do these sources prove? To argue that he was a prophet divinely inspired and thus was in a position to make this distinction, is beside the mark. For the question is one of historical fact, and no amount of inspiration can change an historical fact. And we must again remind our Muhammadan friends that the scriptures, to which Muhammad appealed as true, exist to-day in the same form in which they existed in his day. This is an historical fact which cannot be gainsaid; and the statement of a man on a question of fact such as this before us, whether that statement be inspired or uninspired, must be capable of historical proof or disproof, when we have historical documents on which to base our investigation. And in this case these historical documents exist.

It is not difficult to see how Muhammad came to say what he did, and to take up the position towards Christianity which characterizes him and his religion; but that is not the same thing as to say that he had good reasons for taking this attitude towards Christianity, or for making the statements which he did with regard to it. He presented himself to the people of Arabia as a prophet of God, about 600 years after the time of Jesus, and though the Arabs were for the most part very ignorant, yet many of them must have been fairly familiar with the fact of the existence of Christianity, seeing that throughout

Arabia Christians, and in some parts of it, considerable bodies of Christians, were to be found. To a greater extent they had come in contact with Judaism, and it is probable that they had a better idea of what Judaism stood for than they had of what was meant by Christianity. All through his career Muhammad proclaimed the fact, and insisted on it most strongly, that he was simply calling men to the true faith which had been presented to Jews, Christians, and Arabs alike. It was on the foundations of these previous revelations that he sought to build up his system, and it was from the history of the Jews that he derived most of his illustrations of the way in which God dealt in past ages with mankind. He acknowledged that the sacred books of the Jews and the Christians were divinely inspired, and he appeals to these books as affording proof that what he was mainly preaching—the Unity of God—was no new idea evolved out of his own consciousness, or the result of his own philosophical theorizings, but was something which God had Himself revealed to mankind. He did not ask his contemporaries to accept him and the Qur'an, wherein he professed to bring them a revelation from God, on his simple statement of fact that he was a prophet, and that the Qur'an was the word of God. He based his appeal on the ground that what he taught was in accordance with the teaching