LECTURE IV.

THE PEERLESSNESS OF CHRISTIAN FAMILY LIFE.

WOMAN IN THE WORLD'S PARLIAMENT.

I.

It is a significant fact that the World's First Parliament of Religions refused to listen to a defense of polygamy. It was my fortune to be in a position on the platform in the Hall of Columbus where I could study the causes of the outburst of the great audience when a speaker undertook to apologize for Mohammedan ideas concerning marriage. He was an American who had become a Mohammedan. He was an educated man, of polished address, and on the whole of genial, though rather languid, temperament. I should say that perhaps he was perfectly sincere. I would not call him, as many did, a masquerader. But the audience did not like to hear from him that women in Mohammedan countries were often better off in the polygamous relation than they could be in any other. For one, I had expected Mr. Mohammed Webb,—for this was his name to say something of this kind, and had made a gentle, precautionary verbal protest to the management of the Parliament against allowing any such championship of polygamy to come to the front in the proceedings of an assembly that the whole world was watching. My conviction was, that,

valuable as freedom on the platform might be, freedom would degenerate into license if it allowed the defense of anything regarded as a crime under United States law. So I said with all courtesy to the presiding officer, if any speaker were allowed to champion there what men are put in jail for in Utah, that for one, I could not remain on the platform. "You are greatly mistaken," was the reply. "Mr. Webb does not

believe in polygamy. He has just told me that he does not. He thinks it is no necessary part of Islam." I had been too well instructed by the missionary veteran and hero, the founder of Roberts College on the Bosporus, Dr. Cyrus Hamlin, as to the slipperiness of Mohammedan promises and the untrustworthiness of many of their protestations, to be entirely confident that this engagement would be carried out. So I made a written protest and sent it to the management, reiterating my conviction that we ought not to allow the Parliament to be disgraced by the championship of anything that was a crime under United States law. Whereupon, the leader of the meeting had a brief conversation with Mr. Webb and then came to me and said, "Mr. Webb positively promises that he will not defend polygamy and will say to the audience that he does not believe in it." As a precaution, however, against being hoodwinked, I went off the platform. Mr. Webb came forward and had not spoken three minutes before he began a championship of polygamy. The men on the floor immediately burst out with cries of "No, no,"-" Shame!" These words were uttered with decision by the floor and galleries, and even women hissed. The Mohammedan seemed very much surprised, but took the interruption in good part. It was the first rebuke of the kind the audience had administered to any speaker. He turned to another topic, but, after a few sentences, came back to polygamy and undertook once more to defend it. He not only did not say to the audience, as he had promised to do, that he did not believe in polygamy and that it was no necessary part of Islam, but he actually defended the system. A man might be a polygamist, he thought, and yet an excellent Christian. Once more the audience burst out into hisses and cries of "No! No!" This episode was unique. It is treated with all the quietness possible in the official record, but the chief facts are here (p. 127). I go into these details because I wish to say that I think the management was misled. They trusted this American exconsul in spite of his being a Mohammedan. He did not keep faith with the management. They would have been criticised severely if they had not had this assurance from him, but it

is evident that they did not intend to allow polygamy to be championed there. I have not the slightest suspicion that they were so liberal as to be willing to have a Mohammedan champion the ordinary ideas of Islam concerning polygamy. Mormonism had the door shut in its face when it applied to be heard in the World's Parliament of Religions. From first to last it was decisively shut out.

Two days after this episode there came to the front of the platform no less a man than the learned and heroic Dr. Post of Beirut, Syria, and held aloft a copy of a large book, saying, "Here is a volume that two hundred millions of the human race regard as divinely inspired. They never hold it below the waist; they never touch it with unwashen hands; they never allow it to lie on the floor." (Barrows, P. of R., p. 140.) He then read without note or comment the familiar passages in the Koran which justify polygamy and command the faithful to propagate Islam by the sword-(Chaps. 2, 25, 48, 66.) And so Mohammed Webb was adequately answered. No other representative of a false faith went so far in attempting to hoodwink that assembly as this man did.

