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torial and intercessory agency in the eternal world.

The belief entertained respecting Christ's person, by some among the Mahometans, approaches yet more nearly to the Catholic doctrine one theological school in particular (the counterpart, seemingly, of the Arian,) asserts both his pre-existence, and his participation, in a certain mysterious sense, of the divine nature; while another has advanced its speculative creed to the verge of Catholicity, affirming the belief, "that the divine nature might be united with the human, in the same person," and admitting the possibility," that God might appear in a human form.” *

The fabulous puerilities of the Koran and its expositors, concerning the life and miracles of our Lord, rarely, if at all, of Mahometan invention, may be generally traced to the Apocryphal Gospels, and other spurious remains of Christian antiquity.

The doctrine of the resurrection, with its inseparable consequences, a general judgment, and a future state of reward or punishment, is the next prime fundamental to be considered,

* "The Holûlians believed, that the divine nature might be united with the human in the same person; for they granted it possible that God might appear in a human form.” Sale, Prelim. Discourse, p. 225.

as held in common by Christianity and Mahometanism, however in the latter system lowered and debased by a plentiful alloy of those Rabbinical figments, so congenial to the sensual habits and spirit of its founder. The Mahometan doctrine of the resurrection so far coincides with the Scriptural doctrine, that it comprehends the rising again of the body, and its final reunion with the soul. The mode of their reunion, a question which Saint Paul's masterly argument proves to have been early moved in the primitive church, has also largely exercised the metaphysical zeal and subtlety of the Mahometan doctors; whose theories of the resurrection are distinguished, by the usual incongruous admixture of Gospel truths, with Rabbinical hallucinations; Judaism still supplying what Christianity withholds. *

On the subject of this inexplicable mystery, however, an attempt to thread the maze of Mahometan, speculation, would be foreign from the object proposed in these pages. It will be more in place, to call attention to the parallel, observable between Christianity and Mahometanism, in the facts which they agree in representing, as signs

See Mill, De Mohammedismo, ante Mohamm. p. 399. et sequent.

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of the resurrection. Among the occurrences so accounted by the Mahometan doctrine*, are to be found the following marked coincidences with the signs specified by our Lord, in the twenty-fourth chapter of Saint Matthew, whence they are obviously taken : tumults and seditions; the decay of faith among men; great wars of nations; a revolution in the course of the sun; an eclipse of the moon; the coming of Antichrist; and the descent of Jesus on earth. If to these manifest plagiarisms, be added some signs borrowed from other places of Scripture, - such as, the appearance of the Beast; a general apostasy to idolatry; the persecution and final triumph and return of the Jews, enough will be forthcoming, to indicate the kind of correspondence, on the subject of the resurrection, subsisting between the Christian and Mahometan doctrines: the latter being here, in accordance with the entire analogy of the spurious with the true revelation, the palpable copy and corruption of the former.

For the ridiculous fables interlarded with these fragments of Christian truth, Mahometanism is indebted to the Rabbinical writers ; thus, in every deviation from Christianity, still

See Sale, Prelim. Discourse, pp. 104-110.

so approximating to Judaism, as continually to keep alive the image of its spurious relation to the true religion, in both its branches.

In the teaching of our Lord, and his apostles and evangelists, the resurrection of the dead is uniformly represented as being followed by the general judgment. The Mahometan doctrine of a judgment to come, so far concurs with the Christian; from which it widely differs in the presumptuous and revolting minuteness with which Mahomet and his followers pretend to scrutinize and expose the secrets of the invisible world. Here, however, as in so many other examples, where Mahometanism seems most to swerve from the reverent simplicity of Gospel truth, its aberrations serve only to render a separate branch of the analogy with revealed religion more complete, by betraying further affinities with the errors of Rabbinical Judaism. Thus, the Mahometan notions of the near approach of the sun at the last day, by whose extraordinary heat the wicked shall be then tormented; of the books to be produced, wherein men's actions are registered; of the balance, wherein they shall be weighed; and of the bridge Al-Sirât, over which all must pass, from the judgment to their respective destinations, with several

more particulars, are notoriously borrowed from the reveries of the old Jewish writers. *

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The fearful sights and sounds, on the other hand, which the Mahometans believe are to precede the general resurrection to judgment, very remarkably correspond with the signs predicted in the New Testament; whence, as the following statement of their belief on this subject, given by the learned English translator of the Koran may suffice to show, they must have been derived. At the first sound of the last trumpet, they say, "the earth will be shaken, and not only all buildings, but the very mountains levelled; the heavens shall melt, the sun be darkened, the stars fall; and the sea shall be troubled and dried up, or turned into flames, the sun, moon, and stars being thrown into it." The reader conversant with Scripture will easily refer the particulars of this representation to their proper sources in the New Testament; the main resort of Mahometan plagiarism, on the subject of the future judgment.

The commanding claims of the Christian religion, and the vain pretensions of the Mahometan superstition, stand no where more conclusively opposed to one another, than in the doctrines of the two creeds respecting the re

See Sale, Prelim. Discourse, pp. 110-120.

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