Hawke's Bay Herald. SATURDAY, JUNE 9, 1877.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XX, Issue 3928, 9 June 1877, Page 2

Hawke's Bay Herald. SATURDAY, JUNE 9, 1877.

A certain Rev. Mr Reid in Wellington, as our own correspondent remarks, Las been turning the ]ate events in Europe to account, by pretending to find in them a fulfilment of the Apocalyptic prophecies, and has at any rate, by this process, succeeded in filling his church. While we can congratulate the reverend gentleman on the attainment of this, no doubt his main object, we cannot carry our congratulations further, or remark that his discourses are calculated to revive in the public mind the fast waning regard for the teachings of the pulpit. Fast waning it is thnnighout this colony, as well as, notoriously so, in the old country. The following is a specimen of MiReid's style of interpreting the book of Revelations, as reported by a Wellington contemporary : — ■" The locusts which came out of the smoke, and to ' winch was given power,' he identified as typical of the ferocious followers of Mahomet, and ou this point he mentioned the fact that the soldiers of Malic jmet were directed to spare the' lives of women, not to cut down palm trees, not to burn cornfields, nor to use the sword, if the conquered would accept the koran or pay tribute. The koran first, next tribute ; but if neither were accepted, then the sword. He quoted the 4th verse of the 9th chapter — 'And it was commanded thorn they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree ; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads' — and enquired whether the resemblance between the prophecy and the action of Mahometans was not unique." We should say it is anything but unique. The men whom the Mahometans did not hurt were mainly, as is correctly stated by Mr Reid himself, those who adopted the faith of Islam, and surely it was not such gentry as these that the writer of Revelations alluded to as " having the seal of God in their foreheads." Mr Reid is a man, we should say from the general style of his discourse, not indeed of ability, but still of quite sufficient intelligence not to be himself deceived by the nonsense that he gives A*ent to. He may reply, not openly, but sotto voce, that he gives vent to it because it pays ; but really, if this is the way in which he views the matter, it is much to be regretted that he should allow no other and higher considerations to weigh with him. The long alliance between Great Britain and the . Commander of the Faithful, together with the general expansion of modern thought on religious subjects, have contributed to revolutionise completely the current estimate of Mahoinmedanism, among Englishmen of education and culture. We find in the last number of the Quarter!)/, the organ of Conservatism, and High Church orthodoxy, a- review of a small volume containing a series of lectures on "Mohammed and Mohammedanism," delivered a year or two ago at the Royal Institution by a Mr Bosworth Smith, M.A. The reviewer cites with appreciation the folloAving remarkable passage with reference to the rise and progress of Mahoinmedanism : " Glance for one moment," Mr Smith says, " at its marvellous history." Think how one great truth working in the brain of a shepherd of Mecca gradually produced conviction in a select band of personal adherents ; how when the Prophet was exiled to Medina, the faith gathered there fresh strength, brought him back in triumph to his native place, and secured to him for his lifetime the submission of all Arabia ; how, when the master mind was withdrawn, the whole structure he had reared seemed, for the moment, to vanish away like the baseless fabric of a vision ; how the faith of Abu Bakr and the sword of Omar recalled it once more to life, and crushed the false prophets that always follow in the wake of the true one, as the jackals do the trail of a lion ; how it crumpled up the Roman Empire on the one side, and the Persian on the other, driving Christianity before it to the west and north, and Fire Worship to the east and south." There can indeed be nothing more shallow and false than the ordinary cant about Mahommedanism having relied on the sword exclusively for the spread of its doctrines. Had Mahomet the power of the sword when he was a solitary shepherd at Mecca 1 It was not till the spiritual power of Islam had been for many years an active reality in the world that the corporeal power sprang into being. Nor can it be said that its spiritual power has ceased to be an active reality yet. "In India," as Mr Smith informs us, and as is well known from a thousand sources " Mahommedans make converts by hundreds, where Christians with difficulty make ten." It is not improbable that by the close of the century the whole of the Indian Peninsula will be Mahommedan. Among the negroes of Africa, it has frequently been remarked, that, while the communities, like that of Sierra Leone, on to which a base imitation of Western Christianity has been grafted, fall rapidly into a condition of decay and anarchy ; those like Zanzibar, which have embraced the Mahommedau faith, become stable and progressive. Mr Smith says that •' Christian travellers, with every wish to think otherwise, have remarked that the negro who accepts Mahoinmedanism acquires at once a sense of the dignity of human nature, not commonly found amongst those who have been brought to accept Christianity." For one thing "Mahommedanism," says the Quarterly Review, "is antagonistic to many of the vices to which the Negro is most prone. Drinking, for instance, brings out the very worst qualities of the savage nature, and the suppression of this vice is, no doubt, one of the chief benefits conferred by Islam upon Africa." It is a curious and tempting speculation, though, practically, no doubt, profitless, to conjecture what might have been the fate of the dark-skinned races in this part of the world, if Arabian missionaries had found their way to Polynesia and New Zealand, before the English and American missionaries did, or what it might be even now, if they found their way hero to-day. It is quite possible that in such an event, history would not have to repeat the melancholy tale of the gradual perishing of the primitive race at the approach of the more advanced. The bearing of either form of faith upon matters outside the range of the material universe is not, of course, a fitting subject of comment in columns

such as ours, but as to their respective adaptability for promoting the welfare and civilisation of mankind we think that experience tends to show that, while Christianity has an infinitely higher mission than Islam, that of still further raising and enlightening the races of nobler and loftier nature, it is not so susceptible — owing, perhaps, to its A-ery superiority — • of being grafted on to the natures of lower races, as also that, when grafted on, it is frequently not productive of the same beneficial results.