India the religious atmosphere is deeply pessimistic. Fear is a controlling influence in religious life. The anger of the gods hangs like a brooding curse over life. The dread of evil spirits dwarfs the mind and chills the heart. Religion is an aggressive struggle to ward off perils and propitiate angry gods or malicious demons. The disadvantages of a religious faith and practice so burdensome, so depressing, so misleading can be fully understood only by one who is familiar with the social condition of the Indian people.

to social morality.

In Mohammedan lands there are strange and crude conceptions of what religion is and what it requires. The influence of Islam, so far as it relates to the cultivation of liberty, purity, justice, and kindliness, is revealed in its own his- Islam and its relation tory. It has ever taken an attitude towards humanity which is marked by relentless spiritual and social despotism. True to its historic demand that all unbelievers shall choose between Islam, tribute, and the sword, it offers to humanity its own rigid matrix, into which social life must flow and be cast after the old Islamic model, or accept humiliation and ostracism as the only alternatives. When the fanatical passions of Islam are stirred all guarantees of public order are worthless. Mohammedan feasts and festivals, where the population is not constituted exclusively of Moslems, often involve grave dangers. When the processions of the Muharram Passion Play are in progress no Christian in Persia can venture upon the streets, except at his peril. Wherever Islam is aggressively to the front human society cannot count upon its safeguards, nor the State upon its liberties. It has already smitten some of the fairest lands of the earth with the blight of social disorder and decay.1 Islam carries into the family polygamy, unrestricted divorce, and slavery, the latter, as a rule, being simply an indefinite and unrestrained expansion of the first, under the guise of concubinage.2 In the name of the Moslem's reli1 Cf. article entitled "Turkey for the Turks," in The Independent, November 12, 1896, p. 15.

2 "As a social system," writes Stanley Lane-Poole, "Islam is a complete failure: it has misunderstood the relation of the sexes, upon which the whole character of a nation's life hangs, and, by degrading women, has degraded each successive generation of their children down an increasing scale of infamy and corruption, until it seems almost impossible to reach a lower level of vice.

"The fatal spot in Islam is the degradation of women. The true test of a nation's place in the ranks of civilisation is the position of its women. When they are held in reverence, when it is considered the most infamous of crimes to subject a woman to dishonour, and the highest distinction to protect her from wrong; when the family life is real and strong, of which the mother-wife is the heart; when each man's pulse beats loyal to womanhood, then is a nation great. When women are

gion there is all the scope to desire which an Oriental wishes. Is not female slavery, with all that it practically means, down in the code? He therefore believes in it and practises it, so far as he is able, with a religious as well as a fleshly zest. The Moslem soldier for centuries has marched to his victories, not alone over the dead bodies of men, but over the dishonored forms of women. He even departs for his Paradise with the gleam of expectant passion in his glazing eyes. The family life of Islam is a nursery of ideas which are necessarily fatal to social purity.1 Its political spirit gives no place to liberty and civilized statecraft. The Moslem creed, in its attitude to both the State and the family, in its spirit of ostracism, in its despotic assumptions, in its narrow bigotry, its rigid limitations to progress, its triumphant adjustment of God's law to man's natural desire, and its failure to generate moral character, is a striking illustration of the social blight which is sure to result from a degrading conception of the nature and requirements of religion.

The difficulties of social reconstruction in an environment of religious degeneracy.

The same difficulties which attended the reconstruction of social morality among heathen converts in the apostolic age still hinder the progress of Christianity in modern mission fields. It was not easy to banish pagan laxity from the new life of Christians in the great cities of the Roman Empire. Some of the most searching and vigorous passages in the apostolic epistles are directed to the emphasis and elucidation of morality as an essential of Christian living. History is repeating itself as Christianity enters the pagan environment of to-day. Hundreds, even thousands, of natives in different mission fields in Polynesia and Africa, and even in more enlightened Oriental lands, have been, and are still, seeking admission to the Christian Church without quite understanding why their inconsistent morality presents any serious obstacle to their enrolment. Their old religions put little or no restriction upon individual conduct or traditional social customs; why, therefore, should the new faith introduce such troublesome innovations into the realm of every-day life? No student of the religious condition of the world, however, will recognize this state of things as pertaining to a heathen environment alone. In Mexico and the entire

treated as playthings, toys, drudges, worth anything only if they have beauty to be enjoyed or strength to labour; when sex is considered the chief thing in a woman, and heart and mind are forgotten; when a man buys women for his pleasure, and dismisses them when his appetite is glutted, then is a nation despicable.”—“ Studies in a Mosque," pp. 101, 102.

1 Lane, "Arabian Society in the Middle Ages,” chap. ix., on "Women.”

South American Continent, where Roman Catholic Christianity prevails, the divorce of morality from religion seems to be almost as grievous and as fatal in many respects as in non-Christian lands.

Enough has been said, without dwelling further upon this subject, to show the social demoralization which is sure to attend a low conception of the nature, purpose, and moral demands of religion. Is it not evident that reconstruction of society is made immensely more difficult where there is moral paralysis arising from defective views of the nature and tendencies of a true religious cult?

2. IDOLATRY.-That idolatry is degrading to the spiritual nature of man need not be seriously argued. Its evil effects upon social life are not quite so apparent; yet a little reflection will

of idolatry.

convince us that the degradation of the individual The social degradation character means inevitably the lowering of the spiritual tone and the moral sensibilities of society.

To banish the living God from the individual consciousness means an immense loss of inspiration, guidance, corrective discipline, moral restraint, spiritual courage, and ennobling impulse to the social life of a people. Nothing will so quickly and hopelessly put the progressive forces of society into a state of collapse, lower the practical influence of ethical standards, weaken the power of higher motives, destroy the sense of responsibility, and dissipate the consciousness of moral obligation as the substitution of idolatry for the worship and fear of a living personal deity. If man regards himself as accountable only to dumb images, even though they may be regarded as symbols of deity, he soon loses his touch with a personal God. The history of idolatry, however, shows that to the popular mind the refinements of the symbolic conception of idols soon lose their distinctive sway, while the idol itself, as an object of reverence and fear, gains a sure ascendancy. The apologetic conception that idols are merely symbols of a supreme deity, and are used as such by idolaters, is far from tenable. The facts of history and experience give little evidence in its favor. On the contrary, idolatry as it actually exists, and has always existed, in the world is almost without exception the worship of idols as such, or at least as the personification of some mysterious forces of the supernatural or natural world.2

1 Cf. March, "Morning Light in Many Lands," chap. xiii., “Faith and Hope in Heathen Lands."

2 "Until recent years no one ever thought of apologising for idolatry. We have now reached a stage, however, when it is a common thing to hear it explained, defended, and justified; a philosophy of idolatry, so to speak, has sprung up, and has