No committee could have brought together the Parliament of Religions without giving every faith large freedom. If any one church had called the Parliament, the call would have been a failure. If a State church had done so, there would have been fear of unfair treatment. If a State aside from the church had done so, there would have been the same fear. A responsible committee, having large liberty, with national' recognition and the World's Fair behind it, and promising int the name of distinguished gentlemen who were in the management that freedom should be allowed up to a certain reasonable point, succeeded in bringing together representatives of every great historic faith of the world. It is really a wonder that more mistakes were not committed and that more infelicities did not occur. The worst infelicity I have now discussed, and I have shown you the inner side of it. The Parliament has been greatly blamed for allowing Mohammed Webb to defend polygamy. President Washburne, of Roberts College, Constantinople, son-in-law of Dr. Hamlin, afterwards offered VOL. XIII.-NO. 76

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and read powerful papers on the relations of Christianity to Islam. The Mohammedan faith was allowed to be represented in spite of the fact that the management knew that a Mussulman call for prayer was soon to be heard in Union Square, New York City. Was it meant to give Islam a chance to plant itself in this country? We were so confident that Islam cannot plant itself here that we were perfectly willing to hear the best it could say for itself, provided it kept within the range of our laws. Not a word of championship of polygamy would that audience, representing nearly two-thirds of the population of the world, hear. And there were some representatives of false faiths there that do not greatly oppose polygamy. But, whether Christian or non-Christian, their best educated representatives undertook no defense of it.

II.

Daniel Webster in his early manhood, after reading Moore's Life of Byron, affirmed that he did not find a single respectable trait in the character of the poet as a man. Polygamy as a system has ceased to be respectable among educated men.

So much for the keynote of what I have to say on the Peerlessness of Christian Family Life. Of course I set up here our ideal conception of that life, just as I am willing any ethnic faith should set up its ideal. We are all fragments. We all come far short of our ideals. But the Christian faith has a most definite ideal; and what it is, you may see in a large view of the world better than in any other way. If you wish to be impressed with the peerlessness of Christian Family Life, open your eyes upon the lands of the Vedas, the lands of the Confucianists, the lands of Buddha, the lands of Mohammed, and compare them with the lands of the Four Gospels, or even with the lands of Judaism under only the Old Testament.

Your wife, your mother, your sister, your daughter, your betrothed; what would have been their position if they had been born under Brahmin rule, what if under Buddhist rule, what if under Confucianist? What if they had been born to be educated as Platonists? If Platonism would not have been a good scheme of education for women, much less then can

these other schemes be commended, for Platonism is commonly regarded as the highest outcome of the unaided human faculties. This Bible I take in my hand and I press the clusters of spiritual grapes in it; and, although polygamy was a part of the life of patriarchs in the ancient days, at the beginning it was not so-the wine that flows out of the whole Bible is that of monogamy. "They twain" at the first instituted the family. And the New Testament rigorously insists on monogamy. But I take the clusters on Plato's vine and press them, and although they are the richest grapes that ever grew in merely the light that man has cast on the problems of existence, the wine flowing from them has in it the horrible stench of slavery and polygamy. He allowed both in his Ideal Commonwealth. If this was the poisonous mixture in Platonism,. let us treat with as much parliamentary courtesy as we can the religions that allow polygamy to this day, but let us speak boldly against them all in the name of the contrasts seen in a world-wide view of Christian and non-Christian faiths carried into life.

If your mother had been a Buddhist, she might have been told that she had no soul; that possibly, after a life in which she had lived with great austerity, she might be reincarnated as a man. If your wife had been born under Brahmin rule, she would have heard much of the code of Manu. Now, Manu says, and this is one of the sacred texts of Hindooism :

"Let the wife who wishes to perform sacred oblation wash the feet of her husband and drink the water, for the husband is to the wife greater than Vishnu." Though unobservant of approved usages, or enamored of another woman, or devoid of good qualities, yet a husband must constantly be reverenced as a god by a virtuous wife." (Dharma Sastra, Chap. 5, p. 154.) "Women have no business with the text of a sacred book; and having no evidence in law and no knowledge of expiatory texts, sinful women must be foul as falsehood itself and this is a fixed rule."

The code of Manu forbids a woman to read the Scripture or to offer prayer by herself. Without a husband, she is soulless. Out of this amazing falsehood in faith, grows the custom of putting to death infant girls. It has been the belief