature, most of the Psalms, the hymn-book 
 of the second temple, a collection compiled about the year 150 
 B. C. Of what do they sing ? Of sentiments that indicate a deep- 
 ened moral and spiritual consciousness resulting from the dis- 
 cipline of adversity. Under Persian rule Israel 's religion had 
 been respected and many privileges had been granted 
 the people, but under Greek rule their religion 
 had been derided, their property confiscated, thir political status 
 annihilated, their person oppressed. How natural, then, that 
 they should turn again to their God, and to their own souls and 
 feel a new and deeper need of inward purity, of a clean heart 
 before God. We see this in the fifty-first Psalm in which the 
 jiuthor cries out for a new heart and for a recreating of the 
 vi-ry springs of his moral and religious life. ''Wash me thor- 
 oughly from my iniquity, purify me with hyssop that I may be 
 cli-jui. wash me that I may be whiter than snow. In me, O God, 
 '!( ;ite a clean heart and a spirit that is steadfast renew in my 
 breast." (Wellhausen's translation, "Polychrome" Bible.) 
 
 See, again, how the one-hundred-and-nineteenth Psalm 
 shows forth the deepened sense of reverence felt at this time 
 
 63
 
 for the Divine Will as manifested in the commandments and 
 statutes which Yahweh had given unto Israel. "Thy bidding 
 have I laid up in my heart. On Thy behests I meditate. I for- 
 get not Thy word. In the way of Thy decrees I delight. In- 
 cline my heart to Thy decrees and not to lucre. Behold I long 
 after Thy behests. Through Thy righteousness quicken inc.'' 
 In the twenty-fourth Psalm righteousness is made a condition 
 of membership in the Jewish church, while the fifteenth Psalm 
 is devoted to a description of the ideal man, the man worthy to 
 walk in God's holy hill. Who is he? "He that lives blame- 
 lessly and practices righteousness and speaks from his heart 
 what is true, who utters no slander with his tongue, does no 
 wrong to another, who pledges his word to his neighbor and 
 keeps it." 
 
 When we follow the story of Israel's vicissitudes through 
 the period of Roman rule we learn again, from the literature 
 between the two Testaments, how reverence and love for the 
 Divine Commandments which were regarded as Israel's price- 
 less possession deepened still more and how righteousness came 
 to include not only the manly virtues of the robust morality 
 inculcated by the prophets, but also the gentler virtues of pa- 
 tience, forgiveness, humility, sympathy, love, inculcated by 
 and exemplified in the lives of distinguished Jewish teachers 
 in the generation just before the birth of Jesus. 
 
 In our study of Christianity we shall revert to this stage 
 in the evolution of Jewish ethics. 
 
 And now that we have seen how all the way from pa- 
 triarchial primitiveness down through the post-exilian period to 
 the reign of Herod the Great, in which Hillel and Gamaliel 
 flourished, righteousness has been the priceless pearl of .Jew- 
 ish ethics, the central doctrine of her gospel, this discourse can 
 have but one proper conclusion, namely, that as long as man 
 shall live on this planet all those who wish to make progress 
 in righteousness will come to Israel for inspiration, to -read the 
 gospel of her prophets and her poets, her sages and her seers 
 who saw in righteousness the very core and essence of religion. 
 
 64
 
 CHRIST. 
 
 From a drawing by Eduard Biedertnann, following the traditional artistic conception and 
 utilizing especially the picture of Sodoma at Sienna. 
 
 Hy kind pertniitxion of the Open Court Pub. Co.
 
 THE GOSPEL OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 PROSE-POEM "LOVE." I Cor. XIII, vss. 1-8, 13. 
 If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, 
 
 But have not love, 
 
 1 a in become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal, 
 And if I have the gift of prophecy, 
 A 7id know all mysteries and all knowledge, 
 A ml if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, 
 Hut have not love, I am nothing. 
 And if I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, 
 And if I give my body to be burned, 
 Hut have not love, it profiteth me nothing. 
 Love suffereth long and is kind: 
 Lovo onvioth not, love vannteth not itself, 
 Is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly; 
 Seeketh not its own, is not provoked; 
 Takcth no account of evil, 
 IiY.joieeth not in unrighteousness, but 
 KV.joiceth in the truth; 
 Beareth all things, believeth all things, 
 Ilopeth all things, endureth all things. 
 Love never faileth . . . 
 But now abideth faith, hope, love, these three ; 
 And the greatest of these is love. 
 
 SCRIPT! 1 RE SELECTIONS FROM THE "NEW TESTAMENT. 
 MATT. V. 43-48, XXII. 35-40, I. John II. 7-10, 15-17. 
 
 PRAYER-SENTENCES 
 From the prayers attributed to Jesus. 
 
 Our Father who art in heaven. Hallowed be thy name. 
 Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done. 
 
 Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom 
 Thou hast given me. I have given them Thy word. I pray not 
 that Thou shouldst take them out of the world, but that thou 
 shouldst keep them from the evil. Sanctify them through thy 
 word, thy word is truth. Oh righteous Father. I have glorified 
 
 65
 
 Thee on the earth, I have finished the work Thou gavest me 
 to do. 
 
 Father, the hour is come. If it be possible, let this cup pass 
 from me, nevertheless not my will but Thine be done. 
 
 THE DISCOURSE. 
 
 "On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." 
 
 Matt. xxii:40. 
 
 The gospel of Judaism has been summed up in the phrase : 
 fulfil the law of righteousness. That law consisted of a mass of 
 rules, civil, ceremonial, moral, religious intended to cover 
 every side of life. These rules, originally few and simple, were 
 gradually expanded into the elaborate system of legislation 
 which constitutes the "Pentateuch," edited about the year 
 450 B. C. But the Pentateuch in due time became the l>;isis 
 for still further legislation, witness the "Talmud," which con- 
 sists of interpretation and development of what is prescribed in 
 the "Torah" and which came to be regarded as having a like 
 binding authority with the code attributed to Moses. The effect 
 of this elaborate and voluminous system of legislation on Jewish 
 thought and conduct was both beneficial and injurious. In 
 so far as it furnished an external standard of moral action 
 which all could understand and obey, and involved ;i strict, 
 wholesome disciplining influence, the system was decidedly help- 
 fuj. But, on the other hand, it proved to be injurious in that 
 by its very externalism and formal character it drew the heart 
 and will away from those inward sources of right conduct 
 which are the highest and deepest man can have. By splitting 
 life up into innumerable details, providing a law for each, which 
 it was sin to violate, making no distinction between kinds of 
 sin or degrees of sin, holding that he who offends in one point 
 of the law offends in all a position clearly stated in the epistle 
 of James (II. 10) Judaism tended to despiritualize life, to re- 
 gard goodness as conformity to an external standard of right 
 rather than as an attitude of heart toward what is good and 
 true, to make righteousness a garment that might be put on or 
 off, rather than a constant, maintained habit of the soul. These 
 and other injurious effects of Jewish legislation were frankly 
 recognized and appreciated by Hebrew reformers as early as the 
 seventh century before our era. The Deuteronomist, for ex- 
 
 66
 
 ample, writing about 620 B. C., published his passionate appeal 
 for a devotion to the law that has its seat in the heart, the law 
 itself being found there (Deut. xxx II. sq) Ezekiel and Jeremiah 
 roistered their intensely earnest plea for a new heart that 
 would, out of reverence and love for Israel's God, practice that 
 righteousness which is more than outward obedience to a set of 
 prescribed rules. So again, at a still later day, the authors of 
 I'sjilms XV, LI, CIX, and XXIV, belonging to the Greek and 
 M.-x-rabean periods, expressed the deeply felt need of "renewal 
 of spirit" and the creation of a "clean heart," indicating that 
 they fully appreciated the limitations of the system of legisla- 
 tion they revered. All the way from the Deuteronomist to 
 Hillel. who was an old man when Jesus was an infant and the 
 most distinguished legalist and scholar of his time, we find that 
 there were those who recognized and gave occasional expres- 
 sion to this morality of the spirit which goes back of rules and 
 regulations to the motives and aims of conduct and which is 
 therefore deeper than the morality of conformity and compli- 
 ance. But no one had sought to separate this spiritual right- 
 eousness from the system of legislation and lift it to a com- 
 manding place in the ordering of daily life. Let no one think 
 that Judaism was deficient in spirituality. The literature be- 
 tween the Testaments bears abundant evidence of the fact that 
 there was no lack of this grace in Judaism, even when its legal- 
 ism was most elaborate and detailed; but no one had extricated 
 the morality of the spirit, taught by the immediate predecessors 
 of Jesus, from the mass of rules and raised it to the rank of 
 supremacy among the motives of right action. Had Hillel 
 done this, he and not Jesus would have been the founder of 
 Christianity. Hillel recognized clearly that the need of his 
 time was just this extrication and enthroning, but he was too 
 much steeped in the system of legislation to accomplish the 
 reformatory task of isolating spiritual righteousness and mak- 
 ing it the highest and main controling principle of action. It 
 remained for Jesus to achieve this, thereby transcending the 
 Judaism of his time and manifesting true originality. I admit 
 with the eminent scholar. Rabbi Hirsch, that Jesus uttered no 
 new moral maxims, that one can match every sentence of the 
 sermon on the mount in contemporary or earlier Jewish liter- 
 
