ask further whether according to the Qur'an this spirit and word is created or uncreated. If he replies, as he is practically bound to reply, that he is created, he is to be met by the retort that before creating the word and spirit God must have had neither word (Logos) nor spirit; i.e. God must be ultimately unreasonable unintelligent Power. "Then", adds John, "he will flee from you, having nothing to answer, for people who hold such an opinion are regarded as heretical among the Saracens and altogether abominable."

Another question follows which shows the Moslem trying to raise difficulties about this position which he has been driven to admit: Are the words (logia) of God created or uncreated? He is evidently designing to drive the Christian to the position that if the Logos be uncreated and therefore divine, the words of God (in Scripture) must also be in the same position. This leads the Christian to a long explanation that the words of Scripture are not logoi but rhemata, and that the Scripture often uses words not in their strictly accurate sense but tropologically. Into that we need not go. But we may note that here we have a hint — perhaps a little more than a hint, but still interesting — of how the difficulty about the Logos was afterwards solved. In later times the Logos doctrine was applied to Muhammad himself by the mystic thinkers of Islam,¹ but at this early stage that was impossible. It was applied to the Qur'an. Thus we have in orthodox Islam the doctrine of the eternal uncreated Qur'an practically taking the place of

the eternal uncreated Word or Son of God. It is perhaps too much to say that it was these discussions with Christians which led to the adoption of that doctrine; for the Qur'an itself had paved the way for it. But they must have helped considerably towards the realisation of the necessity for it.

The only other argument which I shall notice is one which perhaps does not belong to John's own Dialogue but which is given by Theodore Abu Qurra as being derived from him. It is an argument which is still used by Moslems and amounts to this. The world before Moses was given up to idolatry. After his coming Judaism was the right religion. Christianity superseded it after the coming of Christ. Why then should not Muhammadanism be the true religion since the coming of Muhammad? To this the reply is not that reason must judge of the truth of a religion — the Christians of that time would as little have accepted that position as the Moslems — but that it is not enough that a man should claim to be a prophet and preach and teach a religion. His commission from God must be evidenced by signs and wonders and the miracles which he performs. Thus we see the Moslems being by way of these discussions brought up against the necessity for the mission of their prophet being evidenced by miracles, which we have already seen popular imagination supplying.

Apart from the interest of the separate arguments, however, there is in this Dialogue of John of Damascus a peculiar interest in that it gives us a glimpse into a process that must have gone