The dramatic pieces themselves are without any author’s name. They are in popular language, such as the commonest and most ignorant of the Persian people can understand, free from learned Arabic words,—free, comparatively speaking, from Oriental fantasticality and hyperbole. The Seyids, or popular friars, already spoken of, have probably had a hand in the composition of many of them. The Moollahs, or regular ecclesiastical authorities, condemn the whole thing. It is an innovation which they disapprove and think dangerous; it is addressed to the eye, and their religion forbids to represent religious things to the eye; it departs from the limits of what is revealed and appointed to be taught as the truth, and brings in novelties and heresies;—for these dramas keep growing under the pressure of the actor’s imagination and emotion, and of the imagination and emotion of the public, and receive new developments every day. The learned, again, say that these pieces are a heap of lies, the production of ignorant people, and have no words strong enough to express their contempt for them. Still, so irresistible is the vogue of these sacred dramas that, from the king on the throne to the beggar in the street, every one, except perhaps the Moollahs, attends them, and is carried away by them. The Imams and their families speak always in a kind of lyrical chant, said to have rhythmical effects, often of great pathos and beauty; their persecutors, the villains of the piece, speak always in prose.

The stage is under the direction of a choragus, called oostad, or “master,” who is a sacred personage by reason of the functions which he performs. Sometimes he addresses to the audience a commentary on what is passing before them, and asks their compassion and tears for the martyrs; sometimes in default of a Seyid, he prays and preaches. He is always listened to with veneration, for it is he who arranges the whole sacred spectacle which so deeply moves everybody. With no attempt at concealment, with the book of the piece in his hand, he remains constantly on the stage, gives the actors their cue, puts the children and any inexperienced actor in their right places, dresses the martyr in his winding-sheet when he is going to his death, holds the stirrup for him to mount his horse, and inserts a supply of chopped straw into the hands of those who are about to want it. Let us now see him at work.

The theater is filled, and the heat is great; young men of rank, the king’s pages, officers of the army, smart functionaries of State, move through the crowd with water-skins slung on their backs, dealing out water all round, in memory of the thirst which on these solemn days the Imams suffered in the sands of Kerbela. Wild chants and litanies, such as we have already described, are from time to time set up, by a dervish, a soldier, a workman in the crowd. These chants are taken up, more or less, by the audience: sometimes they flag and die away for want of support, sometimes they are continued till they reach a paroxysm, and then abruptly stop. Presently a strange, insignificant figure in a green cotton garment, looking like a petty tradesman of one of the Teheran bazaars, mounts upon the sakou. He beckons with his hand to the audienceaudience, who are silent directly, and addresses them in a tone of lecture and expostulation, thus:—

“Well, you seem happy enough, Mussulmans, sitting there at your ease under the awning; and you imagine Paradise already wide open to you. Do you know what Paradise is? It is a garden, doubtless, but such a garden as you have no idea of. You will say to me: ‘Friend, tell us what it is like.’like.’ I have never been there, certainly; but plenty of prophets have described it, and angels have brought news of it. However, all I will tell you is, that there is room for all good people there, for it is 330,000 cubits long. If you do not believe, inquire. As for getting to be one of the good people, let me tell you it is not enough to read the Koran of the Prophet (the salvation and blessing of God be upon him!); it is not enough to do everything which this divine book enjoins; it is not enough to come and weep at the tazyas, as you do every day, you sons of dogs you, who know nothing which is of any use; it behoves, besides, that your good works (if you ever do any, which I greatly doubt) should be done in the name and for the love of Hussein. It is Hussein, Mussulmans, who is the door to Paradise; it is Hussein, Mussulmans, who upholds the world; it is Hussein, Mussulmans, by whom comes salvation! Cry, Hassan, Hussein!”

And all the multitude cry: “O Hassan! O Hussein!”

“That is well; and now cry again.” And again all cry: “O Hassan! O Hussein!” “And now,” the strange speaker goes on, “pray to God to keep you continually in the love of Hussein. Come, make your cry to God.” Then the multitude, as one man, throwthrow up their arms into the air, and with a deep and long-drawn cry exclaim: “Ya Allah! O God!”

Fifes, drums, and trumpets break out; the kernas, great copper trumpets five or six feet long, give notice that the actors are ready and that the tazya is to commence. The preacher descends from the sakou, and the actors occupy it.