 67
 
 ature. Nor does this reproduction of what others had said 
 before him detract in the least from the essential greatness of 
 Jesus; on the contrary, it is a mark of it. Granted that in 
 method, and in thought Jesus is a Jewish haggadist, that his 
 ethics is as little absolute as that of any other teacher, that his 
 similes are indigenous to the Jewish Midrash and of common oc- 
 currence in the picture language of the rabbinical homilies, that 
 he was neither more universalistic nor less nationalistic than 
 the synagogue of his day, that in none of these respects has 
 Jesus the slightest claim to originality, yet it still remains true 
 that the original reformer is not only he who first conceives a 
 fruitful idea but also he who plants it in many minds and fer- 
 tilizes it there through the persuasive power of his quickening 
 personality. To this type of original reformers Jesus belonged. 
 He preached the loftiest moral conceptions the race had won 
 and vitalized them by his commanding, winning presence. Even 
 as the transcendent merit of the tree consists in its drawing 
 from the surrounding air, earth and water the materials where- 
 with to build the strength of its trunk and the beauty of its 
 foliage, so the transcendent merit of Jesus lay in his drawing 
 from earlier or contemporary literature the materials where- 
 with to make his gospel a source of strength and inspiration, 
 stamping what he borrowed with the spiritual genius of his 
 own wondrous personality. His "judge not that ye be not 
 judged" reminds us of Hillel's, "Judge not thy neighbor till 
 thou art in his place." Hillel said, "Whoso would make his 
 name great shall lose it," which is but the earlier equivalent 
 of Jesus' saying, "Whosoever exalts himself shall be humbled." 
 Again, Hillel's remark, "revile not when reviled," had its 
 reproduction in "bless them that curse you." Both Hillel and 
 Jesus enunciated the Golden Rule in substantially the same 
 words. Consequently it is not here that we find the originality 
 of Jesus, but it appears the moment we consider wherein he 
 surpassed Hillel. Perceiving that the spirit behind an act is 
 what gives it moral value, Jesus took it out of the mass of 
 rules where Hillel had left it and made it the corner-stone of 
 his teaching. Higher than the morality of obedience to that 
 outward standard of Jewish Law is the morality of the spirit 
 which cannot be gauged by any external measure at all. Higher 
 
 68
 
 than visible conformity to rules regarding what must be done 
 and still more regarding what must not be done, is the invisible 
 motive behind that conformity. Such was the contribution of 
 .1 1 'si is to Judaism. His recognition of this truth, his isolation 
 of it as a supreme commanding principle of action and his 
 ever-recurring emphasis of it throughout his ministry marked a 
 forward step beyond the limits of Judaism. Thus this spiritual 
 righteousness, if so we may term it, this special gospel of Jesus, 
 the morality of the spirit, was simply a reaction from the ex- 
 cessive externalism of the legislative system of his time and 
 place, a system that crippled spirituality and tended to make 
 men oblivious to the inward springs of all true morality. 
 
 And the genius of Jesus showed itself nowhere so much 
 as in this, that he related his gospel to the Jewish Law and 
 presented it as a development, an expansion and deepening 
 thereof. 'Tis a sorry mistake to suppose that Jesus cut him- 
 self off from Judaism and sought to originate a new religion. 
 On the contrary, ho v:as born a Jew and remained a Jew all 
 his life through. As such, he observed all the ordinances of 
 the Jewish religion. He kept the feasts and fasts. (Mark 
 xiv. 12) He declared that the rules and regulations of Jewish 
 ceremonial law as expounded by the recognized authorities 
 should be scrupulously obeyed (Matt xxiii. 2). He even went 
 so far as to say that not one jot or little of that law would re- 
 main unfulfilled while heaven and earth remained. (Matt. v. 
 18). Lest any one should think him a reckless, ruthless icono- 
 clast, a negative revolutionist in religion, he said: '"Think not 
 I am come to destroy the law or the prophets, I am come to 
 carry them out." And he might have added to develop, ex- 
 pand them, to bring out their latent deeper meaning, for this 
 was precisely what he did. "Ye have heard that it hath been 
 said by them of old," quoting from the twentieth chapter of 
 Exodus, "thou shalt do no murder." "But I say unto you 
 that whosoever is as much as angry with his brother shall 
 be in danger of the judgment." It is not enough, he contends, 
 to obey the sixth commandment, not enough to stop at the 
 law of murder, you must go down to the source of murder in 
 the passion of anger in the heart, that it may be utterly con- 
 sumed and thus no more provoke to murderous deeds. As 
 with the sixth commandment so also with the seventh. It is 
 
 69
 
 not enough to refrain from the adultrous act, you must 1*0 down 
 to the source of it in the evil desire of the heart : UK-IT lies tho 
 root of the sin and duty regarding it calls for its extirpation. 
 Purify the inner springs of conduct, be not content with avoid- 
 ance of evil deeds, remember that the act itself does not so 
 much constitute evil, as the prompting of the heart that leads 
 to it; not the killing but the wrath, not the adultery, but the 
 lust. Again: "Ye have heard that it hath been said thou shalt 
 love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy, but I say unto you 
 love your enemies, bless them that persecute you, pray for 
 them that despitefully use you." Here Jesus quotes no spe- 
 cific passage from the Old Testament but in his own words ex- 
 presses what the actual attitude and spirit of Jewish ethics 
 was prior to his day. True, the Old Testament had enjoined 
 love toward one's personal enemy but nowhere in its pages do 
 we find love toward national enemies inculcated. On the con- 
 trary we observe the logic of the worship of Yahweh 
 as Israel's God and of the belief that Israel is his chosen people, 
 led directly to hatred of foreigners as an inevitable consequence 
 of this unique Jewish privilege. The prophets, notably Jere- 
 miah, the Deuteronomist, and especially the author of the one 
 hundred and thirty-ninth psalm feel hatred of foreigners to 
 be not only inevitable but praiseworthy. In unqualified op- 
 position to this attitude and spirit Jesus pleads for a cosmo- 
 politan love that shall extend beyond one's personal enemies 
 to the hated Romans and all other gentiles; and in so plead- 
 ing he made a distinct advance upon the position taken 
 throughout the Old Testament. Hillel, it is true, had uttered 
 the same sentiment but he did not raise it above the level of 
 Jewish legalism. It remained for Jesus to lift it out of the 
 mass of rules and make it the master-principle of the moral 
 life, addressing not the reason, nor even the emotions, ;is m.-niy 
 think, but only the will., Jesus rightly divined that the sub- 
 tlest intellectual hair-splitting does not, of necessity, rouse the 
 will nor does the most ardent appeal to the emotions, for the 
 emotions, while easily fanned to a flame, as quickly "cool 
 their ineffectual fires." Therefore all the exhortations of 
 Jesus are addressed directly to the will, each man being re- 
 garded as responsible for his conduct, standing face to face 
 
 70
 
 with God and dealing with Him alone. When the tricky law- 
 yer asked him (Matt, xxii, 35) which of all the command- 
 ments in the law is the greatest, Jesus answered by quoting 
 two verses; one, from the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy and 
 the other from the nineteenth chapter of Leviticus, the two 
 together inculcating love to God and love to man, add- 
 ing "all the law and the prophets hang on these two com- 
 mandments." In other words, Jesus would say, whosoever 
 succeeds in obeying these two commandments has in him the 
 spirit out of which all right actions will spontaneously flow. 
 
 Thus the gospel of Christianity, as derived from Jesus, 
 does not consist in righteousness alone, obedience to an ex- 
 ternal standard of conduct, but rather in what we may call 
 spiritual righteousness, or the morality of the spirit, which 
 sees in love for God and for all men as children of the 
 same Father, the inward source of all right action. Of this 
 gospel there are hints and suggestions in the literature be- 
 tween the Testaments but no one had succeeded in giving it 
 special and continual emphasis, no one had detached it from 
 the existing Jewish legal system and made of it a new moral 
 issue. This is what Jesus did and it constitutes his gospel and 
 the gospel of Christianity through him. According to Jesus, 
 each human soul is a child of God, endowed with power to 
 come into perfect harmony with him and the desire for that 
 harmony is the motive for doing what is right. The reason 
 why men should do what is right is that they "may become 
 sons of their heavenly Father," become worthy of their kin- 
 ship with God. Hence the ideal life, according to Jesus, is 
 the life of the spirit, the life of union with the Eternal Life 
 and this gives to morality its highest possible sanction. The 
 supreme comiiiaiidment of Jesus is "be ye perfect even 
 ;is your father in heaven is perfect." In that utterance Jesus 
 gave infinite significance to every humblest human being, be- 
 cause it implies that there are infinite possibilities in every 
 child of God. Imitate the Divine example. God's love is 
 unbounded, unrestrained, impartial ; it is symbolized by the 
 sunshine and the rain, given alike to the just and to the un- 
 jusl. Reproduce that love in your own human experience. 
 Love the idolatrous and the unlovely, love the unrighteous;
 
 out of very love for the heathen, for the hated Romans, the 
 haughty oppressors, pray for them. Such was the meaning of 
 his command and the nearest approach to it in the Old Testa- 
 ment is the sentence, "Be ye holy, for I, Yahweh, your 
 God, am holy" (Leviticus xix. 2). But when Jesus said, "be 
 ye perfect even as your father in heaven is perfect," he rounded 
 out the earlier injunction, he brought out what was implied 
 in it and uttered the very highest spiritual command known 
 to man. But what is more, he lived it. Be doubtful what may 
 concerning the authorship of sentences and chapters in the 
 first three gospels, which constitute our chief reliable source 
 of information, this "synoptic" account of Jesus' life leaves one 
 unmistakable impression upon us, namely, that he practiced 
 what he preached, lived his gospel of love, made his own life 
 his greatest teaching, squared his conduct with his ideals. 
 
