Oh! make Thou us, through centuries long, Around our gift of freedom draw The safeguards of Thy righteous law; Let the new cycle shame the old ! JOHN G. WHITTIER. The Eastern and estern Creeds, and their Fruits. THE events which are happening in the East, and which follow each other with such strange and tragical rapidity, bring out into very clear development the essential contrasts which distinguish Oriental from European society. Christendom is a reality of one kind; Islam is a reality of another kind. Both have been great powers in the world, and are great powers still. But the one seems to have in it a spring of progress, which moves it ever to higher and yet higher forms of development; it has an aspiration and a hope, which its history slowly but surely fulfils; the other, though capable of splendid spasmodic effort, seems incapable of powerful and permanent development, and has no fire of life burning in its heart, which is strong enough to resist the waste of corruption and the palsy of decay. Christendom lives, and grows richer, stronger, larger, by all that it does and suffers. Islam is dying visibly, and its sickness and anguish reveal no spring of power within which can heal and purify-the sickness is manifestly not unto life, but unto death. Nothing can be more striking than the attitude and action of French society, for instance, through the long death-sickness, as it might well seem, which preceded the great Revolution, as compared with the condition of Turkey or Egypt, or any Oriental nation, in similar periods of weakness and decay. The whole head seemed to be sick, in France, and the whole heart faint, during the generation which prepared the Revolution. From Louis " well-beloved," down to the starving peasantry, all seemed rotten together. King, noble and priest, in league against the toiling, struggling, wretched people-who, broken by ages of tyranny, and crushed by burdens which they hardly dreamed of the possibility of casting off, were settling down into the apathy of political death. Can anything be darker than the picture which M. Taine paints of France before the Revolution; all seemed dead, except some fire of purpose and passion, somewhere deep down in the national heart, which made that decay and misery the starting point of a progress which has stirred the life-currents of every State in Christendom for close upon a hundred years, and is an inspiration to great nations still. And the great French Revolution is but an instance the largest and grandest instance, no doubt-of the process through which, in one form or other, every Christian nation has passed, and may have to pass again. There is, and always has been, something at work in the heart of the Christian nations which has revealed itself at critical eras as a spring of renewal, which has drawn into closer fellowship of duties and ministries the classes of whose selfish isolation and antagonism society seemed to be dying; it has breathed a new spirit of concert into the various orders of which the nation is composed, which has developed the unity of the nation, and has enlarged and strengthened each separate class and interest, while enlarging and strengthening the whole. The progress of Christendom, under all the brilliant material splendour with which intellect and industry have clothed it, is at best the constant enlargement and elevation of the life of the classes, all the classes and not only the humblest, which compose our complex societies in these days of advanced civilisation, and of the individuals and households which those classes contain. The field of knowledge, of duty, of power, constantly widens for the peoples who dwell within the Christian borders, and who inherit the Christian traditions. The process is slow enough, no doubt, and the step of progress sometimes seems, as in Spain, for the time to recoil. But the lapse of generations reveals the progress indisputably, a kind of progress, which in various measures, whatever may be the difference in the point of culture, and of social and political institutions, all Christian peoples seem by a kind of common birthright to share; and even in the case of the most decayed and degraded --and Spain has perhaps reached as low a state of political degradation as a Christian State can well touch-there is a confident tone as to her ultimate redemption, her emergence in time into true freedom and power, adopted as almost a matter of course by all her critics and censors, which seems to rest upon the belief that for a Christian people, except under the heel of brutal force, there is no such thing as political death. When we turn to the East the contrast is startling. Progress in our Western sense is a Western achievement. The Oriental has no passion for it, no striving towards it; indeed he has a kind of contempt for it, and finds something more congenial to his nature and habit of mind in the monotony of imperceptible but irresistible and incurable decay. Oriental history is full of splendid bursts of effort and achievement; the Orientals, as Von Bunsen says, have been the authors of the most brilliant episodes in history. A period of intense and masterful activity, during which Eastern hordes storm through wide regions, destroying thrones, founding empires, giving a new face to the world, and a new shape to history, is followed