To give a clear notion of the cycle which these dramas fill, we should begin, as on the first day of the Moharrem the actors begin, with some piece relating to the childhood of the Imams, such as, for instance, the piece called The Children Digging. Ali and Fatima are living at Medina with their little sons Hassan and Hussein. The simple home and occupations of the pious family are exhibited; it is morning, Fatima is seated with the little Hussein on her lap, dressing him. She combs his hair, talking caressingly to him all the while. A hair comes out with the comb; the child starts. Fatima is in distress at having given the child even this momentary uneasiness, and stops to gaze upon him tenderly. She falls into an anxious reverie, thinking of her fondness for the child, and of the unknown future in store for him. While she muses, the angel Gabriel stands before her. He reproves her weakness: “A hair falls from the child’s head,” he says, “and you weep; what would you do if you knew the destiny that awaits him, the countless wounds with which that body shall one day be pierced, the agony that shall rend your own soul!” Fatima, in despair, is comforted by her husband Ali, and they go together into the town to hear Mahomet preach. The boys and some of their little friends begin to play; every one makes a great deal of Hussein; he is at once the most spirited and the most amiable child of them all. The party amuse themselves with digging, with making holes in the ground and building mounds. Ali returns from the sermon and asks what they are about; and Hussein is made to reply in ambiguous and prophetic answers, which convey that by these holes and mounds in the earth are prefigured interments and tombs. Ali departs again; there rush in a number of big and fierce boys, and begin to pelt the little Imams with stones. A companion shields Hussein with his own body, but he is struck down with a stone, and with another stone Hussein, too, is stretched on the ground senseless. Who are those boy-tyrants and persecutors? They are Ibn-Said, and Shemer, and others, the future murderers at Kerbela. The audience perceive it with a shudder; the hateful assailants go off in triumph; Ali re-enters, picks up the stunned and wounded children, brings them round, and takes Hussein back to his mother Fatima.

But let us now come at once to the days of martyrdom and to Kerbela. One of the most famous pieces of the cycle is a piece called the Marriage of Kassem, which brings us into the very middle of these crowning days. Count Gobineau has given a translation of it, and from this translation we will take a few extracts. Kassem is the son of Hussein’s elder brother, the Imam Hassan, who had been poisoned by Yezid’s instigation at Medina. Kassem and his mother are with the Imam Hussein at Kerbela; there, too, are the women and children of the holy family, Omm-Leyla, Hussein’s wife, the Persian princess, the last child of Yezdejerd the last of the Sassanides; Zeyneb, Hussein’s sister, the offspring, like himself, of Ali and Fatima, and the granddaughter of Mahomet; his nephew Abdallah, still a little child; finally, his beautiful daughter Zobeyda. When the piece begins, the Imam’s camp in the desert has already been cut off from the Euphrates and besieged several days by the Syrian troops under Ibn-Said and Shemer, and by the treacherous men of Kufa. The Family of the Tent were suffering torments of thirst. One of the children had brought an empty water-bottle, and thrown it, a silent token of distress, before the feet of Abbas, the uncle of Hussein; Abbas had sallied out to cut his way to the river, and had been slain. Afterwards Ali-Akber, Hussein’s eldest son, had made the same attempt and met with the same fate. Two younger brothers of Ali-Akber followed his example, and were likewise slain. The Imam Hussein had rushed amidst the enemy, beaten them from the body of Ali-Akber, and brought the body back to his tent; but the river was still inaccessible. At this point the action of the Marriage of Kassem begins. Kassem, a youth of sixteen, is burning to go out and avenge his cousin. At one end of the sakou is the Imam Hussein seated on his throne; in the middle are grouped all the members of his family; at the other end lies the body of Ali-Akber, with his mother Omm-Leyla, clothed and veiled in black, bending over it. The kernas sound, and Kassem, after a solemn appeal from Hussein and his sister Zeyneb to God and to the founders of their house to look upon their great distress, rises and speaks to himself:

Kassem.—“Separate thyself from the women of the harem, Kassem. Consider within thyself for a little; here thou sittest, and presently thou wilt see the body of Hussein, that body like a flower, torn by arrows and lances like thorns, Kassem.

“Thou sawest Ali-Akber’s head severed from his body on the field of battle, and yet thou livedst!

“Arise, obey that which is written of thee by thy father; to be slain, that is thy lot, Kassem!