 The highest consciousness a man can have is that of his 
 own divine origin, the realization that in the line of animal evo- 
 lution his ancestry reverts to God, and that the mark thereof is 
 in him. Jesus felt this sense of Divine origin and relation- 
 ship so deeply that it transfigured every humblest, lowliest 
 service he was called to render, lifting it to a sublime height. 
 When he washed the feet of his disciples perhaps the su- 
 preme act of his life he symbolized therein the secret of suc- 
 cessful service. The lower strata of society can be lifted to 
 higher levels only by those who, like Jesus, know they come 
 from God and in that consciousness go down to serve, to touch 
 the Divine in the degraded. Truly do such souls transfigure 
 their helpfulness by the way in which they give it, i. e.. with 
 a spiritual grace and charm of which they are quite uncon- 
 scious, even as they wist not that their faces shine and that their 
 pure and perfect service is an inspiration to those less suc- 
 cessful than they. Given that consciousness of the Divine, that 
 presence within the heart of a truly God-like love, and there 
 can be no human soul so degraded as to resist its influence. 
 This, I take it, was the contention of Jesus and exemplified in 
 his own dealing with every type of "sin-stained souls." To- 
 day we are just beginning to appreciate the significance of his 
 teaching and example in the work of reform. The redeeming 
 power of a deeply spiritual love, : who can measure it? J ? we 
 
 72
 
 are fine enough, if we have enough of the heart-culture that 
 was in Jesus, success in our efforts at reform is as certain 
 as it was with him. If we fail, it can only be because we are 
 not yet fine enough, because the divine element does not yet 
 shine out clearly enough from us, because our love still lacks 
 purity, or patience, or strength, or depth, or wisdom ; it is not 
 yet sufficiently God-like and therefore success is not yet ours. 
 
 The gospel of Christianity, then, as inherited from Jesus 
 is wholly concerned with the individual soul and its living the 
 life of God, reproducing in its own measure the Divine Love. 
 This was the all-absorbing passion of Jesus. The problem of 
 improving the political and social conditions of his oppressed 
 fellow-countrymen in no wise concerned him, for he believed 
 that by a miracle from on high the long-expected Kingdom of 
 God, or commonwealth of man, would come on the earth and 
 in less than twenty-five years (Mark xiii. 30) Jesus, there- 
 fore, was not a socialist as is sometimes claimed. He came 
 not to readjust external conditions but to refine men's hearts 
 and to quicken in each soul the sense of its divine origin and 
 its infinite possibilities. And when he coupled with this gos- 
 pel the Messianic belief in the speedy advent of a new order 
 of society, a Kingdom of God on earth, to be miraculously es- 
 tablished, in which only justice and love would reign, and of 
 which the poor, the oppressed, the despised and the meek 
 would become members, he brought to the Roman empire the 
 one thing it needed, a message that literally transfigured life 
 for the thousands who were enslaved and who were greatly in 
 the majority. The slave, abject in his lot, the property of 
 another, could now feel that despite his chains, he was a per- 
 son, that God loved him, that Jesus was his friend, that there 
 was consolation in his words, that though a slave, there was 
 something within him which could not be bound ; his soul was 
 his own, he might be scourged but the lash did not touch his 
 heart, he might be slain, but the door of the kingdom of heaven 
 \v;is open to him. He felt superior to his position, he lived 
 in an ideal world and felt that by virtue of Jesus' gospel of 
 love and of the "Kingdom," he was one of the great family of 
 God's freemen. So woman, whose condition was degraded, 
 felt that new worth was given to womanhood by the gospel 
 
 73
 
 of Jesus. Her body might be abused, but her soul could not 
 be outraged; she might be beaten to death, but she could join 
 the noble company of the pure in the heavenly kingdom. Thus 
 did the gospel come as a balm and benediction to the Roman 
 masses and when later on it made its way to central and south- 
 ern Europe where neither the gospel of the Epicurean, advo- 
 cating the pleasures of the hour, nor the gospel of the Stoic, 
 inculcating quiet endurance, nor the example of Marcus 
 Aurelius, trying to hold up the falling empire by living him- 
 self a noble, worthy life ; when none of these proved effi- 
 cacious to solve the problem of the age, the gospel of Jesus, 
 of the morality of the spirit and of the kingdom of heaven, 
 captured and transfigured the world. Judaism as represented 
 by Hillel and Gamaliel was unequal to the task required. 
 Jesus transcended that Judaism and laid the foundation of a 
 new religious movement by lifting the spirituality of .Judaism 
 out of its legal environment to the plane of an independent 
 force, making it the dominating principle of conduct. Not 
 only did he emphasize the morality of the spirit, but he trans- 
 ferred the soul's devotion from an outward, objective standard 
 of law to an inward subjective tribunal; a conscience freed, 
 enlightened and inspired by the thought of a Divine Father 
 whose love is to be reproduced in human life and whose abso- 
 lute perfection is to be made the infinite goal of human as- 
 piration. 
 
 It remains only to indicate the relation of the Apostle 
 Paul to Christianity, inasmuch as it was he who instituted the 
 new religion, by relinquishing hold on circumcision and .Jew- 
 ish ceremonial in general, by fixing thought and sentiment 
 upon the person of Jesus as the Redeemer, rather than on 
 obedience to a mass of precepts, and by constructing a frame- 
 work of dogma that was intended to define and explain in terms 
 of theology the spiritual righteousness taught by Jesus. J'aul's 
 position was, in brief, as follows. Man cannot fulfil the law 
 of righteousness as prescribed by Judaism for there is a law 
 in his nature ever warring against the higher law, causing him 
 to do evil when he would do good. What, then, is then- to 
 save him from this dreadful plight? While pondering the 
 problem there came to Paul the belief that there was one soul. 
 
 74
 
 of whom he had heard, but whom he had never seen in the 
 flesh, Jesus of Nazareth, who did succeed in fulfilling the law 
 of righteousness and who out of compassion and perfect love 
 took it upon himself to serve as the Redeemer, through his 
 own perfectness, of sin-stained man. The simple story of Jesus' 
 life had not yet been recorded in any of the gospels. There 
 was as yet nothing but oral tradition. For why write any life 
 of Jesus when it was expected that any day or moment he 
 would return on the clouds to earth and establish the Kingdom 
 of God ? To Paul then, there came the story of the wonderful 
 life of Jesus and he at once exalts it and makes it the corner- 
 stone of his system of faith. Here in this one divine human 
 being, who enjoys perfect at-one-ment with God, man may 
 find the means whereby he, too, can fulfill the law of right- 
 eousness. Jesus the Christ, the second Adam, thought Paul, is 
 our intercessor, the mediator through whom imperfect man 
 may be freed from sin and made one with God. Such was 
 Paul's solution of the problem how to fulfil the law of right- 
 eousness and upon this solution the new religion was founded. 
 When, therefore, the question is asked what makes one a 
 Christian and not a Buddhist, or a Parsee,, the answer is, "be- 
 lief in the Lord Jesus Christ;" i. e., belief in the exceptional 
 character of Jesus, as one who differed from all other men in 
 kind as well as in degree, who alone of all men was able through 
 his perfection, to fulfil the law of righteousness and thereby 
 became the fitting instrument to bring humanity into at-one- 
 ment with God. This belief is the distinguishing characteristic 
 of Christianity as one of the great religions. This belief is 
 what it has in common with no other religion and therefore 
 determines specifically what constitutes one a Christian. While 
 therefore the gospel of Christianity as derived from Jesus 
 makes "love" its key-note, the contribution of Paul, as the 
 founder of organized Christianity, causes us to add "creed" 
 as expressed in the words, "believe on the Lord Jesus Christ." 
 
 75
 
 THE GOSPEL OF MOHAMMEDANISM. 
 
 POEM. 
 
 FROM THE QUR'AN; SURA, 59. 
 Translated by Sir Edwin Arnold. 
 
 Sura the nine and fiftieth: "Fear ye God, 
 
 O true believers! and let every soul 
 
 Heed what it doth today, because tomorrow 
 
 The same thing it shall find gone forward there 
 
 To meet and make and judge it. Fear ye God, 
 
 For He knows whatsoever deeds ye do. 
 
 Be not as those who have forgotten Him, 
 
 For they are the evil-doers: not for such, 
 
 And for the heritors of Paradise, 
 
 Shall it be equal ; Paradise is kept 
 
 For those thrice blessed who have ears to hear. 
 
 Lo ! had we sent * ' the Book ' ' unto Our hills, 
 Our hills had bowed their crests in reverence, 
 And opened to the heart their breasts of rock 
 To take Heaven's message. Fear ye Him who knows 
 Present, and Past, and Future : fear ye Him 
 Who is the Only, Holy, Faithful Lord, 
 Glorious and good, compelling to His will 
 All things, for all things He hath made and rules. 
 
 So rule, Al-Jabbar; make our wills 
 
 Bend, though more stubborn than the hills. 
 
 SCRIPTURE SELECTIONS. 
 FROM THE "QUR'AN," CHAPP. 5 AND 83. 
 
