his countrymen were already feeling, likewise not without political aspirations. Accordingly he made his start as a Reformer of the prevailing religion. Retaining the national sanctuary, with its religious veneration of a black stone, he accepted from the Monotheistic religions the Faith in One God and the repudiation of idols. He borrowed, particularly from Jewish sources, much historic and religious information which, with other enactments, he sought to palm off on the people as direct revelations from heaven to himself, through the angel Gabriel. In this sinister enterprise he was materially aided by the hysterical, visionary constitution of his nature, an inheritance from weakly parents, and an open channel for impure and deceiving influences from the realm of Darkness. Once presenting himself to the people as a Prophet and religious Reformer, he had necessarily to talk much about God and religion. But it must not be forgotten that pious phraseology, which has deceived so many, is not by itself a proof of sincere spiritual piety, and that the language of Canaan has often been heard from the lips of Philistines.

That Mohammed was not a spiritually quickened or regenerate man, breathing the pure atmosphere of a 'worship in spirit and in truth,' must inevitably be gathered from his religion with its mechanical formalism of worship, its wearisome repetition of prayers, its conception of God as mainly the sovereign Lord and omnipotent Master,¹ and

with its perfunctory practice of dead works. The religion concocted by Mohammed is properly that of the unregenerate, natural man. It remains at an immeasurable distance behind the lofty spirituality of the Gospel and the loving communion with the 'Father in heaven' to which it shows the way. The word which Jesus addressed to the Jews becomes fully applicable here: 'Ye are from below, I am from above' (John viii. 23). Mohammed, from his low, earthly standing-point, could neither apprehend the unique excellence of the character of Christ, nor the real nature of His all-sufficient and all-comprehending salvation.

Not want of opportunity, but want of sympathy and compatibility, kept him aloof from the religion of Christ. His first wife introduced him to her Christian cousin; one of his later wives had embraced Christianity in Abyssinia; and the most favoured of his concubines was a Christian damsel from the Copts of Egypt. He was acquainted with ascetic monks, and had dealings with learned Bishops of the Orthodox Church. In those days the reading of the Holy Scriptures in the public services of the Catholic Church was already authoritatively enjoined and universally practised if he had wished thoroughly to acquaint himself with them he could easily have done so. But having no adequate conception of the nature of sin and man's fallen state, he also lacked the faculty of truly appreciating the remedy for it, which was offered in the Gospel.

Unable and unwilling to recognise in Christ the Saviour of man, and in Christianity the right way to God, Mohammed dared to set himself up against Christ, as the last and greatest of all God's Messengers, and to claim the right for his new religion of replacing Christianity. So it came to pass that Islamism, the only religion starting up in broad Christian daylight, and in the face of Christ, was essentially and from its birth not a sort of imperfect or half-Christianity, a younger brother and helpful ally, but a determined rival and implacable foe. The Koran is a book not merely different from the Gospel, but hostile and contradictory to it. It is notorious that it categorically denies the great truths upon which all Christianity reposes as its immovable foundation, to wit, the Divine nature and Sonship of