“Go, get leave from the son of Fatima, most honorable among women, and submit thyself to thy fate, Kassem.”

Hussein sees him approach. “Alas,” he says, “it is the orphan nightingale of the garden of Hassan, my brother!” Then Kassem speaks:

Kassem.—“O God, what shall I do beneath this load of affliction? My eyes are wet with tears, my lips are dried up with thirst. To live is worse than to die. What shall I do, seeing what hath befallen Ali-Akber? If Hussein suffereth me not to go forth, oh misery! For then what shall I do, O God, in the day of the resurrection, when I see my father Hassan? When I see my mother in the day of the resurrection, what shall I do, O God, in my sorrow and shame before her? All my kinsmen are gone to appear before the Prophet: shall not I also one day stand before the Prophet; and what shall I do, O God, in that day?”

Then he addresses the Imam:—

“Hail, threshold of the honor and majesty on high, threshold of heaven, threshold of God! In the roll of martyrs thou art the chief; in the book of creation thy story will live for ever. An orphan, a fatherless child, downcast and weeping, comes to prefer a request to thee.”

Hussein bids him tell it, and he answers:—

“O light of the eyes of Mahomet the mighty, O lieutenant of Ali the lion! Abbas has perished, Ali-Akber has suffered martyrdom. O my uncle, thou hast no warriors left, and no standard-bearer! The roses are gone and gone are their buds; the jessamine is gone, the poppies are gone. I alone, I am still left in the garden of the Faith, a thorn, and miserable. If thou hast any kindness for the orphan, suffer me to go forth and fight.”

Hussein refuses. “My child,” he says, “thou wast the light of the eyes of the Imam Hassan, thou art my beloved remembrance of him; ask me not this; urge me not, entreat me not; to have lost Ali-Akber is enough.”

Kassem answers:—“That Kassem should live and Ali-Akber be marytred—sooner let the earth cover me! O king, be generous to the beggar at thy gate. See how my eyes run over with tears and my lips are dried up with thirst. Cast thine eyes toward the waters of the heavenly Euphrates! I die of thirst; grant me, O thou marked of God, a full pitcher of the water of life! it flows in the Paradise which awaits me.”

Hussein still refuses; Kassem breaks forth in complaints and lamentations, his mother comes to him and learns the reason. She then says:—

“Complain not against the Imam, light of my eyes; only by his order can the commission of martyrdom be given. In that commission are sealed two-and-seventy witnesses, all righteous, and among the two-and-seventy is thy name. Know that thy destiny of death is commanded in the writing which thou wearest on thine arm.”

This writing is the testament of his father Hassan. He bears it in triumph to the Imam Hussein, who finds written there that he should, on the death-plain of Kerbela, suffer Kassem to have his will, but that he should marry him first to his daughter Zobeyda. Kassem consents, though in astonishment. “Consider,” he says, “there lies Ali-Akber, mangled by the enemies’ hands! Under this sky of ebon blackness, how can joy show her face? Nevertheless if thou commandest it, what have I to do but obey? Thy commandment is that of the Prophet, and his voice is that of God.” But Hussein has also to overcome the reluctance of the intended bride and of all the women of his family.

“Heir of the vicar of God,” says Kassem’s mother to the Imam, “bid me die, but speak not to me of a bridal. If Zobeyda is to be a bride and Kassem a bridegroom, where is the henna to tinge their hands, where is the bridal chamber?” “Mother of Kassem,” answers the Imam solemnly, “yet a few moments, and in this field of anguish the tomb shall be for marriage-bed, and the winding-sheet for bridal garment!” All give way to the will of their sacred Head. The women and children surround Kassem, sprinkle him with rose-water, hang bracelets and necklaces on him, and scatter bon-bons around; and then the marriage procession is formed. Suddenly drums and trumpets are heard, and the Syrian troops appear. Ibn-Said and Shemer are at their head. “The Prince of the Faith celebrates a marriage in the desert,” they exclaim tauntingly; “we will soon change his festivity into mourning.” They pass by, and Kassem takes leave of his bride. “God keep thee, my bride,” he says, embracing her, “for I must forsake thee!” “One moment,” she says, “remain in thy place one moment! thy countenance is as the lamp which giveth us light; suffer me to turn around thee as the butterfly turneth, gently, gently!” And making a turn around him, she performs the ancient Eastern rites of respect from a new-married wife to her husband. Troubled, he rises to go: “The reins of my will are slipping away from me!” he murmurs. She lays hold of his robe: “Take off thy hand,” he cries, “we belong not to ourselves!”

