fear of the Divine wrath in Muhammad's own mind; lxxiv. vv. 1-7:

O thou clothed in the dithār
Rise and warn,
Magnify thy Lord,
Cleanse thy garments,
Flee the Abomination (or the Wrath),
Bestow not favours in hope of gain,
And wait patiently for thy Lord.

That has always been taken as an exhortation to the Prophet himself. The word mudaththar is of uncertain meaning, but the most probable sense is, "one clothed in the dithār", some special garment worn by a worshipper. Were there any other evidence of such a thing one would be tempted to see in the passage a kind of rule of life for a monkish company of worshippers. But in any case the passage is a programme for himself at least, and has nothing to do with denunciation of the Quraish. "Warning" is already part of his duty. More interesting still is the word usually translated "the Abomination". The exact word, rugz, does not occur again in the Qur'an. But the related word rigz occurs some eight or nine times, always with the sense of punishment or calamity. Rugz is therefore explained by the Moslem commentators as "conduct which leads to calamity or punishment" and hence "idolatry". But that is evidently a guess at the meaning of a word which in its actual form was not familiar to them. Now in Syriac we find the word rugza meaning "wrath". It is the word used in the Syriac of Matthew iii. 7,

in translating the phrase "the wrath to come". That gives us at once the sense of the verse in the Qur'an passage. Rugz was evidently one of those Aramaic Christian words which Muhammad either adopted or found ready to his hand. The motive of "fleeing from the wrath to come" thus appears in this early passage as a sincerely personal one.

In fact, the notion of a Judgement of some kind, either in this life or in a life to come, is almost necessarily involved in the moral consciousness. In one at Muhammad's stage of culture the moral requirements of God's service could hardly have been recognised except as accompanied by the sanction of rewards and punishments. The idea of a Judgement of God upon man's life must in some form or other have been in his mind from the very start. It is one of his most fundamental convictions repeated again and again in the course of the Qur'an that "the world has not been made in sport", and that therefore it counts, and counts infinitely, whether or not man's actions are in accord with the Creator's will. If we read the Qur'an at all sympathetically we cannot but feel the trembling fear of the wrath of God that lay upon the heart of the man who composed it, whether implanted there by some influence of Christian Monasticism we cannot say. It is specially perceptible in the early portions, delivered before the assurance of God's favour towards himself had grown so strong as it was in his Medinan days. Tradition, for what it is worth, confirms this impression of the fear of God's wrath that dwelt constantly in the