Ishmael and the church

Preface

In introducing the following work to the public, an answer to the following questions may be justly expected: —

What is the subject of which it treats ?

"What call is there for such a treatise at this time ?

What range has been taken, and what method adopted, in treating it ?

In the title, "Ishmael and the Church," is contained a short and comprehensive reply to the first question. This is the text of the discourse, — the thread that ties all its several parts together.

Ishmael has ever " dwelt in the presence of all his brethren," and his fortunes and those of the church have been remarkably blended from first to last. They cross each other's track in the patriarch's tent, in the visions of the prophets, in the creed of Mohammed, in the empires of the Saracens and Ottomans; so that in treating of Ishmael and his descendants we necessarily follow them through the church; for here their way lies. With its affairs they have ever inter-

IV PREFACE.

meddled, and on its changeful and suffering destiny they have ever left the deep impressions of their power. Such, then, is our theme : — " Ishmael and the Church."

Such a work as this is demanded by the stirring events of our own times, — a portable volume, accessible to all, comprehending succinctly "Islamism" in its origin, uses, progress, and end. It should be examined in the light of prophecy as well as of history, and thus made to appear what it truly is, — a creation of Providence, subserving its ends and illustrative of its wonders and its ways. For such a volume the way seems to be now open. It will fill a space occupied by no other.

We are to bear in mind, also, the present anomalous condition of Turkey. Her disappearance from Europe and the appropriation of her soil by the Western Powers are events regarded as imminent. She is a bone of contention, — a centre on which questions of war and peace hinge, — a gateway to most momentous social, political, and religious changes.

A bare glance at these facts will suggest at once that such a theme is necessarily invested with a present interest, and, if rightly treated, must prove highly acceptable to the reading public.

Indeed, would we understand "the Italian question," the policies and necessities of cabinets and princes, this subject needs first to be studied and comprehended. Dark problems with respect to the future will receive by this means a probable

PREFACE. V

solution, and remote and otherwise unperceived causes will be seen to have attained a controlling maturity, and helpless nations to be afloat upon a sea whose resistless surges carry them where they will not.

Political questions have their religious aspects. These belong to the divine, and fall within the range of his appropriate studies. The questions that now agitate Europe are essentially religious. Religion underlies all its policies and impulses; and hence the religious sympathies of the various parties in the strifes of princes are all the more important to be understood. It is one design of this work to make these palpable.

As to the range taken, it is wide. The relations of Ishmael to the church, and his influence on its destinies, from the days of the patriarch to the fall of the Ottomans, are comprehended in it. The lead of the prophets has been followed, and history is expanded just where the prophets pause and make it necessary — -just where after an interval of centuries they point out some new centre of influence, that, springing up irresistibly, changes the entire course of events ; or just where, the crescent crossing into the plane of the church, an adorable Providence becomes conspicuous in the use that it makes of this formidable power in compassing its ends.

This has made the line of the true church, as distinguished from the false, an important object of interest and search. It has hence been care- 2

VI PREFACE.

fully eliminated and traced from Asia and Africa to Europe and America.

It has also made the " Testament of Mohammed," and the consequent protection of persecuted disciples by the Saracens, the subject of special inquiry and elucidation. The aggressions of the Turks in Asia, — the Crusades, and their favourable effects on the church left behind in Europe, — the fall of the Eastern capital, — the desirable results accruing from that event, and the indirect though real protection of the Eeformation of the sixteenth century, arising from the military ardour and successes of Solyman the Great, — come also under review ; and, throughout, the ways of Providence are made obvious, and our confidence in its integrity and wisdom becomes revived and confirmed.

As to method, history has been relied on for facts, and the Divine testimony for evidence that those facts were arranged by Providence to fulfil its purposes.

The work has been prepared for the Protestant world, and care has been taken not to offend against its denominational preferences. If the author has succeeded in making himself useful to the church of our common Master, it will be his sufficient reward.

