55

THE MOHAMMEDAN CONTROVERSY

tenets, and, by throwing into the shade the stronger passages adduced by Pfander, by describing others as metaphorical, by applying a few to his own Prophet, and explaining away the remainder, he in appearance destroys the amount of cumulative evidence which before appeared irresistible. But the most unjust and gratuitous portion of his books is that which rejects in toto the Acts and Epistles, and assumes that the Four Gospels alone are to be regarded as inspired, the rest being of no more value than the Hyât-ul-Culúb,1 or other Mohammedan histories. Taking up such ground, and assuming to himself such unbounded licence of dispensing with our evidence, it is not to be wondered that the Divinity of Christ and the Trinity are dogmatically rejected by the writer as unfounded and absurd, and pronounced to be the fabrications of a heated imagination. We shall now notice some of his chief lines of reasoning which may prove interesting to our readers.

The grand feature of the book is, that reason being the supreme Judge, the Divinity of Christ and the Trinity are absolute impossibilities. On both doctrines, while directly at issue with Pfander, he simply assumes his own position as axiomatic, and proceeds to draw his inferences from them. His work is therefore beside the point, and cannot be regarded as a reply to the Miftâh until he strengthens his premises by argument and proof. Revelation, he argues, must be communicated through a prophet, whose mission cannot be established until the existence of the Deity by whom he is commissioned be ascertained; and that can be done by reason alone; therefore, reason is prior to revelation, and to imagine anything proved by revelation which is contrary to reason is to imagine a thing to be proved by itself, which is absurd; and hence he deduces that revelation must bend to reason, and that anything in the former which opposes the latter must be explained as metaphorical, or abandoned altogether. From such premises he concludes, that were the Trinity, or any other impossible doctrine, contained even in an acknowledged revelation, it must


1 "Life or History of Hearts." When the Acts are adduced in support of a doctrine, he applies to us the proverb, "The fox saw his own tail," implying that they are a fabrication of the Christians, and therefore useless as evidence.