richly blessed. And He shall perfect justice so that the wolf and the elk shall drink water together, and He shall be wroth with the evildoers. Then, having in this way for forty years rendered the world inhabited, He also shall taste the bitterness of death and shall leave the world. Then the Musalmans shall bury Him near the chamber ¹ of Muhammad the chosen."

4. Weil, Biblische Legenden der Muselmanner, pp. 296, sqq.:—"The Jews took Christ and His Apostles prisoners on the evening before the Paschal feast, and shut them up together in a house, with the purpose of publicly executing Christ on the following morning But in the night GOD revealed to Him the message, 'Thou must through Me undergo death, but immediately afterwards Thou shalt be taken up to Me and freed from the power of the unbelievers.' Christ breathed out His spirit and remained three hours dead. The fourth hour the angel Gabriel appeared to Him and bore Him away through the window into Heaven without any one noticing it. An unbelieving Jew, however, who had slipped into the house in order to watch that Christ did not escape, became so like Him that the Apostles themselves mistook him for their Prophet. This man, as soon as the day broke, was fettered by the Jews and borne through the streets of Jerusalem. All the people cried out to him, 'Thou canst forsooth raise the dead to life, wherefore then shouldst thou not be able to burst thy fetters? Then many of them pricked him with thorny switches, others spat in his face, until he came to the place of execution.

There he was crucified, since no one believed that he was not Christ.

"When, however, Mary was in danger of giving way to her grief at the shameful death of her supposed son, He appeared to her from Heaven and said to her, 'Grieve not for Me: GOD has taken Me up to Himself, and we shall be united again on the Resurrection Day. Comfort My disciples also and say to them that it is well with Me in Heaven, and that they must through their firmness in the faith win for themselves a place near Me. Once more, when the Last Day draws near, shall I be sent back to the earth; then I shall slay the false prophet Dajjal and the wild boar, that make equal destruction upon earth, and things will attain to such a degree of peace and concord that lambs and hyaenas shall feed beside one another like brothers. I shall then burn to ashes the Gospel which godless priests have falsified, along with the cross which they honour like an idol, and shall subject the whole earth to the doctrine of the Prophet Muhammad, who shall be sent at a future time."'

For other similar tales vide Sale's "Preliminary Discourse."

APPENDIX B.

THERE has recently appeared a very important book, entitled The Spirit of Islam, by Sayyid Amir 'Ali, which constitutes in itself a sign of the way in which orthodox Islam is losing its hold on the minds of thoughtful Muslims who have come in contact with Western thought. The author professes (Preface) his hope that his book "may assist the Muslims of India to achieve their intellectual and moral regeneration,"