by which theologians were tried and had their places assigned. It had a weighty part also in bringing about the fall of the Mu'tazilites. There had grown up very early in the Muslim community an unbounded reverence and awe in the presence of the Qur'an. In it God speaks, addressing His servant, the Prophet; the words, with few exceptions, are direct words of God. It is, therefore, easily intelligible that it came to be called the word of God (kalam Allah). But Muslim piety went further and held that it was uncreated and had existed from all eternity with God. Whatever proofs of this doctrine may have been brought forward later from the Qur'an itself, we can have no difficulty in recognizing that it is plainly derived from the Christian Logos and that the Greek Church, perhaps through John of Damascus, has again played a formative part. So, in correspondence with the heavenly and uncreated Logos in the bosom of the Father, there stands this uncreated and eternal Word of God; to the earthly manifestation in Jesus corresponds the Qur'an, the Word of God which we read and recite. The one is not the same as the other, but the idea to be gained from the expressions of the one is equivalent to the idea which we would gain from the other, if the veil of the flesh were removed from us and the spiritual world revealed.

That this view grew up very early among the Muslims is evident from the fact that it is opposed by Jahm ibn Safwan, who was killed toward the end of the Umayyad period. It seems to have originated by a kind of transfusion of idea's from

Christianity and not as a result of controversy or dialectic about the teachings of the Qur'an. We find the orthodox party vehemently opposing discussion on the subject, as indeed they did on all theological subjects. "Our fathers have told us; it is the faith received from the Companions;" was their argument from the earliest time we can trace. Malik ibn Anas used to cut off all discussions with "Bila kayfa" (Believe without asking how); and he held strongly that the Qur'an was uncreated. The same word kalam which we have found applied to the Word of God—both the eternal, uncreated Logos and its manifestation in the Qur'an—was used by them most confusingly for "disputation;" "he disputed" was takallam and "one who disputed" was mutakallim. All that was anathema to the pious, and it is amusing to see the origin of what became later the technical terms for scholastic theology and its students in their shuddering repulsion to all "talking about" the sacred mysteries.

This opposition appeared in two forms. First, they refused to go an inch beyond the statements in the Qur'an and tradition and to draw consequences, however near the surface these consequences might seem to lie. A story is told of al-Bukhari, (d. 257), late as he is, which shows how far this went and how long it lasted. An inquisition was got up against him out of envy by one of his fellow-teachers. The point of attack was the orthodoxy of his position on the lafz (utterance) of the Qur'an; was it created or uncreated? He said readily that the Qur'an was uncreated and was obstinately silent as to the utterance