Then he asks the Imam to array him in his winding-sheet. “O nightingale of the divine orchard of martyrdom,” says Hussein, as he complies with his wish, “I clothe thee with thy winding-sheet, I kiss thy face; there is no fear, and no hope, but of God!” Kassem commits his little brother Abdallah to the Imam’s care. Omm-Leyla looks up from her son’s corpse, and says to Kassem: “When thou enterest the garden of Paradise, kiss for me the head of Ali-Akber!”

The Syrian troops again appear. Kassem rushes upon them and they all go off fighting. The Family of the Tent, at Hussein’s command, put the Koran on their heads and pray, covering themselves with sand. Kassem reappears victorious. He has slain Azrek, a chief captain of the Syrians, but his thirst is intolerable. “Uncle,” he says to the Imam, who asks him what reward he wishes for his valor, “my tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth; the reward I wish is water.” “Thou coverest me with shame, Kassem,” his uncle answers; “what can I do? Thou askest water; there is no water!”

Kassem.—“If I might but wet my mouth, I could presently make an end of the men of Kufa.”

Hussein.—“As I live, I have not one drop of water!”

Kassem.—“Were it but lawful, I would wet my mouth with my own blood.”

Hussein.—“Beloved child, what the Prophet forbids, that cannot I make lawful.”

Kassem.—“I beseech thee, let my lips be but once moistened, and I will vanquish thine enemies!”

Hussein presses his own lips to those of Kassem, who, refreshed, again rushes forth, and returns bleeding and stuck with darts, to die at the Imam’s feet in the tent. So ends the marriage of Kassem.

But the great day is the tenth day of the Moharrem, when comes the death of the Imam himself. The narrative of Gibbon well sums up the events of this great tenth day. “The battle at length expired by the death of the last of the companions of Hussein. Alone, weary, and wounded, he seated himself at the door of his tent. He was pierced in the mouth with a dart. He lifted his hands to heaven—they were full of blood—and he uttered a funeral prayer for the living and the dead. In a transport of despair, his sister issued from the tent, and adjured the general of the Kufians that he would not suffer Hussein to be murdered before his eyes. A tear trickled down the soldier’s venerable beard; and the boldest of his men fell back on every side as the dying Imam threw himself among them. The remorseless Shemer—a name detested by the faithful—reproached their cowardice; and the grandson of Mahomet was slain with three and thirty strokes of lances and swords. After they had trampled on his body, they carried his head to the castle of Kufa, and the inhuman Obeidallah (the governor) struck him on the mouth with a cane. ‘Alas!’ exclaimed an aged Mussulman, ‘on those lips have I seen the lips of the Apostle of God!’”

For this catastrophe no one tazya suffices; all the companies of actors unite in a vast open space; booths and tents are pitched round the outside circle for the spectators; in the center is the Imam’s camp, and the day ends with its conflagration.

Nor are there wanting pieces which carry on the story beyond the death of Hussein. One which produces an extraordinary effect is The Christian Damsel. The carnage is over, the enemy are gone. To the awe-struck beholders, the scene shows the silent plain of Kerbela and the tombs of the martyrs. Their bodies, full of wounds, and with weapons sticking in them still, are exposed to view; but around them all are crowns of burning candles, circles of light, to show that they have entered into glory. At one end of the sakou is a high tomb by itself; it is the tomb of the Imam Hussein, and his pierced body is seen stretched out upon it. A brilliant caravan enters, with camels, soldiers, servants, and a young lady on horseback, in European costume, or what passes in Persia for European costume. She halts near the tombs and proposes to encamp. Her servants try to pitch a tent; but wherever they drive a pole into the ground, blood springs up, and a groan of horror bursts from the audience. Then the fair traveler, instead of encamping, mounts into the tâgnumâ, lies down to rest there, and falls asleep. Jesus Christ appears to her, and makes known that this is Kerbela, and what has happened here. Meanwhile, an Arab of the desert, a Bedouin who had formerly received Hussein’s bounty, comes stealthily, intent on plunder, upon the sakou. He finds nothing, and in a paroxysm of brutal fury he begins to ill-treat the corpses. Blood flows. The feeling of Asiatics about their dead is well known, and the horror of the audience rises to its height. Presently the ruffian assails and wounds the corpse of the Imam himself, over whom white doves are hovering; the voice of Hussein, deep and mournful, calls from his tomb: “There is no God but God!” The robber flies in terror; the angels, the prophets, Mahomet, Jesus Christ, Moses, the Imams, the holy women, all come upon the sakou, press round Hussein, load him with honors. The Christian damsel wakes, and embraces Islam, the Islam of the sect of the Shiahs.