Contents

PAGE

Chap. I. — Ishmael in his Youth 17 II. — Ishmael in the Wilderness 22

III. — The Comprehensive Nationality of Ishmael 30

IV.— His Evil Destiny 36

V. — The Nationality of Ishmael obtaining Development in Mohammed 41

YI. — Ishmael and Mohammed. — Continued.... 50

VII. — The Secret of Mohammed's Success 58

VIII. — Islamism a Perversion of Christianity.... 66

IX. — The Saracens — Their Fanatic Courage.... 72

X. — Mohammed and his Successors 82

XI. — The Saracens, a Scourge to Christendom 89 XII. — The Saracens, a Scourge to Christendom.

— Continued 96

XIII. — Mohammed protecting the True Church :

The Nestorians 99

XIV. — Mohammed protecting the True Church :

The Paulicians 109

XV. — Mohammed protecting the True Church :

The Philadelphians 117

XVI. — Mohammed protecting the True Church :

The Albigenses 130

vii

Vlll CONTENTS.

PAGE

Chap. XVII.— Founding of Bagdad the End of the

Prophetic Months..... 134

XVIII. — The Contrast between Christ and Mohammed 137

XIX. — The Saracenic merged in the Ottoman

Empire 148

XX. — The Crusades — Their Causes and Ends 158 XXI.— Peter Waldo on the Track of Peter the

Hermit 169

XXIL— Constantinople menaced 175

XXIIL— The Fall of Constantinople 185

XXIV.— The Mission of Ishmael one of Strife 194 XXV. — The Providential Warning disregarded 197 XXVI.— The Antecedents of the Reformation. 201 XXVII.— The Art of Printing and the Reformation 213

XXVIII.— The Art of Printing and the Reformation. — Continued 222

XXIX. — The Discovery of America, and the

Reformation 234

XXX. — Islamism and the Reformation 240

XXXI. — Islamism and the Reformation. — Continued 254

XXXII.— The Witnesses not slain 265

XXXIIL— Ishmael and the Western Allies 281

XXXIV— Rome— Her Aspirations 292

XXXV.— The Fall of Islamism 299

XXX VI.— Isaac's Patrimony restored 313

Chapter I. Ishmael In His Youth

" I see a mighty arm, by man unseen, Resistless, not to be controll'd, that guides, In solitude of unshared energies, All these thy ceaseless miracles, world!"

Lamb,

There are extensive regions in Asia, Africa, and in the east and south of Europe, in which the Mohammedan religion prevails. It is false, intolerant, and antichristian. Instances there are in which, as in Roman Catholic countries, this intolerance has been for a season intermitted; but still, these instances are exceptions to a rule otherwise universal, and cannot alter a character inherent in the very creed of the false prophet, and traced in blood on the pages of history and on the symbol of his faith.

According to the traditions of Mecca — which are in harmony, on this point, with the intimations of the prophets of Zion — Mohammed sprang from the loins of Abraham, and from the scoffer Ishmael. " It is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid, the other by a free woman. But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh ; but he of the free woman was by promise. Which things are an allegory. . . . For this Agar is Mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children." Gal. iv. 22-25.

He of the bondwoman was born after the flesh, inherited the unsanctified nature of his Egyptian mother, carried the stamp of inferiority on his brow, and cherished her enmity to true religion in his heart. Nature, true to her laws, had carried down the mental and moral characteristics, the physical tastes, and spiritual idiosyncrasies, from the mother to the child. It occurred also that Sarah's jealousy imparted to her domestic rule a severity difficult for unrenewed humanity to bear, and which, in the mind of the irritated Ishmael, doubtless fully justified the bitter complainings and reproaches of Hagar. " When Sarah dealt hardly with her she fled from her

U3HMAEL IN HIS YOUTH. 19

face :" Gen. xvi. 6. Day by day her native hostility to the patriarch's faith received fresh irritation, and in the recesses of the desert, in her frequent communings with her son, would naturally impress its antipathies deeply upon a heart already under the control of a matured impiety. " It set him in a way that was not good ; he abhorred not evil." Domestic feuds, embodying so many causes of enduring and increasing repulsiveness, must reach their crisis at last ; the parties will seek relief ultimately either in the exercise of mutual forbearance or in a voluntary separation. The latter was the result in the present instance ; the aliens became outcasts from a home in which the mistaken Ha gar had aspired to rise from the condition of a subordinate and a slave to that of a mistress.

