the only decisive test, by which the real character of Mohammed can be correctly ascertained, and the oft-repeated question, whether Islam is a true or a false religion, authoritatively settled. Only if a critic is still doubtful in his own mind, as to whether Divine Revelation has reached its climax in the God-man Christ Jesus, and whether this Sun of the realm of mind is powerful enough to penetrate all human spheres and illuminate all mental paths, can he think of deciding the great question about Mohammed and Mohammedanism by any other standard. In any sphere it is only by the light of the higher stage that the lower can be fully understood. Only on the standpoint of the animal kingdom can we rightly estimate the vegetable and mineral kingdoms; and only rational man forms the key for the understanding of all the rest of terrestrial creation. So likewise in Christianity alone have we the right criterion by which to judge all other religions.

I. — Mohammedanism, by its historical hostility to Christianity, has proved itself a Weapon of the Kingdom of Darkness against the Kingdom of Light, thus taking rank, side by side, with anti-Christian Judaism and anti-Christian Paganism.

The sudden rise and rapid spread of Mohammedanism in the world has something enigmatical and startling for the student of history. When the historian has successfully sailed down the misty and difficult stream of remote antiquity, wafted onward by side winds from the right and the left, through rapid currents and intricate channels, till he has arrived at that grand epoch marked by the Second Adam, the God-man Saviour, towards which the whole ancient world tends as to its goal, — then he feels like a mariner who has reached a harbour of rest and safety, after a tedious and dangerous voyage. The Central Sun of Divine Revelation which has risen for him in the wonderful Person of the Prophet of Nazareth, now sheds its illuminating rays over all the apparently pathless regions, the wide expanse of highlands and plains, of cultured fields and arid deserts, through which he has been steering; and

relieves the darkness of their 'Why? and Wherefore?' by its radiant light. He has discovered a goal for the march of nations, a living centre for human history.

From under the Temple of God, 'broken down, and after three days raised up again' (John ii. 19-21), a stream issues forth (Ezek. xlvii. 1-12), destined to flow onwards to the ends of the earth, and to restore freshness and healthiness to all the national waters with which, in its course of universality, it comes in contact. This stream of Christian light and life is the motive power of all real progress and healthful development in the spiritual condition of the world.

As every other stream, this also had its small beginning, then widened its bed, and is still continuing its onward flow, till at last it will issue into the boundless ocean of eternity. From its narrow dimension at the source, where it was wholly spanned by personal individualities, it speedily spread to a congregational or ecclesiastical width, and after a flow of three centuries, had already acquired a full national breadth. The mightiest nationality then extant, the Roman, had itself been subjected by it to a process of permeation and absorption. Thus the wonderful stream had risen to fill with its swelling volume the entire channel of its course, up to the brink.

In such majestic fulness it rolled onward the renovating waters of its personal, ecclesiastical, and national influences, diffusing fertility right and left along its shores. Nothing else could apparently be expected than that it should uninterruptedly continue its mighty, though quiet, onflow, — till it had accomplished its circuit through the world, and enriched, with its bountiful blessings, all the nations of the earth.

But scarcely had Christianity been at work for three centuries longer, in the gigantic task of renovating and reforming the heathen character of the Roman empire, and Christianising the other nations within its reach, when suddenly we find a formidable bar drawn across its hitherto steady course of progress; and Islam is in arms, threatening not merely to stop its onward march, but to repress and crush it altogether. Thus Mohammedanism presents itself to the student of history as a surprise, an enigma, a crux. It