Another piece closes the whole story, by bringing the captive women and children of the Iman’s family to Damascus, to the presence of the Caliph Yezid. It is in this piece that there comes the magnificent tableau, already mentioned, of the court of the caliph. The crown jewels are lent for it, and the dresses of the ladies of Yezid’s court, represented by boys chosen for their good looks, are said to be worth thousands and thousands of pounds; but the audience see them without favor, for this brilliant court of Yezid is cruel to the captives of Kerbela. The captives are thrust into a wretched dungeon under the palace walls; but the Caliph’s wife had formerly been a slave of Mahomet’s daughter Fatima, the mother of Hussein and Zeyneb. She goes to see Zeyneb in prison, her heart is touched, she passes into an agony of repentance, returns to her husband, upbraids him with his crimes, and intercedes for the women of the holy family, and for the children, who keep calling for the Imam Hussein. Yezid orders his wife to be put to death, and sends the head of Hussein to the children. Sekyna, the Imam’s youngest daughter, a child of four years old, takes the beloved head in her arms, kisses it, and lies down beside it. Then Hussein appears to her as in life: “Oh! my father,” she cries, “where wast thou? I was hungry, I was cold, I was beaten—where wast thou?” But now she sees him again, and is happy. In the vision of her happiness she passes away out of this troublesome life, she enters into rest, and the piece ends with her mother and her aunts burying her.

These are the martyrs of Kerbela; and these are the sufferings which awaken in an Asiatic audience sympathy so deep and serious, transports so genuine of pity, love, and gratitude, that to match them at all one must take the feelings raised at Ammergau. And now, where are we to look, in the subject-matter of the Persian passion-play, for the source of all this emotion?

Count Gobineau suggests that it is to be found in the feeling of patriotism; and that our Indo-European kinsmen, the Persians, conquered by the Semitic Arabians, find in the sufferings of Hussein a portrait of their own martyrdom. “Hussein,” says Count Gobineau, “is not only the son of Ali, he is the husband of a princess of the blood of the Persian kings; he, his father Ali, the whole body of Imams taken together, represent the nation, represent Persia, invaded, ill-treated, despoiled, stripped of its inhabitants, by the Arabians. The right which is insulted and violated in Hussein, is identified with the right of Persia. The Arabians, the Turks, the Afghans,—Persia’s implacable and hereditary enemies,—recognize Yezid as legitimate caliph; Persia finds therein an excuse for hating them the more, and identifies herself the more with the usurper’s victims. It is patriotism therefore, which has taken the form, here, of the drama to express itself.” No doubt there is much truth in what Count Gobineau thus says; and it is certain that the division of Shiahs and Sunis has its true cause in a division of races, rather than in a difference of religious belief.

But I confess that if the interest of the Persian passion-plays had seemed to me to lie solely in the curious evidence they afford of the workings of patriotic feeling in a conquered people, I should hardly have occupied myself with them at all this length. I believe that they point to something much more interesting. What this is, I cannot do more than simply indicate; but indicate it I will, in conclusion, and then leave the student of human nature to follow it out for himself.

When Mahomet’s cousin Jaffer, and others of his first converts, persecuted by the idolaters of Mecca, fled in the year of our era 615, seven years before the Hegira, into Abyssinia, and took refuge with the King of that country, the people of Mecca sent after the fugitives to demand that they should be given up to them. Abyssinia was then already Christian. The king asked Jaffer and his companions what was this new religion for which they had left their country. Jaffer answered: “We were plunged in the darkness of ignorance, we were worshipers of idols. Given over to all our passions, we knew no law but that of the strongest, when God raised up among us a man of our own race, of noble descent, and long held in esteem by us for his virtues. This apostle called us to believe in one God, to worship God only, to reject the superstitions of our fathers, to despise divinities of wood and stone. He commanded us to eschew wickedness, to be truthful in speech, faithful to our engagements, kind and helpful to our relations and neighbors. He bade us respect the chastity of women, and not to rob the orphan. He exhorted us to prayer, alms-giving, and fasting. We believed in his mission, and we accepted the doctrines and the rule of life which he brought to us from God. For this our countrymen have persecuted us; and now they want to make us return to their idolatry.” The king of Abyssinia refused to surrender the fugitives, and then, turning again to Jaffer, after a few more explanations, he picked up a straw from the ground, and said to him: “Between your religion and ours there is not the thickness of this straw difference.”

