In his famous lecture on the conquests of the Saracens, Dr. John Lord focuses attention upon the fact that during the thirteen years in which Mohammed stood not only for pure monotheism but for a kindly, inoffensive life, the recognition and practice of universal brotherhood, he gained only about a score of converts; but when he appealed to the passions of men, assured the faithful of all the delights of a sensual heaven, and invoked the sword as a means of propaganda, he converted all Arabia within eleven years! This unpopularity of a high ideal, and this seeming gain attending the lowering of the ethical standard, is abundantly illustrated in the history of religions. The outer growth of the Christian church became marvelous as soon as it consented to array itself in the garments of worldly power, and adapt itself to the materiality, fear, and superstition of the multitude.
The teaching of Christian Science that, being without substance or Principle, evil is but the darkness of falsity which the coming of Truth always and instantly dispels,—this and this alone explains the remarkable achievements of those simple, unlettered men who fared forth at the command of the Master to insist upon the moral requirements of the Sermon on the Mount, and who, as the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews has said, "subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong," through the power of God. The determinative factor was Truth working in them, —this constituted the vital efficacy of their ministry, and this is the essential thing without which the growth of the church in numbers and in dominion, whether in the early centuries or in this our present time, has always meant concession to and compromise with the spirit of the world.
When in the third century the Christian body was led to seek and exercise secular authority, and, forgetting the demands of the Master, appealed to superstition and to the love of pomp and display, then ecclesiastical rule was tremendously advanced, while human redemption became in the same ratio a negligible quantity. Thus it has been truly said that the external triumphs of a religion have often been not so much owing to "the purity and loftiness of its truths, as to its harmony with prevailing errors." In view of its ideality, its demands that unselfishness and truth, righteousness and purity, shall characterize every word and deed of its followers, there is no hope for Christianity apart from the effulgence of that light which knows no darkness, the immediate and continuous manifestation of that truth which destroys all error.