in the life of Oriental peoples by long generations and ages of stagnation, in which, though there may be much fitful activity, much useful and even brilliant production, the whole social order shortly but surely corrupts and decays. Nothing is founded in the East, but the influence of the founder; while that lasts there is what looks like organic growth and progress. Let that be withdrawn, and it is seen at once how little is growing, and how dry is that inner vital spring, which, apart from all impact of rulers of genius, secures a sure progress and enlargement of thought, activity and interest to all who share the development of Christian States. In the East everything depends on the will of a master; there is no steady controlling force within the body of the political society which lays down lines for the ruler, and secures the co-operation of the various classes of the com 1 munity in the government and development of the State. The millions of patient, plodding, and wretched labourers in Egypt are just where they were in the days of the Pharaohs. They have been absolutely nothing through all these millenniums, they have founded nothing. Wave after wave of conquest has passed over them, but they have taught nothing to their conquerors; they have become nothing which can enter as a value into any political calculations, or be a power in any political reconstruction of the decayed and worn-out State. And European Turkey, though her history counts but centuries for the millenniums of Egypt, repeats substantially the same experience. The empire is visibly breaking up and perishing, and what is there constituted and consolidated which promises to survive the wreck. There are not even the elements there out of which enduring and progressive social institutions could be built. When one hears of the reformation of Turkish society, one is tempted to ask where are the organic elements of a true political society on which to work. There is the absolute autocrat at the head, by divine right the master of the whole community. There is a ruling class or rather caste, which carries on the government and management of the empire; but they are absolutely dependent on the one ruling will; their tenure of office has no fixity; their government has no traditions except the basest and most selfish. There is a great multitude of the governed, theoretically on the same level of dignity as believers, but practically on the same level of almost servile subjection; without cohesion, without organisation, without the sense that they have rights and powers as classes, as orders, as individual citizens, as sacred, as vitally important to the true order of a State, as the ruler's will or the soldier's sword. The head of the State is the ordained of heaven, and the decisions of his will carry with them a spiritual weight, which is a crushing incubus on the political life of the Moslem populations. It is as though in Europe there had been no Empire, no secular institution having a sacredness of its own in the eyes of men, under whose fostering care their political institutions might freely grow, and the Pope, the head of the Church, had been from the first universal Bishop and universal King, moulding the whole development of Christian society, under one tyrannous, cramping, and blighting hand. The sense of the dignity of man in the order of political society, the sacredness of his rights and duties in the State, is utterly wanting where the successor of the Prophet rules over hosts of subjects, who are nominally brethren in virtue of their common relation through faith to their founder, but who are really and practically abject, helpless, soulless, slaves. It is this want which makes all schemes for the reconstruction of Eastern society under present conditions-we should go farther, and say so long as the Koran rules-so utterly hopeless. To build a stable, progressive, political society on such foundations as Islam yields, is like building on sand. There is nothing which will hold the community together when the strain becomes severe; there is no healthy nexus between the classes; society has no joints and bands by which it may become compacted and grow. Hence the hopelessness with which all observant critics write about the future of the Turkish Empire; the last thing which they think possible is a sound, radical, vital reformation, which will renew its youth, give it a new starting point on its career of progress, and make it once more a power among men. And does not the root of this contrast between Islam and Christendom lie in their Creeds, their deepest beliefs about things human and divine. The contrasts are too absolute and too constant to be accounted for by any accidental conditions. The root of them must be sought in that which influences and moulds the inner nature of men, and creates their tendencies to and their capacities for development—their religious faith. Islam believes in a righteous, almighty despot; Christendom believes, however feeble and poor the faith may be, in a wise and righteous Father of spirits, who can love, and help, and save. There is nothing before the constant contemplation of the Mahometan but the stern, absolute will of a ruler. The one virtue which he is taught to cultivate is abject submission; the Lord in his house of life is Fate. There is nothing