 O ye who have received the Scriptures, now is our Apostle 
 come unto you to make manifest unto you many things. Now 
 is light and a perspicuous book of revelations come unto you 
 from God. Thereby God will direct him who shall follow His 
 good pleasure into the paths of peace. O true believers, fear 
 God, earnestly desire a near conjunction with Him and fight 
 for His religion that ye may be happy. Moreover, they who 
 believe not shall suffer a painful punishment. They shall desire 
 
 76
 
 to go forth from the fire but they shall not go forth from it, 
 and their punishment shall be permanent. . . . They cer- 
 tainly are infidels who say, God is Christ, the Son of Mary, 
 since Christ said," Serve God, my Lord and your Lord." They 
 certainly are infidels who say. "(Jud is the third of three, for 
 there is no God besides one -God. O true believers, observe 
 justice. Let not hatred toward any induce you to wrong, but 
 act justly and 1'ear God, for God is fully acquainted with what 
 ye do. When ye prepare yourselves to pray, wash your faces 
 and your hands unto the elbows, and your feet unto the ankles. 
 Hut if, on a journey, ye find no water, take fine, clean sand and 
 rub your faces and your hands therewith. Strive to excel each 
 other in good works; keep your contracts. true believers, 
 surely wine and lots and images are an abominition of the work 
 of Satan, therefore avoid them that ye may prosper. Obey 
 God and obey the Apostle and take heed by ourselves, for God 
 loveth those who do good. true believers, take care of your 
 souls. Woe be unto those who give short measure or weight; 
 who. when they receive by measure from other men, take the 
 full, but when they measure unto them, or weigh unto them, 
 defraud. Let not these think they shall be raised again on the 
 Great Day. Hy no means. Verily the register of the actions of 
 the wicked is surely in Sejjin a book distinctly written. But 
 the register of the actions of the righteous is in Illiyyun, a book 
 distinctly written. Verily, the righteous shall dwell among 
 delights, thou shalt see in their faces the brightness of joy. 
 
 PRAYER. 
 THE "LORD'S PRAYER" OF MOHAMMEDANISM QUR'AN, CHAP. I. 
 
 Praise be to God, the Lord of all creatures, the most merci- 
 ful, the King of the day of judgment. Thee do we worship and 
 of Thee do we beg assistance. Direct us in the right way, in 
 the way of those to whom Thou hast been gracious; not of 
 those against whom Thou art incensed, nor those who go 
 astray. 
 
 THE DISCOURSE. 
 
 "Lo Illah 11 Allah, Mohammed rasool Allah!.*' 
 (There is no God but Allah, Mohammed is the prophet of Allah.) 
 
 We come now to the latest of the seven great religions, the 
 least appreciated and the most misunderstood, albeit that Mo- 
 
 77
 
 hammedanism, both in origin and in type, is nearer Judaism 
 and Christianity than any other of the great systems of faith. 
 It originated thirteen centuries ago in the Arabian peninsula, 
 where the streams of culture and of commerce met in the middle 
 ages, where the markets of exchange were stationed for India's 
 treasures and the products of the Mediterranean coasts. This 
 religion is today acknowledged by two hundred million souls 
 and covers an area equal to one-third of the globe. The Niger 
 and the Nile, the Jordan and the Ganges, the Maritza and the 
 Yang-tse-Kiang, fertilize Mohammedan soil. Twice did this 
 religion threaten to overrun all Europe; in 732, when it was 
 checked at Tours by Charles Martel, and again in 1683, when 
 John, King of Poland, at the head of twenty thousand soldiers 
 defeated the Mohammedan army at Vienna. To the early repre- 
 sentatives of this religion the world is indebted for the immense 
 services they rendered in the advancement of civilization. For 
 it was they who transmitted the treasures of Greek literature 
 and philosophy from the middle ages to the renaissance, they 
 who originated the graceful art-forms of which the Taj-Mahal 
 -and the Alhambra are the most famous specimens; they who 
 contributed to the sciences of algebra and astronomy, chemistry 
 and medicine ; they who dotted the Saracen empire with univer- 
 sities and they who established at Bagdad and at Cairo two of 
 the most renowned libraries of the world. 
 
 The founder of Mohammedanism has been called "the 
 lying prophet." His name has been used as a synonym 
 for Satan and his followers have been described as "part of 
 the infernal host." Luther addressed him with the words: 
 "Oh fie, you horrid devil, you damned Mohammed;" and 
 Melancthon affirmed he was "inspired by Satan." For seven 
 centuries not a sound in defence or behalf of Mohammed was 
 heard. The first word of truth and justice was spoken in the 
 fourteenth century by Sir John Mandeville, an English traveler, 
 and his tribute was a veritable bugle-note in the night of 
 bigotry and malice. Four centuries later Lessing, in his "Na- 
 than der Weise," registered his profound respect for the es- 
 sential worth of Mohammedanism. And then came Carlyle, 
 fairly stunning the British public by placing Mohammed among 
 the heroes of history. Yet, in our own generation, Christian 
 
 78
 
 criticism, born of ignorance and prejudice, perpetuates opinions: 
 of Mohammed that have no root in truth and slanders that are 
 without any real warrant whatsoever still resound from pul- 
 pit, platform and press. 
 
 Mohammed was born in 571 at Mecca, one of the chief cen- 
 ters of Arabian commerce and culture, visited annually by 
 some two hundred thousand Muslims in accordance with the 
 religious law requiring a pilgrimage, at least once during life, 
 to the prophet's birthplace. His father died before the child 
 was born and his mother before he had reached his teens. How 
 deeply he felt the deprivations of orphanage is attested by many 
 passages in the Qur'an, enjoining upon the faithful the duty 
 of tender regard for the person of orphans and scrupulous care 
 not to touch their property. Bereft of both father and mother 
 the lad was adopted, first by his grandfather and later by his 
 uncle, a rich, generous and magnanimous man, who disapproved 
 of his nephew's doctrines, yet on grounds of kinship and per- 
 sonal regard gave him freely of the abundance of his posses- 
 sions. Financial reverses came to this noble guardian and the 
 boy was obliged to earn his own living. For several years he 
 tended sheep till, at the age of twenty-four, he entered the 
 service of a rich widow, Kadijah, as camel-driver and conductor 
 of caravans journeying between Jerusalem and Damascus. She 
 became infatuated with him, married him and though fifteen 
 years his senior, their married life appears to have been both 
 happy and mutually inspiring. Kadijah, indeed, seems to have 
 been the very antithesis of Lucrezia, the wife of Andrea del 
 Sarto, the faultless painter who felt he might have been also 
 the soulful painter, rivalling Raphael and Angelo, had she only 
 given him sympathy, interest and inspiration, all of which 
 Kadijah gave Mohammed. She nursed him in his days of 
 illness, strengthened him in hours of weakness, encouraged him 
 and kept him up to the level of the best of which he was 
 capable as long as she lived. 
 
 No authentic portrait of the prophet has come down to us. 
 But from various accounts we learn that Mohammed was a 
 man of medium height, with a massive, well-developed head, 
 his dark curly hair streaming down to his broad shoulders and 
 his Mack, restless eyos looking out beneath heavy eye-lashes. 
 
 79
 
 and eyebrows. His nose was somewhat aquiline and his teeth 
 were regular and white as hail-stones. From his fair and up- 
 right dealing he derived the name, "Al-Amin," or "the faith- 
 ful." His was the simple life, lived in humblest style, even unto 
 austerity; for he would often go for months together without 
 eating a hearty meal while daily he ate the plainest food, light- 
 ing his own fires, mending his own clothes and shoes, having 
 given his slaves their freedom. The following beautiful slory 
 illustrates impressively a virtue he often manifested as well as 
 taught. Sleeping one day under a palm tree, he awoke sud- 
 denly to find an enemy named Du'thur standing over him with 
 drawn sword. "0, Muhammad, who is there now to save 
 thee ? ' ' cried the man. ' ' God, ' ' answered Muhammad. Du 'thur 
 dropped his sword. Muhammad seized it, and cried in turn : 
 "O, Du'thur, who is there now to save thee?" "No one," re- 
 plied Du'thur. "Then learn from me to be merciful," said 
 Muhammad, and handed him back the weapon. Du'thur be- 
 came one of his firmest friends. Mohammed's marriage to a 
 rich widow afforded him opportunity to gratify his taste for 
 reflection and meditation. Not far from his house, on a bluff 
 overlooking the blazing sands of the desert, was a cave, and 
 thither he frequently repaired to study, not books, for he could 
 not read; but Nature and the tablets of his own heart. At't'lirted 
 with a nervous disorder that occasionally caused him loss of 
 consciousness, it was in one of these attacks that he became 
 apprised of his mission. We are told he fell into convulsions, 
 streams of perspiration flowed down his cheeks, his eyes burned 
 like glowing coals and he was about to leap from the brink <f 
 a precipice to end his misery by suicide when, the legend says. 
 he saw the figure and heard the voice of the angel Gabriel, 
 telling him, "Thou art the apostle of the Lord." Rushing to 
 his wife he exclaimed, "am I in truth a prophet or am I mad?'' 
 She answered, "no harmful thing has happened thee; rejoin-. 
 thou speakest the truth. Thou dost not return evil for evil, 
 thou art kind to relatives and friends, thou dost not gossip, 
 thou wilt yet surely be the prophet of prophets." Note in this 
 reply the fine conviction of Kadijah that the surest test of fitness 
 for a prophetic career is nobility and purity of life. Moliauiiiii-d 
 hesitated at first, even as did Jesus at the outset of his prophetic 
 
