contented himself in religion with a mere formal worship and an external relation to God, like that between slave and master, ignoring altogether the indispensable regeneration by the Holy Spirit, he fell into the same snare as Zeid. Like him he stubbornly adhered to Hanifism, as distinct from Christianity, Paganism, and Judaism, and thus occupied a religious position which necessarily bore not only an anti-Polytheistic and anti-Judaistic, but also an anti-Christian character. It is on account of this unsatisfactory ethical condition of Mohammed personally, and as its unmistakable reflex, that the Islam which he afterwards instituted was essentially and from the first not merely opposed to Polytheism, but also to Christianity. Even the marked Jewish colouring which for a brief term he gave it in Medina, was not genuine, but the result of shrewd political calculation, and consequently was at once discarded when he saw the latter fail.

Accordingly, the most momentous and fatal turning-point in Mohammed's ethical history is to be looked for not within his prophetic period, but some considerable time before it. Then already he was placed in the critical balance and found wanting. What followed upon this was only the natural outcome of his first momentous lapse. At the time when the more enlightened Hanifites quitted their intermedial position of Deism and consistently advanced to the goal of Christian Theism, to which it naturally tends and for which it is a mere preparation, Mohammed, with his religious guide Zeid, obstinately held back, and treated the preparatory and temporary as the perfect and the final. This was the fatal step; the moral and religious lapse which led to all the subsequent vagaries and errors. Both these men were then acting as the Jews also had acted, when invited by their Messiah to the sublime consummation for which their whole past history had been merely a preparation. The Jews shut their ears to Christ's voice, and instead of allowing their ancient religion, on which they so greatly prided themselves, to issue into 'the new and living way,' degraded it into a dead formalism.

It would have been as possible for Mohammed to follow the wisest of his Hanifite friends into the daylight of

Christianity, as obstinately to wrap himself up in the dim twilight of a perverted Hanifism. But by refusing to be led on to Christ, the Saviour of man, he culpably closed his eyes to 'the Light of the world,' and turned the Hanifite twilight, by means of which he might have found the right way, into the dense darkness of night. He had heard the Gospel invitation: 'Come unto Me;' and this could not but produce a crisis in his inner life. The gates of darkness and of light, of death and of life, stood open before him. It was for him to choose which of them to enter. Unhappily he allowed the crisis to pass away without coming to the light, that he might have life; and preferred to take his stand and his portion with those whose conduct on one occasion was thus censured by the mouth of truth, 'But ye would not' (Matt. xxiii. 37). We see, therefore, that Mohammed's position with respect to Christianity was fully decided in principle, years before he presented himself as a prophet. The fatal decision happened when he practically rejected its claims to sufficiency, finality, and universality, by his stubborn clinging to Hanifism.

Such appears to have been the spiritual and ethical condition of Mohammed's own person, when the notorious physico-psychical phenomena of his disordered health led to his posing himself as the prophet of a religion whose historical basis and personal substratum we have now sufficiently brought to light. The fuel is prepared and laid ready. Only the igniting spark is required to kindle the whole and set the sinister fire ablaze. This spark proceeded from the darkness of the inner and unseen world, like the flash of lightning from a black cloud.

A new religion, pretending to possess a better title than Judaism and Christianity for replacing the prevalent and time-honoured Idol-worship of Arabia, had, at the very least, to claim for itself an origin in Divine revelation; and for its Prophet a special call and heaven-imparted mission, similar to that of Moses at the burning bush and to that of Jesus, whose coming had been announced by the angel Gabriel. Mohammed's visionary predisposition and unsound state of health furnished the ready means needed for the occasion. All his ancient biographers agree in ascribing to him symp-