in his creed, in his thoughts about God and his relation to things spiritual, divine, and eternal, to touch the springs of aspiration and endeavour. True, he thinks himself the favoured of Heaven, and under the inspiration of an immediate divine command he is capable of splendid effort and achievement; but it is a despot after all whom he obeys; one who rules with strong, stern hand, and gives to man no account of his decrees. So there is nothing in his obedience which expands, elevates, and cultivates his nature, which makes him yearn and strive towards a personal progress; his life is dwarfed and stunted under the cold shadow of the despotic will which is all that he sees ruling in Creation, and so the nation abides age after age in listless indolence as regards the higher human activity, stirred only by the excitements of love and war. The true dignity of man, his true place and worth in the scale of Creation, and the true dignity of work, are alike hidden from him-he lacks the main stimulus to human development, trust, and hope. In Christendom, on the other hand, man has been trained under the influence of the belief that the ruling power busy about his life was love. The love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord, lies at the heart of all the Christian Creeds, and has shaped in a measure we all too little appreciate the life of the Christian nations. Man is taught by it to care for himself, for what he may become and for what may grow out of his life, because God cares, and heaven watches his progress with interest and hope. It may be said in answer that the hold of this Christian idea on the great mass of the nominally Christian peoples is but slight, if indeed it is appreciable; and that Christian and Moslem in the East are about on the same level of morals and of conduct. The morals may be much the same, and the conduct, but the morale is essentially different. The inner mind and temper of the peoples differ toto calo. Nothing can be a greater mistake than to imagine that the moral character and conduct of a people at a particular crisis, is the measure of what their faith is worth to them, and what it can do for their life. The Christian peoples everywhere inherit the traditions, the habits, the ideas, which were wrought into the texture of Christian society in ages in which the Christian truths were very firmly and vividly grasped. by all classes of society. Christian society is built upon the beliefs, the aspirations, the hopes which the Gospel quickened. Christian peoples are living a life whose roots stretch back to apostolic times; and the idea which Christianity revealed of man's life, its dignity, its worth, of man's place in the political order as a being having brotherhood with the great elder Brother, whose oppression was a wrong which Christ would note and avenge, lies at the root of the capacity for political life, and the aptitude for political activity and progress which distinguishes in the most marked way the Christian from the Moslem inhabitants of the world. The God-manhood, and all that it brought into the world, is the root out of which Christian civilisation and progress spring. Islam will find a new spring of vital power, of living, lasting progress opened in its dying heart, when in place of the almighty despot under whose stern hand it cowers, it knows the Almighty Ruler as the Father, who in Christ has become Emmanuel, God with us. J. BALDWIN BROWN. Lot's life. THE last number of this magazine having contained an able sketch of the life and character of Lot, the present gives a brief and simple notice of Lot's wife. The reliable materials are remarkably scanty. She starts upon the page of history almost as an apparition altogether anonymous and unknown; she is introduced by no description, even her name is not mentioned. Her whole biography is condensed into a single line. But though so briefly treated, and though wholly destitute of the qualities or attributes which distinguish cases of historic commemoration, or secure places in civic or ecclesiastical calendars, she has the unique distinction of having been singled out by our Lord as a warning, Luke xvii. 32. We say "unique," for of none beside do we find Him saying what the Evangelist reports Him to have said concerning this nameless woman. It appears probable that she was a native of Sodom. It is clear that she was much attached to the place, and that no mention is made of Lot having a wife when he left his uncle Abraham, and settled at Sodom, and that Lot's ruling disposition would be likely to lead him to such an alliance. The conduct of their children, too, some married to natives, and the two remaining daughters "shamefully lost to all sense of modesty and piety," would seem to countenance the theory. In any case, she was "of" Sodom in spirit. Whatever may have been the form, or extent of righteous influence, she appears to have resisted it to the last. When the threatened doom is impending she leaves the place only under the constraint of the unearthly visitants, and therefore only in body; and even thus, I imagine, no longer than their pressure is upon her. As soon as this ceases, she stops. Her husband and daughters go on, not daring to look behind them till they come to Zoar. Not so with the wife and mother. Away upon the plain she "looked back," and, |