In the church, when it was placed under patriarchal rule, the first-born son succeeded, at the death of the patriarch, to his authority, dignity, and estates, and took, ordinarily, his honoured place as next in the line among the illustrious progenitors of the promised Messiah. Isaac, the child of promise and of miracle, was correctly regarded by Abraham as his successor.

For years previously to the birth of this divinely-appointed rival, Ishmael had occupied the place and had held in just expectancy the coveted immunities of the first-born, — had been the accredited heir; and, considering the extreme age of his parent, there existed no reasonable prospect of his being supplanted by another. The patriarch also, up to the time of the predicted birth of Isaac, had been satisfied with this arrangement ; had prayed, " Oh that Ishmael might live before thee !" nor had he even dreamed of another. But, when it was said, " In Isaac shall thy seed be called,"* God revealed a preference which, in its very nature and in the very terms in which it had been conceived, rejected Ishmael from the privileges of primogeniture.

When the solemn yet joyous preparations for the festival in which Isaac was to be weaned and publicly recognised and installed in the succession were in progress, Ishmael was seventeen years of age, capable of comprehending the extent, at least, of his earthly loss, and of an humble and intelligent submission to the known will of heaven ; but from that hour his rival became the object of his most unreasonable envy and resentment.

* Gen. xxi. 12.

ISHMAEL IN IIIS YOUTH. 21

Cain rejected the same Lord on whom Abel depended alone for salvation. Ishmael followed in the way of Cain. His desire for the patriarchate terminated in its temporal advantages. When these were alienated in Isaac, he scorned the spiritual patrimony and persecuted the child of promise. Similar alternate characteristics are now discoverable in the families of the godly. Some betake themselves in life's young day to Jesus, are seen in the ways of piety, and grow up in the fear of the Lord ; others become restive and desire to free themselves from the restraints of a Christian fireside. Born after the flesh, they despise the blessings of the covenant. Controversies in the church, intermarriages with unbelievers, the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches, the very bread and water which they acquire and carry with them, serve but to increase their dreary distance from all succour amid the spiritual wastes that surround them. Ishmael, in a word, in his rejection of his Lord, is an allegory, and represents Christ in the covenant as the uniform and chosen test of human character, as alternately a sanctuary and a rock of offence, "set for the rising and falling of many in Israel."

Chapter II. Ishmael In The Wilderness

" There was in him a vital scorn of all, As if the worst had fallen that could befall ; He stood a stranger in this breathing world, An erring spirit from another hurl'd."

Byron.

Beersheba lay at the southern extremity of the land of Canaan. Hence, in any description of the country intended to include its entire area, Beersheba was referred to as the extreme southern limit. The wilderness of Beersheba — sometimes also called the wilderness of Paran — comprehended a region lying still farther south, covered with low shrubs and loose sands. On its southern division rises abruptly, from the bosom of a vast and thirsty plain, the frowning battlements of Sinai. In this gloomy solitude, far from the abodes of the godly, Hagar and Ishmael found their congenial retreat.

"Agar is Mount Sinai in Arabia." That covenant of which she is the allegory "gen-

ISHMAEL IN THE WILDERNESS. 23

deretli to bondage."* Ishmael inherited his mother's nature, imbibed her religious prejudices, espoused her quarrel against Sarah, met with a rival in Isaac, turned against the patriarchal church, persecuted the child of promise, became an outcast; and thus, step by step, commenced his career of wo.

Such is the covenant of Sinai. It is one of hardship and servitude. Under its rigorous workings is engendered the base spirit of servility. Here the moral bondman toils for life in services in which he has no pleasure, is goaded on by curses that appal and a conscience that torments him ; and yet every step, every change, is for the worse, involving him in ever-increasing difficulties, and widening more and more fatally his separation from the blessed vicinity of joy and hope.

Such, indeed, is ever the normal career of unbelief. Whenever the true Messiah is left or scorned, whichever plausible alternative after that may be substituted for him, such must ever be the invariable result; perish at last the wanderer must, in an arid waste "where no water is." That course is dark and hopeless indeed in which Christ is not the centre to which the weary spirit ever tends. There is an awful spiritual solitude before it; and there also is that Mount Sinai, with its barren declivities and rocky turrets, scarred by thunder ; and beyond it is the Red, red sea in which the weary never rest.

