MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM.
[To THE EDITOR -OF THE °BrzerATOV1 SIR,—Allow me to point out, with reference to your remarks On Dr. Badger's criticism of my lectures in the Contemporary Review, that I did not, as you seem to imply, omit to dwell on the equality of rights enjoined and practised by Islam as one of the main- causes of its vitality and its success. On the contrary, I insisted on its importance in more than one passage (see especially p. 17- 177), and I pointed out on page 230 that this is one of the lessons which Christians have still to learn from Muslims. It is on this. ground, amongst others, that an earnest Muslim will generally admit that Moslem slavery, and still more, the slave trade, are repugnant alike to the practice and the precept of the prophet. Dr. Badger, therefore, I presume, did not touch upon this subject, not because, as you suggest, he did not think it important, but because there was here no "hiatus" to supply.
If I may make one remark on the passage you quote from so, able and so kind a critic as Dr. Badger, it is this :—It is true, as he says, that I have not eared to tabulate the causes which, as I think, go far to explain the success of Islam where Christianity failed, and still fails. Yet the two ideas on which Dr. Badger dwells, the sublime simplicity of the Muslim formula, "There is no god but God, and Mohammed is his Prophet," on the one hand, and the less exacting nature of the moral standard required by the Koran on the other, do really underlie, and are, in fact, presupposed by my whole treatment of the subject.
Assuredly I should not have written my lectures at all, if I had not wished to show that Christianity can approximate to Islam, by falling back on its primal truths, to the exclusion of the meta- physics that have overlaid it ; and that Islam can approximate to Christianity by learning that there is a standard of morality higher than that of the Koren, of which Mohammed was quite ignorant, and which he needs must have accepted, had it been presented to. him in its true light.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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