Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 102.djvu/83

Rh Hence their apologist sees in their teaching a truly practical human element—purely ethical and metaphysical, and yet palpable to the simplest and lowest, which exerted a regenerating force never attained by the highest efforts of Neo-Platonism. That capital doctrine of the very Personality and the real Fatherhood of God, upon which Mr. Maurice insists with so much emphasis and solicitude is reiterated and illustrated by his friend and fellow-labourer Mr. Kingsley, with equal prominency and persistency of statement. And when summoned to observe the decline and fall of Alexandrian Christianity, and to say why it rotted away, and perished hideously, he at once proclaims the causes of its decay and death to lie in its having been untrue to itself, and faithless to the cardinal point of its religious philosophy. They forgot practically, these religious philosophers, that the light of truth proceeded from a Person—and that if He was a Person, He had a character, and that that character was a righteous and loving one—they became Dogmatists, fierce assertors of a truth which they were forgetting was meant to be used, and not barely asserted—the divine Logos, "and theology as a whole, receded further and further aloft into abysmal heights, as it became a mere dreary system of dead scientific terms, having no practical bearing on their hearts and lives;" and thus the Christian Alexandrians, as the Heathen had done, took to demonologies and image-worship, and all those drivelling idolatries which made their Mohammedan invaders regard them as polytheists, no better than the Pagan Arabs of the desert.

And justly so regard them, Mr. Kingsley holds. Little tolerance has he for that degraded aspect of the Christian world of which Islam was indignantly intolerant. Little sympathy with those Jacobite and Melchite controversies and riots, in the midst of which uprose the avenging Mussulmaus. Little courtesy towards that chaos of profligacy and chicanery, in rulers and people, in the home and in the market, in the theatre and in the senate, such as the world has rarely seen before or since; a chaos, he says, which reached its culmination in the seventh century, the age of Justinian and Theodora, whom he pronounces the two most hideous sovereigns, worshipped by the most hideous empire of parasites and cowards, hypocrites and wantons, that ever insulted the long-suffering of a righteous God. And what of Islam and Mohammed? Much the same in substance with what Carlyle teaches in his "Hero-worship," modified by the views of Maurice in his "Religions of the World." Islam was strong, because it was the "result of a true insight into the nature of God," as a God who "showeth [in the words of the Koran] to man the thing which he knew not;" for this, we are assured, is the end and object of all metaphysic, "that external and imperishable beauty for which Plato sought of old, and had seen that its name was righteousness, and that it dwelt absolutely in an absolutely righteous Person; and moreover, that this Person was no careless self-contented epicurean deity," but One who cared for men, and desired to make them righteous.

But Islam soon deteriorated. Polygamy, inducing the degradation of woman—the loss of the sense of inspiration, and the loss of the knowledge of God, dwindling into a dark, slavish, benumbing fatalism,—the cultivation of the Aristotelian philosophy (Mr. Kingsley's Platonic zeal never spares the Stagyrite when he can deal him a blow, deserved or otherwise);—these things sped the decline of Islamism. To polygamy