to the position they occupied was much contested, and separated the Shi'ahs and Sunnis at last into two opposite parties, mutually hating, cursing, and combating each other.¹ That these are serious evils and elements of weakness and decay in Islam from the beginning, and naturally resulting from the mixture of religion and politics in the Qur'anic system, must be evident to every thinking man. It is true that there have also been religious wars among several Christian nations, but these did not arise until centuries after Christ's ascension into heaven, when, in times of prevailing ignorance, the true faith, as taught in the gospel, was little understood and practised.

Another evil, springing from the same fruitful source of mischief, manifested itself particularly with regard to the non-Muslims. While the Christians are taught in the gospel to look with pity on unbelievers as unfortunate wanderers from the right way of God, who ought to be kindly invited to come to the one heavenly Father, by true repentance and a living faith in Jesus Christ whom He has sent to redeem them, the Muhammadans are directed by their religion to regard all non-Muhammadans, not only as infidels, but political enemies, whom they must try to convert and subjugate by force. Accordingly we read: 'Fight, then, against the unbelievers till strife be at an end,

and the religion be all of it God's' [Suratu'l-Anfal (viii) 40]; and again, in v. 66, 'O prophet, stir up the faithful to the fight. Twenty of you who stand firm shall vanquish two hundred: and if there be a hundred of you, they shall vanquish a thousand of the infidels, for they are a people devoid of understanding.' That the purport of these and similar passages in the Qur'an is really this, that the Muslims were to compel, by force of arms, to obedience to their prophet, when nations refused it, can be gathered from the summons sent by Muhammad, in the seventh year of the Hijra, to the sovereigns of the surrounding empires to submit to his authority, and the devastating wars by which the Muhammadans afterwards actually sought to enforce obedience to that summons, as well as from words spoken not long before His death, according to the statement of Waqidi's secretary: 'There shall not cease from the midst of my people a party engaged in wars for the truth, even until Antichrist appear.' These injunctions were not lost upon the Muslims. General history tells us how they strove to carry them out, and how many countries were in consequence deluged with the horrors and miseries of war, in the name of religion. Nor were the sufferings of a country over, when it had passed through the fires of a Muhammadan conquest. If the conquered people persevered in refusing to adopt a religion brought to them by a conquering army, instead of self-denying, loving