without a father :" the prevalent belief of Mahometans understands the expression, as appropriated to our Lord, in a sense still nearer to the Catholic mystery. * 2. They own Jesus as the Messiah of the Jews, and make common cause with Christians, on this question, against them. t 3. They maintain, with the Catholic church, our Lord's incarnation of a pure virgin, by the immediate power or Spirit of God; + alleging him, further, to have been begotten after the similitude of Adam's creation, whom God called into being from the dust. § 4. His immaculate conception. || 5. His sole exemption, the blessed virgin only excepted, from the touch of Satan, or stain of Adam's transgression. 6. His office in heaven as mediator and intercessor between God and man.¶ 7. His place

* "One sect of them, particularly, believes that Christ is God, and the Redeemer of the world."- Worthington's Boyle's Lectures, vol. ii. p. 246. Conf. Pocock, Specim. p. 221.

"Rem ipsam si spectes, et controversiam que cum Judæis nobis intercedit, an Jesus Nazarenus sit verus Messias, diximus jam, in Thesaur. Philol. p. 163., Muhammedanos à Christianorum stare partibus.” — Hott. Hist. Orient. p. 105, 106.

So the Koran: "Mary, the daughter of Imran, who preserved her chastity, and into whose womb we breathed of our spirit."— Sale, vol. ii. p. 449. "Tu as créé Jésus de ton Esprit, et de ton Verbe." - Mahomet, ap. Gagnier, tome i. p. 242.

§ Sale's Koran, vol. i. p. 67. Mill, De M. A. M. p. 349. Hott. Hist. Orient. p. 104.

Hott. Hist. Orient. p. 94.

¶ Concorditer Arabes docent Christum in cœlo, seu vitâ eternâ, MEDIATORIS, SEU ¡KETOV, munere fungi. — Hott. ut supra, p. 105, 106.

and final supremacy, as the appointed Judge of all men, Mahomet himself included, at the last day.1

From the foregoing summary of its belief in Christ's character and office 2, the reader will perceive that the religion of Mahomet not only reproves the errors of Jewish infidelity, but rises vastly superior to the confession of certain classes of pretended Christians. By a special Mahometan law, the Jews, who altogether deny the character and office of Jesus Christ, and reject him as the promised Messiah, are compelled, first to confess their faith in Christ and Christianity, as the indispensable preliminary to their admission to the rank of Mussulmans. * Nor will orthodox Mahometans admit the affinity laid claim to by those sectaries of Christianity, the disciples of Socinus, or by the more modern Unitarians, who disown those characteristics of Jesus Christ, upon which they strenuously insist; his miraculous incarnation, his immaculate conception, and his exemption from all taint of human frailty, with his media

*« Si quis Judæus fieri vult Mahumetista, cogitur prius credere Christo: cui talis fit interrogatio: Credisne Christum fuisse flatu Dei ex Virgine natum; et ultimum prophetam Hebræorum? Quo concesso, fit Mahumetanus." – M. A. Vivaldus, ap. Reland. De Relig. Mohamm. Præfatio.

torial and intercessory agency in the eternal world.

The belief entertained respecting Christ's person, by some among the Mahometans, approaches yet more nearly to the Catholic doctrine one theological school in particular (the counterpart, seemingly, of the Arian,) asserts both his pre-existence, and his participation, in a certain mysterious sense, of the divine nature; while another has advanced its speculative creed to the verge of Catholicity, affirming the belief, "that the divine nature might be united with the human, in the same person," and admitting the possibility, "that God might appear in a human form." *

The fabulous puerilities of the Koran and its expositors, concerning the life and miracles of our Lord, rarely, if at all, of Mahometan invention, may be generally traced to the Apocryphal Gospels, and other spurious remains of Christian antiquity.

The doctrine of the resurrection, with its inseparable consequences, a general judgment, and a future state of reward or punishment, is the next prime fundamental to be considered,

* "The Holûlians believed, that the divine nature might be united with the human in the same person; for they granted it possible that God might appear in a human form.” Sale, Prelim. Discourse, p. 225.

as held in common by Christianity and Mahometanism, however in the latter system lowered and debased by a plentiful alloy of those Rabbinical figments, so congenial to the sensual habits and spirit of its founder. The Mahometan doctrine of the resurrection so far coincides with the Scriptural doctrine, that it comprehends the rising again of the body, and its final reunion with the soul. The mode of their reunion, a question which Saint Paul's masterly argument proves to have been early moved in the primitive church, has also largely exercised the metaphysical zeal and subtlety of the Mahometan doctors; whose theories of the resurrection are distinguished, by the usual incongruous admixture of Gospel truths, with Rabbinical hallucinations; Judaism still supplying what Christianity withholds. *

On the subject of this inexplicable mystery, however, an attempt to thread the maze of Mahometan speculation, would be foreign from the object proposed in these pages. It will be more in place, to call attention to the parallel, observable between Christianity and Mahometanism, in the facts which they agree in representing, as signs

See Mill, De Mohammedismo, ante Mohamm. p. 399. et sequent.

B B

of the resurrection. Among the occurrences so accounted by the Mahometan doctrine*, are to be found the following marked coincidences with the signs specified by our Lord, in the twenty-fourth chapter of Saint Matthew, whence they are obviously taken : tumults and seditions; the decay of faith among men; great wars of nations; a revolution in the course of the sun; an eclipse of the moon; the coming of Antichrist; and the descent of Jesus on earth. If to these manifest plagiarisms, be added some signs borrowed from other places of Scripture, such as, the appearance of the Beast; a general apostasy to idolatry; the persecution and final triumph and return of the Jews, - enough will be forthcoming, to indicate the kind of correspondence, on the subject of the resurrection, subsisting between the Christian and Mahometan doctrines: the latter being here, in accordance with the entire analogy of the spurious with the true revelation, the palpable copy and corruption of the former.

For the ridiculous fables interlarded with these fragments of Christian truth, Mahometanism is indebted to the Rabbinical writers; thus, in every deviation from Christianity, still

* See Sale, Prelim. Discourse, pp. 104-110.