Our uninstructed sympathies ever take part with the oppressed and the unfortunate. Sarah's jealousies and cruelties are readily remembered, together with the destitution of the unhappy exiles ; but the want of interest on their part in the blessings of a spiritual and a higher life, their promptness in forsaking without a single regret the pure and holy faith of the church because adherence to it had become environed with temporary obstacles, is as readily pardoned and forgotten, though it was their great unworthiness, the true cause of their condemnation and ruin. God, on this account, because he knew they loved him not and cared not for the promised spiritual deliverer, dictated the severity. Sarah's execrations would have proved all impotent and unavailing if God himself had not turned against the aliens. They had merited his displeasure, since they had intruded themselves into his church, whose most sacred things they hated and had dared

ISmTAEL IN THE WILDERNESS. 25

to make the objects of their unhallowed scorn.

While the prophetic description — to wit, that he should be a wild man, and that his hand should be against every man* — involved in it no creative or coercive processes, it nevertheless revealed a law inherent in his very nature and in that of his race. During the long period of twenty-seven hundred years his wildness remained untamed. Each one of his offspring, separated from all others in his sympathies for himself alone, maintained his own proud personal independence and marked out for himself his own solitary track. Submission to a chief, if made at all, arose from interest, and was cast off, transferred, or continued, at pleasure. In predatory bands in the days of Jeremiah, they (the descendants of Ishmael) sat for the travellers in the ways of the wilderness,*)* dreaded by all, lying concealed in the shadows of mountains, or peering from behind the clumps of trees that, bordering the watercourses, invited the wayfarer, at burning noon, to repose. The captive Israelites, released from servitude in Babylon, crossed the track of this inhospitable foe and made grateful mention of the good hand of God upon them, in that he

* Gen. xvi. 12. f Jer. iii. 2.

26 ISHMAEL AND THE CHUECH.

had delivered them from " such as lay in wait by the way."* Impelled by hunger or by lust of plunder, their marauding companies, mounted on the fleet horse of the wilderness that stumbled not,f made frequent incursions into districts governed by neighbouring emirs. The swift and stealthy advance was effected under cover of night. When the morning rose, "and the oxen" (of the unsuspecting) "were ploughing and the asses feeding beside them, the Sabeans" (or Ishmaelites) " fell upon them and took them away."J The assault, seen perchance by a flying servant whose less fortunate companions were slain, is reported; but redress is unthought of and pursuit impossible: the wily robbers had vanished as they came, — in unknown paths and in the solitudes of the wilderness. The Bedouins of the present day perpetuate the original character—the wild and warlike habits of the earliest times, and form a continuous illustration of the extreme individuality and lawlessness of the descendants of Ishmael.

This character, also, is one that equally develops itself in that mighty offshoot from the parent stock which has spread the shadow of its rule for ages over Arabia and over the

ISHMAEL IN THE WILDERNESS. 27

entire Southern hemisphere. Ishmael, as it had been previously revealed in the prophecy concerning him, became a great nation ; and in this new form of his continued existence were merged the idiosyncrasies of the original and isolated type. In other words, the individual, ever unreliable, treacherous, and antichristian, incapable alike of a permanent adherence to a treaty or of a continued submission to a ruler, when once fully subdued and constituting with his fellows a great nationality, made it witlj respect to all other nations just what the individual man had previously been with respect to all other individuals. It became the world's disturbing centre, and broke in alike for centuries upon all its harmonies.

