Tradition! The Biblical wonders resemble beautiful flowers of Paradise, springing up from a purely ethical ground, where the ever-faithful God of Love pities the need of His children, hears their prayers, and helps them. The Mohammedan marvels look like unreal phantoms of the air, produced for the purpose of ostentatious display, and result from an unethical trifling with the supernatural. The miraculous works of Jesus Christ were deliverances from death, disease, and distress, with the only exception of the withering of a fruitless fig-tree, as the symbol of the punishment awaiting a favoured nation in which God looks in vain for the fruits of repentance and righteousness. But even this one exception, how favourably does it compare, on the ground of reasonableness and chaste propriety, with the date-tree which is said to have been caused by Mohammed's prayer to grow forth from a camel's hump, and instantaneously to bear fruit of which a whole assembly of men could eat, the dates being exceeding sweet to the palates of believers, but becoming stones in the mouths of unbelievers! or with the other tree which, in obedience to a message sent by Mohammed, swayed from side to side, as is reported, in tearing up its roots, and walked to his Excellency, greeting him with the salutation, 'Peace be on thee, O thou Apostle of God!'

Surely the extravagant descriptions of Mohammed's supposed 'excellencies' and 'miracles,' by which Mussulman devotees have sought to sustain his pretension to the highest rank amongst God's ambassadors, can only lower him in the estimation of truth-loving men, whose sense of religious propriety and spiritual decorum is not vitiated; and invest him, to their view, with the character of prophetic charlatanism and religious monstrosity. Reading an account of Mohammed's fictitious virtues and fantastic miracles, after perusing the Scriptural record of God's true prophets and their wondrous works of faith, is like turning from a sunny walk through life-teeming nature to the unrealities of a phantasmagoria.

The author is fully conscious that this is strong language concerning a character which the many millions of Moslems throughout the world regard with religious reverence and

superstitious devotion; but he confidently anticipates that it will be fully justified and deliberately indorsed by all his Christian readers who pay due attention to the subject. It can hardly be otherwise than that every one, whose judicial faculties have matured under the influence of Christian truth, should at once discover a repulsive and truly blasphemous caricature of the Divine beauty of the Son of Man, if he carefully peruses the following pages in which Mussulman pens have so hyperbolically described, and so excessively coloured, the physiognomy of the author of Islam.

The image now about to be unrolled is not that of the historical Mohammed, as he actually lived in the flesh, an Arab amongst the Arabs, but that of a mythical Mohammed, as he was portrayed by the vivid imagination of his uncritical admirers, on the ground of outlines drawn by himself. Stories which had come into circulation about the Prophet, with his ready connivance, were embellished on their passage by his admirers. What was known of the lives of previous prophets was exaggerated to suit the conception of the chief and seal of all the prophets, such as Mohammed claimed to be, and was most unscrupulously applied to him. He had to unite in himself the excellencies and virtues of all former prophets, and something more. His biographers looked at his person through this magnifying mirror. It is mainly this unnaturally magnified, this unhistorical, and fictitious Mohammed, who sways the hearts of the Moslems and keeps them from recognising in Jesus Christ the true Saviour of man,' the Way, the Truth, and the Life,' in the full sense of the word. But this supernatural halo, this transcendent glory, with which he shines in the following pages, is not really his own. It is a borrowed lustre, just as the moonshine of the night is merely a dim reflection from the king of day. As the moon unconsciously bears witness to the glory of the sun, so also the so-called 'Light of Mohammed' involuntarily testifies to the primeval glory of Him who said, 'I am the Light of the world' (John ix. 5).