"And they who believe not, shall have garments of fire fitted unto them: boiling water shall be poured on their heads; their bowels shall be dissolved thereby, and also their skins; and they shall be beaten with maces of iron. So often as they shall endeavour to get out of hell, they shall be dragged back into the same; and their tormentor shall say unto them, Taste ye the pain of burning!" Sale's Koran, ch. xxii. p. 169.

"We have prepared for him who shall reject the belief of the hour of judgment, burning fire: when it shall see them from a distant place, they shall hear it furiously raging and roaring!" Ch. xxv. p. 202.

The kind of roar which should thus issue from the flames of the bottomless pit, might have been a question likely enough to arise among the Mahometan commentators. But Mahomet has not left it to the decision of these expositors; chusing rather to dispose of it himself in a sub"And for those who believe sequent chapter:not in their Lord, is also prepared the torment of hell; an ill journey shall it be thither. When they shall be thrown thereinto, they shall hear it bray like an ass; and it shall boil and almost burst for fury!!!" Ch. lvii. p. 450.

Indeed few of these descriptions are simply terrible in many of them, on the contrary, there is a strange, and even a ludicrous mixture, of the terrible and the grotesque. For example:

"Whoever shall withdraw from the admonition of the Merciful, we will chain a devil unto him; and he shall be his inseparable companion; until, when he shall appear before us at the last day, he shall say unto the devil, Would that between me and thee there was the distance of the east from the west! O how wretched a companion art thou!" Ch. xliii. p. 358.

"It shall be said unto them, Go ye to the punishment which ye denied as a falsehood: go ye into the shadow of the smoke of hell, which shall ascend in three columns, and shall not shade you from the heat, neither shall it be of service against the flame: but it shall cast forth sparks as big as towers, resembling yellow camels in colour." Ch. lxxvii. p. 477.

But the terrors of the flame, which was to bray like an ass, and to look like a camel, must yield the palm to the descriptions of the tree Al Zakkum, and of the other nutriments, which are to constitute the regimen of the unbelievers, in a future state :

"The tree of Al Zakkum is a tree which issueth from the bottom of hell: the fruit thereof resembleth the heads of devils; and the damned shall eat of the same, and shall fill their bellies therewith; and there shall be given them thereon, a mixture of filthy and boiling water to drink: afterwards shall they return into hell." Ch. xxxvii. pp. 310, 311.

66 Verily the fruit of the tree Al Zakkum shall be the food of the impious: as the dregs of oil shall it boil in the bellies of the damned; like the boiling of the hottest

water. And it shall be said to the tormentors, Take him, and drag him into the midst of hell; and pour on his head the torture of boiling water, saying, Taste this !" Ch. xliv. p. 366.

"Then ye, O men, who have erred, and denied the resurrection as a falsehood, shall surely eat of the fruit of the tree of Al Zakkum, and shall fill your bellies therewith: and ye shall drink thereon, boiling water; and ye shall drink, as a thirsty camel drinketh.* This shall be their entertainment on the day of judgment !" Ch. lvi. p. 415.

If these specimens fail to silence and put to shame the sceptical admirers and apologists of Mahomet and his Koran, assuredly no evidence will content them: the spirit which could lead men deliberately to peruse passages like these, and then deliberately to set up Mahometanism against the Gospel revelation, must have other grounds for its enmity to Christianity, than the dictates of reason, or of good taste. Did moral delicacy, however, permit, examples still more horrible and loathsome are not wanting, wherewith to expose as they deserve, the insidious panegyrics of modern infidelity. With such examples, from respect alike to his readers and to himself, the author must decline to stain these pages,

From this revolting sample of the language and spirit of the Koran, wherever it affects ori

* See note ante, p. 79.

ginality, wherever it deserts for a moment the beaten path of scriptural plagiarism and imitation, we may next turn, for a similar result, to specimens of a somewhat different class to passages of the Koran, in which the language of Scripture is not copied, but parodied; is not imitated, but caricatured: in which the sublime figures, and matchless imagery, of the Old and New Testaments are introduced only to be degraded, by being applied, not in a spiritual, but in their literal acceptation.

Who, for example, can read without emotion that awful and affecting passage of the Apostle : "Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you! Your riches are corrupted; and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered ; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days!"* But how is this sublime imagery travestied in the Koran? The forced and frigid parody needs not a word of comment; and shall be left to speak for itself:-" But unto those who treasure up gold and silver, and employ it not for the

* St. James, v. 1—3. For a commentary on this passage, see "Sacred iterature," pp. 257-268.

advancement of God's true religion, denounce a grievous punishment. On the day of judgment, their treasures shall be intensely heated, in the fire of hell; and their foreheads, and their sides, and their backs, shall be stigmatized therewith. And their tormentors shall say, This is what ye have treasured up for your souls; taste, therefore, that which ye have treasured up!" Ch. ix. p. 244.

Again what more admirable vehicle for the powerful reasonings of Saint Paul, than the figurative language in the twelfth chapter of his first epistle to the Corinthians? where the Apostle illustrates the mutual relations and dependencies. of the members of Christ's church, from the mutual relations and dependencies subsisting between the several parts or members of the same body. In this fine context, we have the human limbs personified; and introduced, in the way of figure, as addressing one another: "If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body? And if the ear shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body? And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you." What the great Apostle of the Gentiles