consequences of the fall, and to prepare them for heaven. Jesus Himself laid the foundation of this kingdom while He was upon the earth. It formally commenced on the clay of Pentecost. And how did He describe its character? He declared it to be a kingdom of truth, and, as such, divine and inward. This we find stated both in the words that came from His own lips, and in the inspired words of His apostles. Consequently, neither Christ nor His apostles ever deposed any earthly king or ruler for refusing to believe the gospel. The New Testament rather commands all men to be obedient to civil magistrates, and even gave these commands at a time when the civil magistrates were not only unbelievers, but persecutors of the faith. Muhammad, on the contrary, at once assailed the governments that would not yield him implicit obedience, and occupied himself the first place both in the mosque and in civil and military councils; so that, from the commencement, Islamism appeared in the character not simply, of a religion, but of a worldly polity. While Jesus Christ distinguished between religion and the state, saying, on one occasion, 'Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's', Muhammad confounded religion and the state, arrogating to himself both the sacredness of a messenger of God and the power of Caesar. A superficial judge might perhaps say that the union of worldly power and religion in

Muhammadanism is a perfection, and the absolutely spiritual character of Christianity the reverse; but in reality the identification of religion and the state in the one system has proved a source of weakness and decay to both, while the distinction of Church and state in the other has turned out a fountain of strength, and a safeguard against decay; for the political aspect of Islam being calculated to attract the worldly-minded who cared more for power and earthly riches than for truth, holiness, and communion with God, it could not fail, as a religious institution, to be of a mixed and impure character from its very origin; whereas the purely spiritual nature of Christianity, its declaimer of earthly grandeur, its demand of entire self-dedication to God, and the long and bloody persecution it underwent, must have acted from the beginning as a check upon the worldly-minded, so that its first ages reflected in great measure the heavenly purity and elevation of its Founder, by the confession of enemies themselves. This glaring defect of Islam in identifying religion with worldly politics could not but manifest itself in a variety of ways, all of which show, that instead of being more adapted to the religious wants of mankind than Christianity, it is decidedly less so, and consequently not a higher but a lower form of religion. We have now to illustrate some of the evils resulting from the inseparable connexion just named.