The identity of the same people in successive ages is more than conventional or legal; it has its seat in the constitution of things, in nature itself, and belongs to a nation in its successive generations, just as it belongs to a man in the successive periods of his life. His body is not composed of the same particles at fifty of which it was at twenty ; his mind has, likewise, had an infinite succession of volitions and emotions; and yet, though in so many respects a new and a different creature,

28 ISHMAEL AND THE CHUECH.

lie still is the same, and is so held to be, both in law and in fact. " Who ever perished being innocent?" Under the government of a righteous God punishment pursues the guilty. Amalek was cut off by Saul for murders committed by a previous generation four hundred years before. (1491 B.C.) Ex. xvii. 14-16: " The Lord said unto Moses, Write this for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua : for I will utterly put out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven. And Moses built an ajtar, and called the name of it Jehovah-nissi : for he said, Because the Lord hath sworn that the Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation." (1070 B.C.) 1 Sam. xv. 2, 3 : " Thus saith the Lord of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way when he came up from Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have." Yerse 9 : " But Saul and the people spared Agag." Verses 10, 11 : " Then came the word of the Lord unto Samuel, saying, It repenteth me that I have set up Saul to be king." Yerses 32, 33 : " Then said Samuel, Bring ye hither to me Agag the king of the Amalekites. And Agag came unto him delicately. And Agag said,

ISHMAEL IN TnE WILDERNESS. 29

Surely the bitterness of death is past. And Samuel said, As thy sword hath made women childless, so shall thy mother be childless among women. And Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal." Great social wrongs, unredressed and unregretted, and still repeated by a seed of evil-doers, demanded the providential visitation. The children had risen up "an increase of sinful men to augment yet the fierce anger of the Lord."* Samuel reminded Agag of this; and, while we do not understand him to deny his connection with the guilt of a former age, he assures him that he suffers for his own: — "As thy sword hath made women childless, so shall thy mother be childless among women." Such is the unity and responsibility of each distinct race.

Destitute of all fraternal loves and local attachments, his hand against every man, an outlaw and a robber, Ishmael entered on his chosen domain and became the lord and the terror of the wilderness. On its wild clans, and on the twelve powerful tribes and the great nation that sprang from him, he stamped in indelible characters his own native love of war and plunder and his ever-living animosity to the blessed Messiah.

* Num. xxxii. 14. 3*

Chapter III. The Comprehensive Nationality Of Ishmael

"The gather'd guilt of elder times Shall reproduce itself in crimes."

Gal. iv. 24, 25 : " Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar. For this Agar is Mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children." The allegory has a wide range. There is not only more in it than appears in the original narrative, but in this instance it is perhaps unusually comprehensive, and includes the personal rejection of Ishmael and that of his posterity, as also those other descendants of the patriarch who, moved with envy, delivered their Lord to a cruel death, persecuted those born after the Spirit, and were become "contrary to God and contrary to all men. *

This Agar is Mount Sinai, in Arabia, and

COMPREHENSIVE NATIONALITY OF ISIIMAEL. 31

•answereth to Jerusalem, which now is, and is

in bondage with her children." Having rejected her Lord, (thus Paul instructs the church in the above-quoted passage,) Jerusalem, amid her faded glories as a doomed city, was for this in bondage with her misguided offspring. In a few short years she too, like the son of the bondwoman, would become outcast from patrimonial possessions and spiritual privileges, and be houseless, the sport ot oppression and want, in that wide wilderness in which she should wander and perish for ages. The wrath of Koman legions in her spoliation and in her wo would but express toward her, as did Sarah's severities toward Ishmael, the punitive justice of offended Heaven. And when the day should ultimately come for Isaac's effectual calling and spiritual birth, — when, raised from the slumber of centuries and weaned from the love of the world, his return should commence, and the great feast should be spread in his native mountains, and he should be about to be solemnly installed anew in the blessed line of the spiritual succession, — then (as we understand the prophet*) shall the scoffing and per-

* Isaiah xxv. 5-8; Dan. xi. 44, 45.

32 ISHMAEL AND THE CHUKCH.

secuting Ishmael again and for the last time become an outcast from the patriarch's down-trodden heritage. The power of Sarah's prophetic curse shall revive afresh amid the ruins of her fallen towers, the perils of her returning children, and prove mightier than the armies of the aliens.

