of him as “Our Father”—­the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.  They acknowledge, indeed, that Jesus was a true prophet sent of God; but they deny his crucifixion and death, and they know nothing of the power of his resurrection.  To those who have found redemption and peace in these the grand and distinctive truths of the Christian faith, it may be allowed to mourn over the lands in which the light of the Gospel has been quenched, and these blessings blotted out, by the material forces of Islam; where, together with civilization and liberty, Christianity has given place to gross darkness, and it is as if now “there were no more sacrifice for sins.”  We may, and we do, look forward with earnest expectation to the day when knowledge of salvation shall be given to these nations “by the remission of their sins, through the tender mercy of our God, whereby the Dayspring from on high hath visited us, to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace."[p]

[Sidenote:  Contrast between divine and human work.] But even apart from these, the special blessings of Christianity, I ask, which now of the two faiths bears, in its birth and growth, the mark of a divine hand and which the human stamp?  Which looks likest the handiwork of the God of nature, who “hath laid the measures of the earth,” and “hath stretched the line upon it,"[q] but not the less with an ever-varying adaptation to time and place? and which the artificial imitation?

[Sidenote:  Islam.] “As a reformer, Mohammed did indeed advance his people to a certain point, but as a prophet he left them fixed immovably at that point for all time to come.  As there can be no return, so neither can there be any progress.  The tree is of artificial planting.  Instead of containing within itself the germ of growth and adaptation to the various requirements of time, and clime, and circumstance, expanding with the genial sunshine and the rain from heaven, it remains the same forced and stunted thing as when first planted twelve centuries ago."[81]

[Sidenote:  Christianity compared by Christ to the works of nature.] Such is Islam.  Now what is Christianity?  Listen to the prophetic words of the Founder himself, who compares it to the works of nature: 

     “So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the
     ground;

     “And should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should
     spring and grow up, he knoweth not how.

     “For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself:  first the blade,
     then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear."[r]

And again: 

     “Whereunto shall we liken the kingdom of God, or with what
     comparison shall we compare it?

     “It is like a grain of mustard-seed, which, when it is sown in the
     earth, is less than all seeds that be in the earth;