280 MOHAMMED A PARODY OF CHRIST. [BK. II.

(17.) After the commencement of their public ministry, both of them had to pass through the ordeal of a remarkable Satanic Temptation, which aimed at seducing them into a most important change of their mission, but without success.1

a. In Matt. iv. 1-11 we read concerning Jesus Christ that 'He was led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil,' and that He victoriously passed through the ordeal, without the least wavering in His resistance to the tempter, by meeting the first temptation with the word, 'It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God;' the second, with the declaration, 'It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God;' and the third, with the rebuke, 'Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.'

1 Let the reader be expressly reminded that this heading (as are also other similar ones) is not in the least intended to convey the notion as if there was a real parallelism between the two cases. The parallelism results only from the Mohammedan invention of a story in excuse of an unethical action of Mohammed. In Christ's case we stand before a real, though unsuccessful, Satanic temptation, to lead Him astray from the Messianic course marked out for Him; in Mohammed's case, before an unprincipled compromise which he formally accepted, and from which he afterwards cunningly tried to extricate himself, by throwing the whole blame on the devil, and by representing himself as merely the innocent sufferer of his unsuccessful temptation. Sir W. Muir expressly asserts the possibility of a true and real parallel between the two cases, by saying, in his Life of Mahomet, vol. ii. p. 95, 'If we admit that our Saviour was at the commencement of His mission the subject of a direct and special temptation by the Evil One, we may safely assume that a similar combat possibly was waged, though with far other results, in the case of Mahomet.' This assertion not only needs the apology from which he boldly dispenses himself; but it is so gravely objectionable that no apology could make amends for it. From a Christian standpoint it is altogether inadmissible. For it presupposes the belief that, as Jesus had the Divine mission to be the prophet of Israel, so Mohammed had equally a Divine mission to become the prophet of the Arabs; and that the Evil One naturally felt the same interest in spoiling the one and the other of these Divine missions.
Sir W. Muir, in several places of his work, speaks of Mohammed as if he had fairly begun to be a true prophet, a kind of Messiah for Arabia; and that this Divine purpose was only frustrated by the moral delinquencies to which he yielded. But if Christ was sent by God as the true prophet and only Saviour of all mankind (which Sir William undoubtedly believes), how can Mohammed, as the founder of a non-Christian and anti-Christian religion, by any possibility
CH. I. 17.] TEMPTED BY SATAN. 281

b. The Rawzat narrates Mohammed's notorious temptation and its result in the following manner: 'It is recorded that that Excellency's anxiety for the conversion of the Koreish to the faith was so great, that he desired the Most High might send a spirit to subdue the people's mind, and to incline their hearts to the Faith, and that he read to the polytheists revelations which from time to time came down from the One, in order that thus their hearts might be softened and themselves turned into Mussulmans. When the Sura "By the Star" (i.e. the 53d) came down, the Lord of the world went to the holy house of prayer and read that Sura in the assembly of the Koreish. In reading it out, he paused between the verses, to enable the people to take them in and remember them entirely. When he had reached the noble verse, "Do you see Lat, Ozza, and Manat, the third, besides?" then Satan found it possible to cause the stupefied ears of the polytheists to hear these words, "These

have likewise had a Divine mission from which it required a special Satanic temptation to turn him aside? Theoretical Monotheism is of itself not so certain a token of the presence of God's kingdom as to be intolerable to Satan. The Jews were strict monotheists, and yet they were so completely under the influence of the devil that Jesus could affirm, he was their father (John viii. 44). In fact, the devils themselves, as St. James teaches us (James ii. 19), are professed monotheists; but to no good, except to make them 'tremble.' Accordingly, Mohammed's iconoclastic advocacy of Monotheism cannot by any means be relied upon as a proof that even during the best period of his prophetic career, when some regard him as a true prophet, with a special Divine mission for the Arabs, he was anything but an instrument in the hand of the Powers of Darkness for raising up one of the most formidable obstacles to the coming of the Kingdom of God and the spreading of the Faith in Christ, as the Divine and only Saviour of man. The theological views, plainly underlying Sir W. Muir's valuable work on Mohammed, demand, if consistently carried to their logical conclusion, a rectification of the manner in which he has hitherto represented the outwardly purer period in the life of a fictitious prophet whose claims to replace Christ as a Divine Ambassador, from the very time they were first put forth, could not be anything but the outcome of deception. Not his immoralities constitute Mohammed a false prophet, but his claimed prophetship itself, his gratuitous assertion of a Divine mission to supersede Christ, as the last and greatest of all God's messengers. Therefore whatever appears to prove Mohammed a prophet, can, in the face of Christ, only prove him a false prophet. The kingdom of Darkness had obviously a far greater interest in upholding Mohammed's anti-Christian prophetship, than in demolishing it by an extraordinary Satanic temptation. The whole 'parallel,' discovered by Sir W. Muir, therefore reduces itself to this: that Christ's temptation was a fact and Mohammed's a fiction.