Ahmadiyyat or The True Islam — Page 166
166 kindness or affection, or to commit breaches of trust, or to dislike progress and reform, or to discard nobility, dignity, self-respect and meekness, or to suppress all feelings of beneficence and gratitude. A religion which aspires after universal acceptance and respect, is bound to provide a code of moral teachings, that code being common to all religions. If it fails in this respect human nature is sure to revolt against it, and thus it would be doomed to swift disappearance. Such general moral injunctions, therefore, do not help us much. They are common to all religions, and no religion can pride itself on its exclusive proprietorship of them, nor can we derive any intellectual benefit from this sameness of moral teachings, for it is the result of compulsion and not of any deep insight or research into the sources and working of human nature and conduct. I am often amused by the attempts of people who seek to establish the superiority of their respective religions and to propagate their faiths by first putting together all the general moral injunctions and then representing them as their own exclusive teachings. Whereas the fact is that these injunctions are not peculiar to any religion; they are common to the most ancient, the most primitive as well as the latest and, if I may say so, the most advanced religions. Even the peoples or tribes that are reckoned among savages and have very crude ideas about religion would, if we disregard their actions, and question them calmly and kindly about morals, tell us something very closely resembling that which is taught by more ad- vanced religions. It is, therefore, absurd to base the truth of one’s religion on factors which are the property even