 80
 
 career, but at last the belief is fixed that he has been called to 
 be the bearer of a message. But the Meccans received him not. 
 They called him fool, madman, liar; so that he shared the fate 
 of others of his vocation, illustrating the proverb that a prophet 
 is not honored in his own country. But opposition only in- 
 tensified his consecration. When his uncle besought him to 
 cease his attempt to convert the Meccans, bidding him name 
 the price of silence, he replied: "Though they gave me the 
 sun in my right hand and the moon in my left to bring me back 
 from my undertaking, yet will I not pause till the Lord carry 
 His cause to victory, or till I die for it. ' ' Abu Talib replied : 
 "Go in peace, son of my brother, and say what thou wilt, for 
 by God I will on no condition abandon thee." Eventually as- 
 sassination was planned and the prophet hearing of it resolved 
 on flight, making his way on a night in July, 622, to the city 
 due north of Mecca, now known as Medina. This year of the 
 flight, or "Hejira," marks the beginning of the Mohammedan 
 era. Hitherto Mohammed had been a preacher proclaiming 
 unwelcome truth, denouncing vices of his countrymen and re- 
 buking low standards of business dealing. Now he assumes the 
 role of legislator, ruler, conqueror, heading a defensive and 
 aggressive movement which meets with increasing success, the 
 number of followers passing the five hundred mark within two 
 years. For eight more years the prophet continues his con- 
 quering crusade, aiming to win over all Arabia to his message 
 and claims, till, on the eighth of June, 632, he died, leaving to 
 his beloved disciple, Abu-Bekr, and to succeeding califs that 
 task of missionary expansion which gradually resulted in es- 
 tablishing the founder's faith over an empire greater than that 
 of Rome and almost making it the one religion of the civilized 
 world. Before we pass from the founder's life to his message, 
 let it be said that he was certainly not an impostor, though 
 both orthodox Christians and crude rationalists unite in the 
 assertion. Voltaire voiced the view of the latter class in a 
 verse that won the approval of both : 
 
 "Chaque peuple a son tour a brill^ sur la terre, 
 Par les lois, par les arts et surtout par les guerres. 
 Le temps de 1'Arabie est enfin venu, 
 II faut un nouveau culte, il faut de nouveaux fers 
 II faut un nouveau Dieu pour 1'aveugle univers." 
 
 81
 
 Credulous humanity had been victimized by the crafty 
 prophet of Arabia, who palmed off a new God, a new cult and 
 new fetters on an unsuspecting public ! "Amen," cried the crude 
 rationalists, because to them all religion is deception, an in- 
 vention of politic priests and scheming prophets. But among 
 the notions to be relegated to the realm of prejudice and super- 
 stition are these: Religion is an invention, all prophets are 
 impostors and Mohammed perpetrated the most egregious fraud 
 on record. The proofs that Mohammed was no crafty cheat, 
 no scheming impostor are not far to seek and they are numer- 
 ous. Let me cite two. At Mecca Mohammed had received a 
 handsome income as custodian of the Kaaba, or sacred stone 
 worshipped by the residents and by the visiting pilgrims. The 
 religious practices connected with this worship came to be re- 
 garded by Mohammed as sheer superstition. To criticize them 
 meant certain loss of his position. Yet he did not hesitate to 
 denounce them and promptly surrendered his profitable cus- 
 todianship. Is such conduct the mark of an 'impostor? Again, 
 when implored to desist from his radical and revolutionizing 
 preaching, he to name his own price for the silence he was to 
 keep, he repudiated the tempting offer, preferring the luxury 
 of his convictions and his mission, with poverty if need bo. to 
 the allurements of conservatism, ease and wealth. Surely this 
 could never be the part of an impostor. Nothing but the 
 bigotry, jealousy and malice of his enemies originated ihi 
 charge of imposture and nothing but blind prejudice and la/y 
 indifference to truth can account for the perpetuation of the 
 charge. 
 
 Like the other great religions, Mohammedanism arose as 
 a protest. At the time of the prophet's appearance there were 
 three types of idolatry extant in Arabia. First and oldest, the 
 native astrology with star and planet worship antedating the 
 advent of Jews and Christians. Second, Jewish idolatry which 
 took the form of bestowing worship upon Ezra the scribe and 
 probable editor of the Pentateuch. Mohammed observed and 
 complained of this "Ezrolatry" (Sura, ix, 30). Third, Chris- 
 tian idolatry, which consisted not only in the worship of images 
 and relics, but also of three gods, for the "trinity" had here 
 degenerated into tritheism (Sura, 5). Now Mohammed's wish 
 
 82
 
 and aim was to turn the people away from these various 
 idolatries and bring them back to what he thought was the 
 original Semitic faith, the one original source of both Judaism 
 and Christianity. The thought of instituting a new religion 
 seems never to have entered the prophet's mind. His one 
 thought was to restore the ancestral faith of Abraham with its 
 simple doctrine of pure monotheism and obedience to the one 
 true God. This, he thought, was Abraham's religion, this, he 
 was persuaded, should be reinstated and all forms of idolatry, 
 indigenous, Jewish, Christian abolished. The time for vindi- 
 cating "the true faith" had arrived. Mohammed believed he 
 was the prophet to whom it had been revealed. Five other 
 great prophets, he said, there had been before him, namely, 
 Adam, Xoah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus. To each, he believed, 
 a revelation had been vouchsafed and that each in turn was 
 superseded by its successor, Mohammed receiving the final 
 revelation and establishing the absolute religion. All this the 
 prophet sincerely believed, regarding himself simply as the 
 latest medium through whom the Mighty One had made known 
 His word. Nowhere does Mohammed make extravagant or ex- 
 traordinary claims for himself. "I am only a man like the rest 
 of you. I am not a miracle-worker, not an angel. I am frail 
 and liable to err. I am an apostle, a prophet, the last of the 
 prophets." In these phrases did he describe himself again and 
 again in the Qur'an. Xor does he think that to him has been 
 revealed all that the omniscient Mind contains. In the thirty- 
 first Sura we read: "If all the seven seas were changed to ink 
 and all trees to pens, they could not write all the things God 
 has to reveal to man." 
 
 The revelation which Mohammed believed he received con- 
 stitutes the "Qur'an," the sacred book, or Bible, of the Mo- 
 hammedans. It is, without exception, the most deeply revered 
 and widely read of all the sacred scriptures of the world, its 
 us.- being much more extensive than that of the New Testa- 
 ment in Christian countries. Moreover, it is believed by the 
 faithful that this book existed from all eternity in heaven, 
 whence it was sent down, piecemeal to the prophet, by one 
 an eel or another and following the delivery dictated to a sec- 
 retary who committed it to writing on scraps of papyrus, 
 
 83
 
 leather, or whatever material was available at the time, the 
 separate parts collected and edited two years after the prophet's 
 death: by Abu-Bekr. Ten years later (642) it was revised and 
 issued, as a final recension, by Uthman, the third Khalifa, all 
 earlier versions having been ordered destroyed. Thus the 
 Koran is unique among Bibles in that it is the work of a single 
 mind and has a uniform text in all editions. Its contents may 
 be described as a collection or potpourri of myths, legends, nar- 
 ratives, legal rules, ceremonial injunctions, moral precepts. 
 The Qur'an is a reservoir into which, through Mohammed's 
 mind, many different streamlets have been emptied. That 
 Jewish and Christian stories should form part of the book is 
 not strange, for, as conductor of caravans through Judea and 
 Syria, Mohammed must have acquired considerable informa- 
 tion on Biblical subjects. Tales of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, re- 
 lated by not very competent reporters entered the prophet's 
 head and fermented there. What he knew of Bible characters 
 he never derived from direct contact with the Bible itself. The 
 probability is he never saw a Hebrew Bible nor a Greek New 
 Testament. But many a Hebrew story as recorded in rabbinical 
 books he doubtless heard, while the apocalyptic books of the 
 Old and New Testaments Joel, Daniel, Revelation with their 
 thrilling accounts of the Judgment Day told symbolically by 
 reference to figures, animals, numbers, all these exerted their 
 influence upon Mohammed as almost every page of the Qur'an 
 testifies. That there should be contradictions in the Qur'an is 
 to be expected from the very nature and manner of the revela- 
 tions. But Mohammed never had any scruples about "progres- 
 sive revelation" as applied to himself. If experience proved a 
 certain "revealed" ordinance to be unsatisfactory another 
 ordinance was revealed later on to supplement, correct or per- 
 haps even to annul the original revelation. In this connection 
 it is instructive to know that the scepticism and agnosticism 
 which have resulted from the discovery of contradictions and 
 limitations in the Christian Bible have their parallel in Mo- 
 hammedan countries where a marked defection from the faith 
 is taking place among those who see the inadequacy of the 
 Qur'an as a moral and political guide. As many thoughtful 
 Chritians have ceaed to follow the cross and abandoned their 
 
 84
 
 orthodoxy when enlightened upon the fallibility of their 
 Bible, so there are intelligent, thinking Mohammedans who for 
 a similar reason have ceased to follow the crescent and are 
 feeling about for a new foundation of belief. 
 
