in the capacity of judge and political controller. A treaty also was imposed on them, in which Mohammed claimed the right to all their land produce and even to their persons, whom he might use as slaves. But he magnanimously waived the full application of that right, and promised them protection for their life, land, property, and faith, under the following humiliating conditions. The Najranites had to pay an annual tribute consisting of 2000 hollas or suits of clothes, each of the value of one ounce of gold. They had to provide Mohammed's commissaries, sent to their country, with food and other necessaries for twenty days, free from all charge. In case of a war or encampment in Yemen, they were to furnish thirty suits of armour, thirty horses, and thirty camels. They were not allowed to lend money on interest; and if any Moslem took one of their daughters for a wife, he should have to pay to the family one half only of the usual compensation. Thus Mohammed made it patent to all that, in his eyes, Christianity was inferior to Islam, and that the relation between the Christians and the Mussulmans was to be that between subjects and their masters.¹

Though Mohammed loved to represent his new religion as nothing more than the ancient 'Faith of Abraham:' yet, as he also emphatically declared it to be the only one now desired and sanctioned by God, and to differ essentially from the faith of the then living Jews and Christians, he could not consistently wish to countenance Judaism and Christianity in any way, but had to oppose them both, and to seek to supplant the one as well as the other. When he speaks of the Law and the Gospel as Divine revelations, it is not with the view of recommending them to his people, but rather for the purpose of extolling his own Koran, as the last and complete edition of God's Book, of which they were only subservient precursors. Even if he claims for himself to be the subject of prophecies in the Old and New Testament, it is only to enhance his own prestige as a prophet and to draw Jews and Christians over to his side; and not to uphold the eternal validity of the Law and the Gospel, as marking essential

steps in the revelation of God's entire truth for the salvation of man.

In fact, it appears that Mohammed himself had not the faintest idea of the development and organic growth of Divine Revelation, from its elementary beginning in the days of Adam, till its perfect maturity in the Person of the God-man Christ Jesus. Else, how could he have supposed that the religion of Abraham, as such, could simply be brought back again, after thousands of years, to re-occupy the place which it had filled before, and to set aside the Law and the Gospel which meanwhile had formed God's way for man? All God's plans being marked with infinite wisdom and carried out with unerring consistency, no truly thoughtful man can regard it agreeable to the supreme wisdom and perfection of God, first to reveal the religion of Abraham, then to replace it for ever so long by the Law and the Gospel, and at last to send it back again by the Archangel Gabriel to a prophet in Arabia, thus, as it were, altering and correcting His previous measures.

When Mohammed hazarded the assertion in the Koran that the Law and the Gospel contained prophecies about his own coming (see Sura vii. 155-156 and lxi. 6; ii. 141), it was no doubt from a sense of the propriety, in which every thinking person must share, that, to be recognised as the last and greatest of all the prophets, and as the mediator of the final and perfect covenant, such prophecies ought really to have existed, as witnesses to his exalted character. In order to discover them, if possible, he must have been fain to avail himself of the renegade Jews and Christians who, having made his interests their own, would readily show him passages in the Scriptures which, taken out of their context and apart from their obvious import, might be misinterpreted as referring to his own person. But all honest Jews and Christians could not for a moment remain doubtful as to the utter baselessness and futility of such interpretation. For the former knew full well that the great Prophet and King, promised them in their Holy Books, must be an Israelite of the house of David, not a Koreishite Arab; and the latter found it unequivocally explained in the Gospel itself, that the coming Paraclete, instead of being the Arabian prophet,