GREAT CAREERS

Hawera Star, Volume XLVI, 12 March 1927, Page 11

GREAT CAREERS

/dJUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS, the great King of Sweden, fell at Lutzen. If he had survived to follow up his victories he’would probably .have united all the Protestant peoples of Northern Europe in a great anti-imperialist League. Germany would have accepted his leadership, and Prussia as a great Power -might never have come into being. One may turn to an individuality that, left a deeper and more permanent impress upon the world. If Alexandra the Great had died in childhood by the neglect, of a careless nurse, Western Asia and all the Mediterranean lands might have become Persian or Phoenician, and the Graeco-Roman civilisation, whose heirs we are to this day, might have been submerged by the Orential wave.

And what if Alexandra hail not “done himself to well” at that banquet at Babylon, and died prematurely of a fit of indigestion? He was only 33. What might have happened if he had lived to be 60, and had consolidated his conquests into an empire which would have extended from Delhi to perhaps the Atlantic, and from the Sahara to the Danube?

Sometimes the accident works out the other way. Mohammed did live to be CO. If he had died at the age of Gustavus, or Alexander, he would never haye been heard of. He was 40 before he experienced his “conversion,” and saw a vision of the messenger of Allah

PERSONALITY AND CHARACTER

Mecca. To talk of Mohammed is to reflect on wha,t-, but for a few of those, useful strokes of fortune or misfortune which we may call accidental, Islam might have become. That ca valry charge out of the Arabian desert nearly overwhelmed Europe under the Prophet’s successors.

It took Egypt, -Syria, Anatolia, Spain in its stride. It crossed the Pyrenees, and had the fertile fields of France beforq

who commanded him to preach the true Faith. But he made slow progress; and if his end had come even at 50 he would have been known only as a wandering fanatic with a handful of disciples. The third of the great world religions would never have been born if the Prophet had passed away before those last few triumphant, years which led him, in his old age, from Medina To

Then Charles Martel and his Franks faced it at Tours, and rolled back the, tide. But what might have been if, as Gibbon says, some forgotten captain in that desperate battle had moved his troops to the right instead of the left, and so given victory to the banners of the Prophet? The hosts of Islam might have reached the Channel and crossed it; and St. Paul’s Catlierdral might be a Mahommedan mosque, as Macaulay v pleasantlv suggested, and Mussulman professors might be lecturing in Arabic at Oxford.

There is no getting away from the transcendent and enduring influence of* personality and character.