 Of all the Bibles of the great religions, the Qur'an is the 
 least attractive to the general reader. Curiosity draws him to 
 its pages but he is quickly repelled because there is no con- 
 tinuity of thought, no charm of style, both the thought and the 
 style suggesting the camel of the desert, at liberty to browse 
 wherever stubble is to be found. The one hundred and four- 
 teen chapters of the book have superscriptions indeed, but these 
 for the most part bear no relation to the contents. The events 
 chronicled follow no chronological order and only the most 
 patient scholarship of specialists has enabled us to shape from 
 this literary waste and tangle the prophet's thought and teach- 
 ings. Had Mohammed known how to write there might have 
 been no such difficulties. As the "revelations" fell from his 
 lips they were caught by a secretary, jotted down on any ma- 
 terial ready to hand and never connectedly arranged during 
 the prophet's life. He having been neither a theologian, nor 
 an historian, nor a philosopher, but an enthusiast, spoke his 
 revelations as they came regardless of their agreement with or 
 contradiction of earlier ones. His thought possessed him, not 
 he his thought. Prom his surcharged brain it rushed on un- 
 diked, unchanneled, too swift to allow of skilful or consistent 
 expression. Carlyle complained that the Qur'an was the most 
 toilsome reading he ever undertook. He described it as "a 
 wearisome, confused jumble, endless iterations, long winded- 
 ness, entanglement most crude, incondite, insupportable stupid- 
 ity in short." But, thanks to the labor of Biblical scholars, who 
 have applied the principles of the higher criticism to the Qur'an 
 as to the Old and New Testaments, we can place its chapters 
 in their chronological order, divide the book into three sections 
 corresponding to the three epochs of the prophet's career and 
 see the spirit of each reflected in the chapters of each section. 
 The first epoch, marked by misgiving, doubt, struggle, misap- 
 preciation and opposition, is readily discerned in a series of 
 chapters aglow with enthusiasm and bordering on frenzy, re- 
 cording his visions with a fervor that persuades us of his sin- 
 
 85
 
 tjerity. The second epoch, the period of appreciation and suc- 
 cess, is evidenced in the chapters of reasoning and argument; 
 calm, dispassionate, yet not void of enthusiasm, addressed to 
 converts who recognize and acknowledge the authority of the 
 speaker. The third epoch finds the prophet prone to make con- 
 cessions and compromises for the sake of still greater success. 
 He has grown shrewd, calculating, politic, in his aggressive 
 propaganda and all this is reflected in a group of chapters whose 
 weak, willowy utterances indicate descent from the plane of a 
 high ideal which had been transfigured by sincere consecration 
 and perfervid enthusiasm. 
 
 Turning to the Qur'an, as we have turned to the Bibles of 
 the other great religions in search of their respective gospels, 
 we observe that the duty of submission to God, the Resistless, 
 mighty, omnipotent one, is enjoined with never wearying em- 
 phasis. Submission, that is the note which Mohammedanism 
 contributes to the symphony of Universal Religion. The very 
 name of the religion, "Islam," means submission. For the 
 faithful never speak of their religion as "Mohammedanism," 
 but always as "Islam.' Then, too, in the ninety and nine 
 M.-imos of Allah, "the Strong One," the idea of submission is 
 predominant. He is called, "the one to whom everything is 
 subject, the Lord of all creatures, the Lord of the East and 
 the West, the all-governing, the all-compelling." He is the 
 Mighty One to whom all things and all creatures must sub- 
 mit and whose mercy is due to his very omnipotence. He is 
 likened unto the wind and all humanity unto a field of grain 
 that sways with the blowing of the wind. He is a Sultan, a des- 
 pot, and Muslims are they who submit (the word Muslim having 
 the same root as Islam), they who, like the willows, bend be- 
 fore the blast; rather than like the infidels, who resist it, as 
 does the oak. Thus the fundamental religious duty of Islam 
 is submission and it implies three primary obligations. First, 
 abhorrence of idolatry as the most heinous of sins, bestowing 
 on other supposed gods the homage due to Allah alone. When 
 the subjects of an autocratic Sultan dare to enthrone a usurper 
 and to do him homage, they are punished to the full extent 
 of the civil law. Even so idolaters who dare to worship any 
 other god than the heavenly Sultan, are punished to the full 
 
 86
 
 extent of the religious law, enunciated repeatedly in the Korai* 
 and to be fulfilled on the Judgment Day. Every mosque 
 bears witness to Mohammed's hatred of idolatry, no statuary, 
 no images, no reproductions of any human forms are to be 
 seen, solely the arabesque ornaments whose geometric trac- 
 eries reproduce only objects from the inanimate world. Sec- 
 ond, the duty of submission involved the obligation to extend 
 the heavenly Sultan's Kingdom on earth, and by force if need 
 be, because refusal to recognize and do homage to Him is 
 rebellion and rebellion must be suppressed, by persuasion if 
 possible, by the sword if necessary a doctrine that appealed 
 to the military temper of the Saracen and which Mohammed 
 set forth by precept and example. Such is the logic of a 
 monarchical creed. This, however, must be said concerning 
 Islam's appeal to force, that the Mohammedan sword has often- 
 er been tempered with mercy than has the Christian, albeit 
 that the genius and spirit of Christianity oppose appeal to 
 force. When Omar captured Jerusalem he suffered every 
 Christian life to be spared, when Geoffrey of Lorraine cap- 
 tured the city he put ten thousand Muslims to merciless death. 
 The third obligation identified with the duty of submission 
 is obedience to the commandments of Allah as taught in the 
 Qur'an. with special care to have one's moral account 
 "square" when the Judgment Day dawns. For then will the 
 heavenly Sultan determine the fate of each human soul. Then 
 will a man walking to the judgment seat be met by a loath- 
 some looking object to which he will say, "be gone," but it 
 will reply, "I cannot, for I am thy conscience." Then will 
 the fraudulent buyer and the fraudulent seller walk to the 
 judgment seat with the goods they fraudulently bought or 
 sold tied to their necks and dragging behind them. Then too 
 will the righteous have opened unto them the gates of Para- 
 dise, no mere reproduction of a Turkish harem, having its 
 sensuous delights indeed, but its spiritual elements besides. 
 Most frankly and even naively is the Mohammedan motive 
 for right conduct presented in terms of Paradise and Hell. 
 Nowhere else is the utilitarian motive for virtue more explic- 
 itly sd forth than in the Qur'an. 
 
 Five "pilhu-s" of fidelity are set up, constituting the moral 
 
 87
 
 and religious requirements binding upon all believers. (1) 
 Repetition of the creed "there is no God but God and Mo- 
 hammed is his prophet." (2) Prayer and ablutions; five times 
 daily, at the call of the "Muezzin," from his minaret. (3) 
 Almsgiving, two and a half per cent of one's goods to be given 
 the poor, (4) fasting, from sunrise to sunset in the month 
 Ramadan, in which the prophet fled to Medina from Mecca, 
 (5) a pilgrimage, at least once in one's lifetime, to Mecca. 
 
 Three commandments are given special prominence in the 
 ethical teachings of Mohammedanism. These relate to total 
 abstinence, cleanliness and humaneness. Essentially charac- 
 teristic of Mohammed's legislation was his insistence on ab- 
 stinence from liquor. Drunkenness is the one vice most fe;ired 
 in tropical countries and generally condemned as a violation 
 of divine law. This prevailing conception was adopted by 
 the prophet as an integral part of his moral code. His oppo- 
 sition to Christianity was based in part on its failure to put 
 an absolute veto on the use of wine. General Lew Wallace, 
 after prolonged residence at Constantinople declared that while 
 Christian drunkards were to be seen daily on the streets, he 
 never once saw a drunken Muslim. The requirement of ablu- 
 tions five times daily, before prayers, led very naturally to 
 the promotion of cleanliness. 
 
 A "Society for the prevention of cruelty to animals" is 
 unknown in Mohammedan countries, except in cities overrun 
 by Christians, and in Turkish cemeteries, it is said, the four 
 corners of every slab that covers a grave are grooved to catch 
 the rainfall and so attract the birds to drink and sing over 
 the place where their human brethren sleep. This tender con- 
 cern for the lower animals results from the prophet's injunc- 
 tions touching humaneness which appear again and again in 
 the pages of the Qur'an. 
 
 Concerning the charge of advocating polygamy and slav- 
 ery, made against Mohammed, it should be remembered that 
 these evils existed before his day and the most that could 
 then be done was to improve the condition of slaves and the 
 position of women, both of which Mohammed achieved. He 
 gave women rights of property, he regulated divorce and put 
 restrictions on polygamy by fixing the number of wives at 
 
 88
 
 four, a law that provoked no general antagonism because it 
 made allowance for the physical passion of the tropics, even 
 as the law prohibiting use of intoxicants conformed to the 
 popular belief as to the wisdom of practicing abstinence and 
 therefore the law was readily approved. 
 
 When we reflect upon the utterly uncivilized character of 
 the tribes that inhabited Africa and parts of Asia at the time 
 <!' Mohammed's appearance as a reformer, we may well be- 
 lieve that the doctrine of submission to an irresistible Ruler 
 whose decrees are to be unquestioningly accepted and obeyed 
 was exactly suited to the needs of these peoples, belonging 
 AS they did to the childhood stage of human development, 
 when simple obedience to rules regardless of their meaning or 
 purpose is the highest possible virtue. For peoples who have 
 evolved from that stage the gospel of Islam, or submission, 
 can have no inspiration. To the everlasting credit of Moham- 
 medanism it must be said that in lifting to a higher plane of 
 life the various tribes of Africa and Asia to which it ministered 
 it accomplished that which contemporary Judaism and Chris- 
 tianity in those localities were never able to achieve. In this 
 civilizing work Islam performed an invaluable service to the 
 world.
 
 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 
 
 "Whatever road I take joins the highway that leads to thee." 
 
 Parsee Scriptures. 
 
 "I make bold to say that we who are now living will behold the 
 dawn of a new religion which is to be really universal in its principles 
 and as broad as humanity in its boundaries; which is not, however, to 
 be Christianity, nor Judaism, nor Buddhism, nor Neo-BrahmanSsm. but 
 a new faith into which the specific religions are in form to die that they 
 may continue to live in spiritual substance." Wm. J. Potter, in 1893. 
 
 In the name of universal brotherhood, in the interests of 
 truth and in the spirit of love, we have gone like pilgrims, 
 with the staff of sincerity and the scrip of sympathy to the 
 shrines of sacred scripture that contain the gospel of the great 
 religions. 
 
