at God,
to the exclusion of other nations, had revealed himself immediately and
supernaturally first to Israel, and afterwards through Christ to all
mankind. Hence it followed that Christianity was not prized as the
highest religion, existing along with less developed forms of religion,
but was opposed as the only true religion to all others, which were
regarded as the fruit of imposture and error, an opinion to which the
religious and political struggles in which Islam and Christendom have
been involved also richly contributed. Mohammed was seer and prophet,
filled with fiery zeal for religion, and, while he stands indeed in this
respect, both personally and with regard to the contents of his
preaching and the means by which he sought to gain admission for his
doctrine, below the seers of Israel, and far below the founder of
Christianity, yet, on the other hand, his monotheism, abstract as it is,
must be regarded as a wholesome reaction against the ever-increasing
polytheistical superstition to which in his time the Christian church of
the East especially had sunk. Islamism stands, however, below original
Christianity, the religion of Jesus and the Apostles, in that, by
separating God, as the abstract one Supreme Being, from the world, it
leaves no place for the doctrine of God's immanence, or the indwelling
of the Spirit of God in man. Hence in Islamism the divine revelation
remains purely mechanical, with no natural point of connection in man,
and therefore there is no possibility of an enduring prophetism, which
is the fundamental principle of Christianity. From this separation of
God and man, the Mohammedan doctrine of predestination, in distinction
from the Christian, acquires its abstract and fatalistic character,
whereby man, instead of being regarded as a being in whose free activity
God's power and life are glorified, is conceived as a passive instrument
of a higher power. To true moral independence, therefore, the Moslem
does not attain. His religion is legal and external, and therefore
intolerant and exclusive; and when Islamism, led by excited passion and
a heated imagination, disregarded the sanctity of marriage, and held up
as a reward before the faithful Moslem a paradise characterized by
sensual enjoyment, it missed at once the deep moral and spiritual
character of Christianity. To these defects must be ascribed the fact
that Islamism, adapted to the need of the East, and therefore spread
over a large pa