Ahmadiyya Movement — Page 49
49 when the world, or the majority of its people, were united by the bonds of one common faith. To bring peace, therefore, to the Universe, he claimed God had sent him so that, through him, men may be gathered in the fold of one faith and thus find out- ward and inner peace. As an improvement of present conditions, however, he made the following suggestions”: 1. The founders and leaders of different religions should not be referred to in a manner which, is likely to offend the senti- ments of their followers. 2. In the propagation of religion, the missionaries of each reli- gion should confine themselves to an explanation of the beauties of their religion and should not attack any other re- ligion. To find faults in other religions does not prove the truth of one’s own religion. The truth of a religion can be established only by reference to the superiority of its own teachings and not by reference to the dements of other reli- gions. 3. The followers of a religion should not ascribe to their religion a doctrine or a teaching which is not directly deducile from their Scriptures. Both the doctrine and its proof must be cited from the revealed book of the religion. Without a strict ad- herence to this principle no correct decision with regard to the truth of a religion is possible. For in the absence of any such restriction the world is unable to discover whether the teachings ascribed to a particular religion are to be found in the scriptures of that religion or have been derived from a study of other religions or of the current thought of the age. If the advocates of each religion were to put forward the teachings of their particular religion from the revealed book of that religion and were to support those teachings by argu- ments derived from that book, the public would easily be able to decide between the claims of different religions, and truth would soon be made manifest. There can be no doubt that, if