 What has our pilgrimage done for us? Intellectually, it 
 has widened the bounds of our knowledge concerning 1lie.se 
 systems of faith, it has corrected certain errors and false im- 
 pressions, thereby banishing prejudices that were the product 
 of those misconceptions. Spiritually, our pilgrimage has broad- 
 ened us, made us more catholic in our sympathies, more cos- 
 mopolitan in our attitude to the non-Christian religions, more 
 responsive to inspirations from sources we supposed were un- 
 promising, if not wholly void of helpfulness. In a word, our 
 pilgrimage has deepened within us that spirit which is more 
 than forbearance, more than tolerance, more than charity and 
 to which we give the name Appreciation; the spirit Ili;it 
 prompts us to bow before every teacher, be he Buddha or 
 Zoroaster, Confucius or Jesus; that leads us to find moral and 
 spiritual food in all sacred scriptures, be they the Pitakas or 
 the New Testament, the Avesta or the Qur'an, valuing each 
 teacher, each book, in proportion to the helpfulness derived 
 therefrom; the spirit that in looking at the various sects of 
 Christianity compares them to the stops and pedals of a great 
 organ, each contributing some tone or timbre toward the com- 
 plete harmony of human faith. Our pilgrimage has taught us 
 that no one can enter into the respective messages of the 
 world's great religions or into the lives of the great founders 
 and teachers without taking a distinct forward step in spir- 
 itual progress, without reducing the number of one's pre.ju- 
 
 90
 
 dices, without developing the qualities of fair-mindedness, can- 
 dor, catholicity, appreciation. In so far, then, as our pilgrim- 
 age has achieved for us these results we must count it a dis- 
 tinct spiritual gain. 
 
 We have discovered that all of the seven extant great 
 religions, despite their differences, face the same way, look 
 up to the same ideal of a diviner life on earth as man's most im- 
 mediate concern; all ask the same essential, vital questions re- 
 lating to morals and religion, to-wit: Is there a God? Is man 
 immortal? Is duty binding upon us? What shall I do to be 
 saved? To each of these primary religious questions each 
 of these religions gives an answer of its own. All, again, 
 emphasize some one particular doctrine or belief, constituting 
 the keynote of each. 
 
 From actual reading of the Bibles of these religions we 
 have proved that moral precepts relating to justice, gentle- 
 ness, tolerance, truthfulness, forgiveness, love, which many 
 think are to be found in the Old and New Testaments alone, 
 appear also in the other five Bibles. Nay more, we discovered 
 certain moral maxims in these scriptures which are lacking in 
 the Christian Bible, while every moral sentiment found in it 
 is paralelled by corresponding- sentences in one or another of 
 the rest. 
 
 The Golden Rule we once thought original with Jesus, but 
 we came across it in the teachings of Confucius and of Gotama, 
 we read the version of it given by Mohammed and by Zoro- 
 aster. Even Moses, or the author of the injunction "an eye 
 for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, we observed, did not teach 
 a doctrine of revenge in those words, but on the contrary, he 
 set forth the doctrine of justice as then understood and jus- 
 tice is the heart of the Golden Rule. 
 
 The ten commandments, we found, might be extended to 
 at least fourteen so as to include the inculcating of temper- 
 ance, humaneness, cleanliness and intellectual honesty, com- 
 mandments contributed by Buddhism, Mohammedanism and 
 Hinduism. 
 
 Again, by appeal to these same Bibles we have discovered 
 tliiit the religious sentiments of reverence, wonder, awe, aspira- 
 tion are present in the hearts of the billion non-Christian souls 
 
 91
 
 no less than in the hearts of the four hundred and fifty mil- 
 lions who take the Christian name. We listened to a Hindu 
 psalm and were at once reminded of a similar psalm in the 
 Old Testament and also of the refrain in the "Litany" of 
 the Episcopal Prayer-Book. We heard the Parsee's prayer for 
 purity and realized how slight a change in the words of that 
 prayer is -required to make it suit our own spiritual need. We 
 read the Buddha's "eight-fold noble path" and though we 
 believe neither in reincarnation nor in Nirvana, we know that 
 we too must walk that path if all the possibilities of character- 
 development are to be ours. We opened the "Kings" and the 
 Qur'an and found that each contains the credentials of a re- 
 ligion that on many a spiritual theme speaks to our hearts in 
 accents beautiful and divine. 
 
 So deeply impressed were we by the purity of spirit, the 
 nobility of purpose and consecration to an ideal aim that mark 
 the lives of the founders of the great religions that we shrink 
 from comparing them. We feel compelled to refrain from 
 declaring the spirit of any one of them to be superior to that 
 of all the rest, a practice that prevails pretty generally among 
 representatives of these religions. Who, that has made an 
 impartial study of the life and work of these great teachers, 
 will dare to say that the spirit of Zoroaster was any less pure, 
 less fine, less exalted than the spirit of Jesus? Who will <l;ire 
 to say that Confucius was less consecrated than the Buddha 
 or that Mohammed was less sincere than Moses? Who, in the 
 light of even our imperfect studies in comparative religion 
 will think of affirming that Jesus summed up in his personality 
 all the qualities of the other great religious teachers and added 
 to that sum his own distinguishing attributes? Far -be it from 
 us to detract one iota from that which constitutes the spiritual 
 greatness of Jesus, yet there is nothing to warrant so extrava- 
 gant a claim as this "pleroma" implies. From all such com- 
 parisons, contrasts and extravagant, unwarranted claims our 
 pilgrimage has saved us; at the same time.it has bidden us be 
 discriminating in our estimates and judgments both of the 
 teachers and of their respective gospels. 
 
 Not the least important of the discoveries resulting from 
 our pilgrimage is that which pertains to the unity and diversity 
 
 92
 
 of the great religions. We see that all are one because all 
 are rooted in universal human nature and all are simply so 
 many expressions of man's effort to perfect himself in all his 
 relations and this effort is the essence of religion. On the 
 other hand, these religions are all different because of their 
 various local origins and because of the various special claims 
 made by each but shared by no other. In other words, we 
 have seen that each of these religions has a special and a uni- 
 versal element, the former indicating its difference from the 
 others, the latter its oneness with them. Mohammedanism is 
 a religion, because of its universal element, i. e., its root and the 
 ideahvard effort, beliefs and sentiments which it shares with 
 all other religions. It is the Mohammedaoi religion because 
 of its special element, its claim that Mohammed is the prophet 
 of God and the Qur'an God's supreme revelation to man. Chris- 
 tianity is a religion because of the same universal element which 
 it contains; it is the Christian religion because of its special 
 claim that Jesus is the Christ of God, the sole Savior of man- 
 kind. So each of the other five religions has its universal ele- 
 ment, its ideas, sentiments, aspirations, which it shares with 
 all others; each has also its special element, represented by 
 those claims and doctrines which are peculiar to itself. 
 
 The question therefore arises, very naturally and sponta- 
 neously, will any one of these seven religions conquer and 
 absorb the other six and so become itself a universal religion? 
 At the World's Parliament of Religions this expectation was 
 entertained and expressed by one or more representatives of 
 each of the seven religions. The fervent Buddhist pictured the 
 universal reign of Gotama's faith. The enthusiastic Moham- 
 medan made bold to predict the universal sway of Islam. The 
 devout Christian prayed for the redemption of the world 
 through his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. At Saratoga, in 
 1894, Unitarianism was declared "identical with Universal 
 Religion ; ' ' yet it still remains a sect of Christianity, still re- 
 tains the Christian name and singles out the religion of Jesus 
 to be accepted by all the churches of the National Conference 
 and makes acceptance of this religion the central plank of its 
 denominational platform, saying not one word of any other 
 7-ditrion as being even partially true or of any other great 
 
 93
 
 teacher as making any contribution essential to the formation 
 of an all-round human ideal. But would a Baptist, Methodist 
 or Presbyterian change his name to "Unitarian" even were 
 it a synonym for universal religion? Would a Jew ever join 
 a Buddhist church if Buddhism were the name of a universal re- 
 ligion? Would a Mohammedan, even were he to forget Geof- 
 frey of Lorraine, acept the name "Christian" as equivalent 
 to universal? Would a Christian be willing to be styled "Mo- 
 hammedan" were Islam to attain universality? These queries 
 suggest that there are certain insurmountable obstacles that 
 stand in the way of any one of the seven great religions rep- 
 resenting universal religion and these we must now consider. 
 
 1. To begin with, they all are built on the principle of 
 authority. Each appeals to its own leader, or book, when any 
 disputed or open question arises for settlement. To whom 
 shall we go for the answer? The Buddhist points to his deified 
 Gotama, saying "go to him, he has the words of eternal truth." 
 The Parsee points with like remark to his inspired Zarathustra, 
 the Moslem to his infallible Mohammed, the Christian to his 
 supranatural Jesus. But it is an insult to a Christian to ask 
 him to accept the authority of Gotama or of Mohammed and 
 it is equally an insult to ask a Buddhist or a Mohammedan to 
 accept the authority of Jesus or of Paul. 
 
 Universal Religion insults none because it recognizes all, 
 showing impartial gratitude and reverence to all and paying 
 due homage to each according to the amount of truth he has 
 taught and the degree to which his character ennobles and 
 inspires. 
 