That is not quite so; yet thus much we may affirm, that Jaffer’s account of the religion of Mahomet is a great deal truer than the accounts of it which are commonly current amongst us. Indeed, for the credit of humanity, as more than a hundred millions of men are said to profess the Mahometan religion, one is glad to think so. To popular opinion everywhere, religion is proved by miracles. All religions but a man’s own are utterly false and vain; the authors of them are mere impostors; and the miracles which are said to attest them, fictitious. We forget that this is a game which two can play at; although the believer of each religion always imagines the prodigies which attest his own religion to be fenced by a guard granted to them alone. Yet how much more safe is it, as well as more fruitful, to look for the main confirmation of a religion in its intrinsic correspondence with urgent wants of human nature, in its profound necessity! Differing religions will then be found to have much in common, but this will be an additional proof of the value of that religion which does most for that which is thus commonly recognized as salutary and necessary. In Christendom one need not go about to establish that the religion of the Hebrews is a better religion than the religion of the Arabs, or that the Bible is a greater book than the Koran. The Bible grew, the Koran was made; there lies the immense difference in depth and truth between them! This very inferiority may make the Koran, for certain purposes and for people at a low stage of mental growth, a more powerful instrument than the Bible. From the circumstances of its origin, the Koran has the intensely dogmatic character, it has the perpetual insistence on the motive of future rewards and punishments, the palpable exhibition of paradise and hell, which the Bible has not. Among the little known and little advanced races of the great African continent, the Mahometan missionaries, by reason of the sort of power which this character of the Koran gives, are said to be more successful than ours. Nevertheless even in Africa it will assuredly one day be manifest, that whereas the Bible-people trace themselves to Abraham through Isaac, and the Koran-people trace themselves to Abraham through Ishmael, the difference between the religion of the Bible and the religion of the Koran is almost as the difference between Isaac and Ishmael. I mean that the seriousness about righteousness, which is what the hatred of idolatry really means, and the profound and inexhaustible doctrines that the righteous Eternal loveth righteousness, that there is no peace for the wicked, that the righteous is an everlasting foundation, are exhibited and inculcated in the Old Testament with an authority, majesty, and truth which leave the Koran immeasurably behind, and which, the more mankind grows and gains light, the more will be felt to have no fellows. Mahomet was no doubt acquainted with the Jews and their documents, and gained something from this source for his religion. But his religion is not a mere plagiarism from Judea, any more than it is a mere mass of falsehood. No; in the seriousness, elevation, and moral energy of himself and of that Semitic race from which he sprang and to which he spoke, Mahomet mainly found that scorn and hatred of idolatry, that sense of the worth and truth of righteousness, judgment, and justice, which make the real greatness of him and his Koran, and which are thus rather an independent testimony to the essential doctrines of the Old Testament, than a plagiarism from them. The world needs righteousness, and the Bible is the grand teacher of it, but for certain times and certain men Mahomet too, in his way, was a teacher of righteousness.

But we know how the Old Testament conception of righteousness ceased with time to have the freshness and force of an intuition, became something petrified, narrow, and formal, needed renewing. We know how Christianity renewed it, carrying into these hard waters of Judaism a sort of warm gulf-stream of tender emotion, due chiefly to qualities which may be summed up as those of inwardness, mildness, and self-renouncement. Mahometanism had no such renewing. It began with a conception of righteousness, lofty indeed, but narrow, and which we may call old Jewish; and there it remained. It is not a feeling religion. No one would say that the virtues of gentleness, mildness, and self-sacrifice were its virtues; and the more it went on, the more the faults of its original narrow basis became visible, more and more it became fierce and militant, less and less was it amiable. Now, what are Ali, and Hassan, and Hussein and the Imams, but an insurrection of noble and pious natures against this hardness and aridity of the religion round them? an insurrection making its authors seem weak, helpless, and unsuccessful to the world and amidst the struggles of the world, but enabling them to know the joy and peace for which the world thirsts in vain, and inspiring in the heart of mankind an irresistible sympathy. “The twelve Imams,” says Gibbon, “Ali, Hassan, Hussein, and the lineal descendants of Hussein, to the ninth generation, without arms, or treasures, or subjects, successively enjoyed the veneration of the people. Their names were often the pretense of sedition and civil war; but these royal saints despised the pomp of the world, submitted to the will of God and the injustice of man, and devoted their innocent lives to the study and practice of religion.”

