 | The Poetical Works of (Richard Monckton Milnes) Lord Houghton |  |
MOHAMMEDANISM.
Were met by early foes,
Who oft assault by strategy concealed,
And oft in force arose;
Her pleasurable faith,
At call of one who lived in that he died,
And preached that Life was Death;
Blent fragments of the new,
Though every master held himself the chief
Discerner of the true;
Th' Idea that long ago
Had ruled the Hebrew mind occasion caught
To strike a final blow.
Was sown a living seed,
Strong these contending mysteries to displace
By one plain ancient creed.
The Patriarch name begot,
Rose a new Prophet, simple to behold,
Cast in a humble lot;
Let half his life go by,
And then stood up a man of faith and fate,
That could the world defy.
He preached, and little more,
Resting the weight of all he had to say
On what was said before.
The streams that spring and run,
The clouds that with regenerate life supply
The havoc of the sun:
The camel and the palm,
To them for sustenance or service sent,
And wondrous herbs of balm;
From one Creative will,
As well the bee that 'mid the blossoms hums,
As human pride and skill.
Before Him humbly bend,
And, willing or unwilling, earth and heaven
Work out His solemn end.
The Absolute, the One,—
With whom a thousand years are as an hour,
And earth as moon or sun.
His creature men permit
The puny fragments of their mortal wills
Against his might to set?
With objects of the eye
And fanciful devices to divide
His awful monarchy.
Command the only Lord?
Adorers or adored?
But these are weak and frail:
—By men and angels every living hour
Father, Creator, hail!
He spoke in lowly words,
As one who wanted not or power or pelf,
Or more than God affords;
Of God's majestic will,
In his whole being resolutely bent
That mission to fulfil.
Were Nature's, not his own,
Teaching that God was everywhere revealed—
Not in His words alone.
To please inconstant youth,
But one who uttered, without shows and seems,
The serious facts of truth;
Were parts to mortals given
Of that eternal Book of thought divine—
The Prototype in heaven:
Of sin that Adam saw
In Pentateuch, and Gospel, and Kuràn
Enunciates Allah's law.
The prophet lineage run,
Down till the fulness of due time unfolds
Immaculate Mary's son.
The great commission past,—
Mohammed, the Apostle of the Wild,
The purest and the last.
Rejecting other claim
To power or honour than attends of right
The Apostolic name.
Unhastened, undelayed,
Fixed to consign to their eternal homes
All men that God has made:
And, like a ball of sand,
God shall take up this our terrestrial sphere,
In the hollow of his hand;
Each man shall stand alone,
Before his judge, and, once for ever, win
A prison or a throne.
Shall seek in whom to trust,
And when his idols help him not, shall cry
“O God! that I were dust!”
A glorious light shall play,
And angels herald them to Paradise,
To bliss without decay;
And ever-budding flowers;
Rivers that cool in brightest noon-day run,
Nor need the shade of bowers;
To which the laden trees
Bend at desire, and every hour disclose
Fresh tastes and fragrances;
By angel-children plied,
And love without satiety or stain
For bridegroom or for bride.
Awaits the bolder few,
That plunge their being in the Infinite,
And rise to life anew.
The new religion wore,
And in new words men followed, as is wont,
Precepts they scorn'd before.
From tribes to nations rose,
And open enmities and ribald gibes
Grew feeble to oppose.
This simple, noble name;
And reckoned life a thing of little store,
A transitory game.
That led the Muslim forth,
And wonder not that they who follow it
Should conquer half the earth.
No fear and fear no loss?
One only thing—they could not overthrow
The kingdom of the Cross.
Beyond their spirits' range,
A Truth for which the faith they represent
Had nothing to exchange.
One God the Orient still
Adores through many a realm of mighty span,
A God of Power and Will—
Rests utterly apart
From all the vast Creations of His might,
From Nature, Man, and Art:—
All other beings weigh
No more than in the potter's reckoning stand
The workings of his clay:—
To save or to destroy;
And to eternal pain predestinate,
As to eternal joy:—
Demanding simple awe,
Beyond all principles of good or ill,
Above idea of law.
To which the bounds belong
Only of that unalterable line
Disparting right from wrong:—
The issues of free-will,
By its own sacrifice can expiate
The penalties of ill.