 2. Hindus, Buddhists, Parsees, Christians, and the rest, 
 all pursue truth by the method of authority, i. e. by appeal to 
 "revelation." "This is true," each one says, "because it is 
 in my sacred book, in this revelation from God" and of course 
 there can be no debating the question because it is a revela- 
 tion. But alas, the alleged revelations do not give one and 
 the same answer to every question. Take, for example, that 
 most pressing practical question "What shall I do to be saved ?" 
 The Hindu says, "Study and meditate," the Buddhist, "live 
 an absolutely unselfish life;" the Parsee, "be pure in thought, 
 word and deed;" the Confucian, "reproduce Nature's order;" 
 
 94-
 
 the Jew, "fulfill the law of righteousness;" the Christian, "be- 
 lieve on the Lord Jesus Christ ; ' ' the Mohammedan, ' ' submit to 
 the decrees of the heavenly Sultan, Allah." Here, then, are 
 seven revelations offering seven different answers to our ques- 
 tion, each one of them, moreover, imposing its answer as dog- 
 ma, that is, as not to be questioned because "revealed." 
 
 Universal Religion appeals to none of these conflicting reve- 
 lations, but to evidence, and it insists on debate as absolutely 
 indispensable to the discovery of truth. It holds that the first 
 question to be asked concerning any statement of belief must 
 be, is it true and this can be determined only by appeal to 
 that standard of truth-seeking which accords freedom of 
 thought to each human soul and permits nothing but the agree- 
 ment of all capable of thinking on the disputed question (the 
 "consensus of the competent") to settle it, and even then it 
 makes allowance for the possible discovery of new facts which 
 may in some measure modify the conclusion reached. To be 
 sure the belief, whatever it may be, is no truer then than it was 
 at first, but nothing short of such a test could warrant regard- 
 ing it as a universally accepted truth. In other words, the 
 method of universal religion is not dogmatic but scientific. It 
 does not say, "this is true because it is in this sacred book, 
 or because it was uttered by this founder;" it says, this is 
 true liccjuisc it has been tested, because it has been sifted, sub- 
 " jected to the most careful and crucial scrutiny, because it has 
 successfully passed through the ordeal of that six-fold process 
 known as the method of science, without which no open ques- 
 tion in any department of thought has ever yet been closed. 
 
 3. All the great religions make membership depend on 
 acceptance of their Leader, or their Sacred Book, or both. To 
 join a Christian church one must accept the New Testament 
 ;is the standard of faith and morals, and regard Jesus as Savior, 
 or at least as the complete, all-sufficient guide and exemplar. 
 Hut this test of fellowship shuts out four hundred and fifty 
 million Buddhists who accept the "Pitakas" and who regard 
 finlama as their Savior or Leader. It shuts out two hundred 
 million Mohammedans who accept the Qur'an as their standard 
 in religion and who look on Mohammed as the perfect Teacher 
 ;ind (Jiiide. In short, the Christian requirement for membership 
 
 95
 
 shuts out two-thirds of the human race. Equally exclusive is 
 the Buddhist test of fellowship and all the others in greater 
 or less degree shut out souls who should be welcome whore 
 the common object is to strive for perfection in all the rela- 
 tions of life. 
 
 Universal Religion sets aside these excluding tests of fel- 
 lowship. It seeks to unite men and women not in the bonds 
 of Christian love, or of Buddhist love or of Mohammedan love, 
 but solely in the bonds of human love. Christianity aims to 
 unite men in the bonds of Christian love. It accepts all Chris- 
 tians on equal terms, but all non-Christians on no tot-ins. 
 Universal Religion holds that it is not enough for 
 a group of men and women to be brothers and sisters in 
 Christ, or in Mohammed, or in Moses; they must be brothers 
 and sisters in humanity with all the rest of mankind ; that 
 is what true, ideal fellowship calls for. Universal Religion 
 welcomes all free souls who wish to live upward toward truth 
 of though*, truth of feeling and truth of will, as our lamented 
 pioneer, Dr. F. E. Abbot, expressed it. Only they who wish 
 to live downward to the opposite of these supreme ends of life, 
 if indeed there be any souls absolutely given over to irreligion, 
 could Universal Religion exclude. For no man can live up- 
 ward and downward at the same time. In actual life we are 
 neither wholly angelic nor wholly demonic but all of us .-ire 
 either religious or irreligious, that is to say all of us either 
 strive to live upward and make effort toward the ideal our 
 aim or we make no such effort toward Truth, Duty, Love. 
 Hence, if there is to be a religious fellowship at all it can in- 
 clude only those who wish to be religious, that is, to live up- 
 ward. Futile and vain it is to think of an all-embodying human 
 fellowship because religion excludes irreligion as ^ovcnmiont 
 excludes anarchy. We can hope to unite men in one groat 
 fellowship only if that fellowship be religious. Universal Re- 
 ligion accepts the irreconcilable antagonism between living up- 
 ward and living downward, between religion and irroli^ion 
 and consequently makes its test of fellowship the wish to livo 
 upward and not by any means assent to any intellectual propo- 
 sitions, as is done by the special religions and their sects. When 
 the dream of such a fellowship is historically realized it will 
 
 96
 
 include all sects, large and small ; not, however, as sects, but as 
 free human souls, for then all these sects will have ceased 
 to be sectarian, submitting, in the love of truth, all their sec- 
 tarian doctrines to the test of the method of freedom, the meth- 
 od of science. If the world continues to advance, sectarianism 
 will become as absurd in religion as it already is in science. 
 Today the universal church fellowship is only an ideal; to- 
 morrow it will be a fact, because history affirms that man is 
 a progressive being. Perfect liberty in perfect love; anything 
 less than that is unworthy to serve as the principle of fellow- 
 ship for a religion that would be universal. 
 
 4. Each of the seven great religions, by reason of the 
 particular circumstances under which it came into the world 
 and the particular type of evils to protest against which it 
 originated, sets forth a more or less partial, one-sided ideal 
 of life. Each uplifts a side of life and makes development of 
 that side the main feature of its teaching rather than develop- 
 ment of all the possibilities of our human nature in right relation 
 and in proper proportion, the physical and the intellectual, 
 the emotional and the practical. As an example take Chris- 
 tianity, the religion with which we are most familiar. It is 
 strongly representative of the' feminine or emotional virtues, 
 meekness, humility, resignation, compassion, self-abnegation 
 love, just as early Judaism is in large measure representative of 
 the masculine virtues, justice, loyalty, fortitude, patriotism. In 
 his emphasis on self-abnegation Jesus was led to attach small 
 value to the pursuit of knowledge as a worthy object in life, 
 and to look on the physical and aesthetic life as a hindrance 
 to the development of the spiritual life. True, this very one- 
 sidedness, this exclusive glorification of the gentler virtues 
 was the secret of his success as a restorer of hope and faith 
 to an empire sunk in despair and unbelief. His message proved 
 to be precisely what was then wanted. By uplifting the emo- 
 tional side at the expense of the physical, intellectual and 
 aesthetic, Jesus manifested a noble narrowness that saved 
 the Roman world. But, on the other hand, this very onesided- 
 ness makes it impossible to regard the ideal taught by Jesus 
 as a complete one, while gratefully and reverently recogniz- 
 ing and appreciating his indispensable contributions to the 
 
 97
 
 complete ideal. Similarly a study of the ideals set forth by 
 the other great Teachers would lead us to a like conclusion, 
 namely, that each has the defects of its qualities and does not 
 cover every side of life. 
 
 Universal Religion, therefore, heir of the historic religions, 
 inherits the contributions of each to the formation of the com- 
 plete ideal of life, holding that no one religion contains it, 
 for it is and can be nothing less than the harmonious develop- 
 ment of all the possibilities of our many-sided human nature 
 in one rounded life. Toward this modern conception of life's 
 ideal each of the seven great religions contributes its special 
 quota, but no one of them in its sacred scriptures presents 
 this ideal. 
 
 Universal Religion, therefore, in answer to the question, 
 whom shall we follow, whom shall we accept as our Leader, 
 our representative of the ideal of humanity, will mention not 
 any one, but all Gotama, Zarathustra, Confucius, Moses, Jesus, 
 Mohammed ( adding Socrates, Marcus Aurelius and all other 
 world-teachers. If asked "why mention all and refuse to se- 
 lect one?" the answer is because it takes all of these and 
 more to embody the full-orbed human ideal. There never 
 was in any one soul a concentration of all the perfections pos- 
 sible to all persons, past, present and to be. Only in imag- 
 ination, not in history, has such a Leader lived, though in 
 China they think him Confucius, in Ceylon, Gotama, the 
 Buddha, in Christendom, Jesus the Christ. As the entire 
 beauty and excellence of the diamond does not shine from 
 any one of its many facets, but is produced only from them 
 altogether, so it takes all the great religious Leaders and more 
 beside, to produce the beauty and excellence of the ideal of 
 humanity. 
 
 Such are the chief reasons w r hy no one of the seven great 
 religions can ever conquer and absorb the other six and become 
 itself a universal religion. As long as each one of them re- 
 mains sectarian, setting up an external authority, a dogma, a 
 book, a name, a test, repudiated by all the rest, it is absurd 
 to expect that any one of them will ever be equivalent to Uni- 
 versal Religion. A union of these conflicting systems of faith 
 under the banner of any one of them is utterly impossible. The 
 
 98
 
 only possible union is one not of systems but of souls, a re- 
 ligions brotherhood of free souls united on the basis of free- 
 dom for the attainment of moral and religious truth by the 
 method of freedom, to the end that life may be richer, grander, 
 diviner. 
 
 As fast as men learn to value spiritual freedom more 
 than bondage to tradition or creed, as fast as people grow to 
 care more for truth than for sectarian victory, so fast will 
 they hasten the advent of that religion which will lift them 
 above all differences of creed, color, class and race into that 
 sublime religious fellowship which has been the dream of every 
 ;i^c and of every clime.
 
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