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Because the convent, which is common to the Orient as well as to the Occident, to antiquity as well as to modern times, to paganism, to Buddhism, to Mahometanism, as well as to Christianity, is one of the optical apparatuses applied by man to the Infinite.
Charles Martel turned back the Saracens at Tours, and saved Europe from Mahometanism, and his grandson, Charles the Great, rescued the Pope from the Lombards, and received from him in return the crown of a new Empire of the West the Holy Roman Empire, which was supposed to be the great temporal power.
If the Christian should reply to this, by ascribing the success of Mahometanism to the sword, the Mahometan might reply, with truth, that it was a vulgar error; for that vastly more nations embraced Islamism voluntarily, than there were who freely received Christianity; and he might remind him, how much Christianity owed to the accession of Constantine; to Charlemagne; and the Teutonic Knights; and bid him recollect that the monks were assisted by soldiers to convert to Christianity almost every nation in Modern Europe.
But in the unsettled East, and with the low valuation of human life wherever Mahometanism prevails, insecurity and other causes must have caused millions of such deposits in every century to have perished as to any knowledge of survivors. Regularly as it approached, gold and jewels must have sunk by whole harvests into the ground.
In brief, the Mormons no longer claim to be a Christian sect, but assert, and truly, that their religion is as distinct from Christianity as that is from Mahometanism. Many of the doctrines whispered in 1847 only to those who had been admitted to the penetralia of the Nauvoo Temple are proclaimed unblushingly in 1857 from the pulpit in the Tabernacle at Salt Lake City.
His alliance and co-operation with the civil beast is precisely the same as in this chapter. He "wrought miracles before him," that is, in his interest. Some interpreters have mistaken this "false prophet" as a symbol of Mahometanism.
It has long since been observed, that the history of the four great monarchies, of tyrannies and free states, of chivalry and clanship, of Mahometanism and the Christian church, of the balance of Europe and the revolution of empires, is little else than a tissue of crimes, exhibiting nations as if they were so many herds of ferocious animals, whose genuine occupation was to tear each other to pieces, and to deform their mother-earth with mangled carcases and seas of blood.
III. Thirdly. In a reflex way, as the one great danger which overshadowed Europe for generations, and against which the Byzantine empire proved the capital bulwark, Mahometanism may rank as one of the Byzantine aspects or counterforces.
Schlegel speaks of this "mighty victory" in terms of fervent gratitude, and tells how "the arm of Charles Martel saved and delivered the Christian nations of the West from the deadly grasp of all-destroying Islam"; and Ranke points out, as "one of the most important epochs in the history of the world, the commencement of the eighth century, when on the one side Mahometanism threatened to overspread Italy and Gaul, and on the other the ancient idolatry of Saxony and Friesland once more forced its way across the Rhine.
Thomas Hobbes had, in language more precise and luminous than has ever been employed by any other metaphysical writer, maintained that the will of the prince was the standard of right and wrong, and that every subject ought to be ready to profess Popery, Mahometanism, or Paganism, at the royal command.
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