Of fallen nature raised,
By inward strife and moral discipline,
Higher than e'er debased,—
From highest heaven to meet
The poorest wandering spirit that returns
To its Creator's feet.
At once to God and man,
Author Himself and part of the profound
And providential plan:
Himself the living sign,
How by God's grace the fallen sons of earth
May be once more divine.
Were different powers of strife;
Mohammed's truth lay in a holy Book,
Christ's in a sacred Life.
And realms of thought expand,
The Letter stands without expanse or range,
Stiff as a dead man's hand;
The Spirit Christ has shed
Flows through the ripening ages fresh and warm,
More felt than heard or read.
And closest ties of race,
May guard Mohammed's precept and decrees,
Through many a tract of space,
The sapless tree must fall,
Nor let the form one time did well to take
Be tyrant over all.
Bringing the blessèd hour,
When in Himself the God of Love shall merge
The God of Will and Power.
Mohammed always professes to be renewing old truths, not to be revealing new ones: he seems to be always wishing to restore the patriarchal state of thought and feeling, with the addition of a distinct faith in a future life and in a day of final retribution.
The frequent recurrence of this notion evidently applies to the doctrine of the Trinity and the worship of the Virgin as much as to that of Idols; it is singular that Mohammed considers the two as equally common to all Christians; it has been suggested that the sect of Collyridians, who used to sacrifice cakes (KOLLURI/DES) to St Mary, had come prominently under his notice: this is unlikely and unnecessary; the mere title of the Mother of God was enough to excite his hostility, as that of the Son did; and his was not the mind to make the philosophical distinction.
I ask for no payment; I am paid at the hand of God—the Master of the universe. Kuràn, chap. xxvi. ver. 109.
The archetye or “mother” of all these sacred books, is supposed to have existed in Heaven from the beginning of things: thus the Prophet always speaks of the Kuràn as a thing completed from the very beginning: thus, too, every verse is as much the Kuràn as the whole book. This adoration of the Word has had a peculiar effect on the Arabic language,—every word in the Kuràn being declared, as a matter of faith, to be pure Arabic, even those demonstrably Persian. The copies of the Kuràn printed by order of Mahomet Ali have not yet been sanctioned by the ecclesiastical authorities: they say, “they cannot answer for the errors of the press, some of them probably intentional, Infidels being occasionally employed in the work. The copyists, it must be remembered, are a strong interest in the East.
Mohammed seems to have attached so little importance to miraculous events—regarding the whole world as one incessant miracle—that his recognition of the supernatural birth of Christ does not imply any acknowledgment of his divine nature. It still remains a subject of inquiry, from what sources he derived his notions of the theory of Christianity, or the person of its author. Not, probably, from books: for if his assertion (chap. xxix. v. 47) that he could neither read nor write had not been correct, it could have been disproved by many persons present, who had known him from his youth; and Toland's theory of his instruction by the apocryphal gospel of Barnabas has been put an end to by the discovery of the forgery of that work, written with the very intent of exciting this notion, long after Mohammed's era, in Italy or Spain. The Syrian monk, Sergius, is a rather obscure personage: Mohammed only knew him in his early days, and he is hardly likely to have filled the mind of a heathen boy with strange legends and perverted facts. The Christianity of the Kuràn is, in all probability, the Arabian tradition of that time, formed out of the recollections of the doctrine which spread very early into Arabia, but did not meet with much success there, and the relations of the Nestorian fugitives, who would not scruple to attribute many corruptions to the orthodox body. The Infancy, and other apocryphal gospels, are derived from a similar source, and hence their frequent coincidence with Mohammedan notions.
Oriental mysticism distinguishes itself from Christian by the predominance of the sensual character: it is the rapture of the soul, the ecstatic interfusion of pleasure and pain, the yearning towards the absorption of self in the Infinite, which is at the heart of the spiritual religion of the East, while with us there is much more sentiment, and a variety according to the character of the individual, unknown to Oriental Pantheism.
Mohammed carries out the doctrine of predestination with a merciless logic—“Would you force men to become believers? How can a soul believe without the will of God?” Chap. x. v. 99. “There shall be a great number of those that are saved among the ancient peoples, but few among those of modern times.” Chap. lvi. v. 13. The eternity of hell does not seem to be doubted.
| The Poetical Works of (Richard Monckton Milnes) Lord Houghton | |