Ishmael was, according to the prediction, to " dwell in the presence of all his brethren."* And, as the great conquerors of the world have ever failed to subdue Arabia, — as still, from the earliest times till now, the Arabs have watched the traveller who has crossed their unprofitable sands and made him pay tribute, — as they have escaped successively the rule of the Persians, the Macedonians, and the Komans, — it has been supposed that this passage was intended as a prophetic description of the future independence of their wild tribes, from age to age, in their own hereditary dominions. "Arabia, though its frontier-provinces experienced some vicissitudes, preserved in the depths of its deserts its primitive character and independence; nor had its nomadic tribes ever bent their haughty necks to servitude."*)*

Gibbon, in his great eagerness to cast discredit

* Gen. xvi. 12. -j- Irving.

COMPREHENSIVE NATIONALITY OF ISIIMAEL. 33

on this prophecy as fairly furnishing satisfactory evidence in favour of the inspiration of the Scriptures, first sneers at the idea and then denies the fact of the continued independence of the Ishmaelites ; but, before he closes this extraordinary paragraph, he indirectly retracts and fully contradicts his first statement. "The perpetual independence of the Arabs has been the theme of praise among strangers and natives; and the arts of controversy transform this singular event into a prophecy and a miracle in favour of the posterity of Ishmael. Some exceptions, that can neither be dismissed nor eluded, render this mode of reasoning as indiscreet as it is superfluous. The kingdom of Yemen has been successively subdued by the Abyssinians, the Persians, the sultans of Egypt, and the Turks; the holy cities of Mecca and Medina have repeatedly bowed under a Scythian tyrant; and the Koman province of Arabia embraced the peculiar wilderness in which Ishmael and his sons must have pitched their tents in the face of their brethren. Yet these exceptions are temporary or local : the body of the nation has escaped the yoke of the most powerful monarchies. The arms of Sesostris and Cyrus, of Pompey and Trajan,

34 ISHMAEL AND THE CHUECH.

could never achieve the conquest of Arabia. The present sovereign of the Turks may exercise a shadow of jurisdiction; but his pride is reduced to solicit the friendship of a people whom it is dangerous to provoke and fruitless to attack."*

Others suggest that the text simply describes the place of their abode as it related geographically to the land of Canaan. It should be " to the east of their brethren." The meaning is confessedly obscure ; and, though inclined to adopt as most correct the view first named, yet, were either opinion the received one, it would not affect the obvious meaning of the other portions of this remarkable prophecy. If, as we have seen, the historic record, after you exhaust its literal meaning, is also allegorical, and comprehends in it even the lineal descendants of Isaac, who, in imitation of their scoffing brother, turn their hand against every man, then, though the Bedouin tribes who are the present robber-lords of Paran may be the lineal descendants of Ishmael, still, the allegory fairly comprehends all the tribes to whom Ishmael became related by intermarriage and by mastery, together with any other of the

* Gibbon.

COMPREHENSIVE NATIONALITY OF ISHMAEL. 35

descendants of Abraham by Keturah, whose tribal life was finally merged and lost in his own.

It is enough, indeed, for our purpose, that the characteristics of Ishmael — his love of war and booty, his irreconcilable hatred of the Christian religion, and his disposition ever to persecute its nominal or its real disciples — have impressed themselves alike on all the races united by his descendants under the sway of the Koran ; enough, that Mohammed attracted to his standard the contending factions that descended from his renowned progenitor, and, out of these wild elements, formed and founded his empire; enough, that throughout Asia, Africa, and a part of Europe, other nations were confessedly lost in it, as rivers and streams are lost in the sea.

Chapter IV. His Evil Destiny

" The Maker justly claims the world he made: In this the right of Providence is laid ; Its sacred majesty through all depends On using second means to work his ends."

Parnell.

"What a sweet relief is given to that spiritual night which stretches its gloomy curtains from the fall to the resurrection-morn, when, one by one, the living types of the Messiah, in an unbroken succession, springing up amid whispers of comfort and angel footfalls, span the flight of intervening ages with the ever-recurring evidences of a coming and a glorious dawn ! It is among these that even Ishmael, during seventeen years, holds his elevated position. The patriarch regards him as his heir; and, as he was his first-born son, he continued to be the visible representative of Christ, in the succession, until Isaac, by divine direction, took his place. His rejection, however, as a progenitor of a coming Saviour, did not neces-