Claims and Teachings - Ahmad The Promised Messiah and Mahdi — Page 392
392 If they taught any morals, their object only was that their own people alone should possess those morals. Jesus, for instance, plainly paid that his mission was confined to the house of Israel, and when a woman who was not from the Israelites approached him saying 'Have mercy on me, Lord/ he repulsed her saying, 'I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel,' and when she again humbly approached him with the same request, he again rejected her with the answer, 'It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs. ' But our Holy Prophet never said that he was sent only to the Arabs. On the other hand, and Quran says: <*U ) J ^j ^J J ^r ^ ) V. ' ^ J* **$& fi ) i. e. , Say, Prophet, to the people, 'lam sent to the whole world'. " But it should be remembered that Jesus cannot be blamed for having thus coldly repelled the woman for the time then. was not yet ripe for a universal guid- ance and Jesus was accordingly commanded to confine his preach- ing to the Israelites and to have nothing to do with others. So, as I have said above, the moral precepts of Jesus were only addressed to the Jews. The law of Moses laid emphasis on tooth for tooth and eye for eye, and the object of this teaching was to establish justice among the Jews and to check them from trans- gression, because they, owing to their having lived in slavery for 400 years, had become hard-hearted and mean, and injustice formed the chief trait of their character. Similarly in the time of Jesus, God's wisdom demanded that the over-strictness with which the Jews had come to punish every offender should be remedied by enjoining upon them leniency and mercy and BO Jesus laid great stress on forgiveness. Hence the moral teaching contained in the Gospel was only addressed to the Jews and Jesus had no concern with any other people.