Abnegation and mildness, based on the depth of the inner life, and visited by unmerited misfortune, made the power of the first and famous Imams, Ali, Hassan, and Hussein, over the popular imagination. “O brother,” said Hassan, as he was dying of poison, to Hussein who sought to find out and punish his murderer, “O brother, let him alone till he and I meet together before God!” So his father Ali had stood back from his rights instead of snatching at them. So of Hussein himself it was said by his successful rival, the usurping Caliph Yezid: “God loved Hussein, but he would not suffer him to attain to anything.” They might attain to nothing, they were too pure, these great ones of the world as by birth they were; but the people, which itself also can attain to so little, loved them all the better on that account, loved them for their abnegation and mildness, felt that they were dear to God, that God loved them, and that they and their lives filled a void in the severe religion of Mahomet. These saintly self-deniers, these resigned sufferers, who would not strive nor cry, supplied a tender and pathetic side in Islam. The conquered Persians, a more mobile, more impressionable, and gentler race than their concentrated, narrow, and austere Semitic conquerors, felt the need of it most, and gave most prominence to the ideals which satisfied the need; but in Arabs and Turks also, and in all the Mahometan world, Ali and his sons excite enthusiasm and affection. Round the central sufferer, Hussein, has come to group itself everything which is most tender and touching. His person brings to the Mussulman’s mind the most human side of Mahomet himself, his fondness for children,—for Mahomet had loved to nurse the little Hussein on his knee, and to show him from the pulpit to his people. The Family of the Tent is full of women and children, and their devotion and sufferings,—blameless and saintly women, lovely and innocent children. There, too, are lovers with their story, the beauty and the love of youth; and all follow the attraction of the pure and resigned Imam, all die for him. The tender pathos from all these flows into the pathos from him and enhances it, until finally there arises for the popular imagination an immense ideal of mildness and self-sacrifice, melting and overpowering the soul.

Even for us, to whom almost all the names are strange, whose interest in the places and persons is faint, who have them before us for a moment to-day, to see them again, probably, no more forever,—even for us, unless I err greatly, the power and pathos of this ideal are recognizable. What must they be for those to whom every name is familiar, and calls up the most solemn and cherished associations; who have had their adoring gaze fixed all their lives upon this exemplar of self-denial and gentleness, and who have no other? If it was superfluous to say to English people that the religion of the Koran has not the value of the religion of the Old Testament, still more is it superfluous to say that the religion of the Imams has not the value of Christianity. The character and discourse of Jesus Christ possess, I have elsewhere often said, two signal powers: mildness and sweet reasonableness. The latter, the power which so puts before our view duty of every kind as to give it the force of an intuition, as to make it seem,—to make the total sacrifice of our ordinary self seem,—the most simple, natural, winning, necessary thing in the world, has been hitherto applied with but a very limited range, it is destined to an infinitely wider application, and has a fruitfulness which will yet transform the world. Of this the Imams have nothing, except so far as all mildness and self-sacrifice have in them something of sweet reasonableness and are its indispensable preliminary. This they have, mildness and self-sacrifice; and we have seen what an attraction it exercises. Could we ask for a stronger testimony to Christianity? Could we wish for any sign more convincing, that Jesus Christ was indeed, what Christians call him, the desire of all nations? So salutary, so necessary is what Christianity contains, that a religion,—a great, powerful, successful religion,—arises without it, and the missing virtue forces its way in! Christianity may say to these Persian Mahometans, with their gaze fondly turned towards the martyred Imams, what in our Bible God says by Isaiah to Cyrus, their great ancestor:—“I girded thee, though thou hast not known me.” It is a long way from Kerbela to Calvary; but the sufferers of Kerbela hold aloft to the eyes of millions of our race the lesson so loved by the sufferer of Calvary. For he said: “Learn of me, that I am mild, and lowly of heart; and ye shall find rest unto your souls.”