adaptation to the spiritual wants of humble life, making even his
fearful fatalism administer thereto. A pitiless destiny is awaiting us;
yet the prophet is uncertain what it may be. "Unto every nation a fixed
time is decreed. Death will overtake us even in lofty towers, but God
only knoweth the place in which a man shall die," After many an
admonition of the resurrection and the judgment-day, many a promise of
Paradise and threat of hell, he plaintively confesses, "I do not know
what will be done with you or me hereafter."

[Sidenote: Its true nature.]

The Koran thus betrays a human, and not a very noble intellectual
origin. It does not, however, follow that its author was, as is so often
asserted, a mere impostor. He reiterates again and again, I am nothing
more than a public preacher. He defends, not always without acerbity,
his work from those who, even in his own life, stigmatized it as a
confused heap of dreams, or, what is worse, a forgery. He is not the
only man who has supposed himself to be the subject of supernatural and
divine communications, for this is a condition of disease to which any
one, by fasting and mental anxiety, may be reduced.

In what I have thus said respecting a work held by so many millions of
men as a revelation from God, I have endeavoured to speak with respect,
and yet with freedom, constantly bearing in mind how deeply to this book
Asia and Africa are indebted for daily guidance, how deeply Europe and
America for the light of science.

[Sidenote: Popular Mohammedanism.]

As might be expected, the doctrines of the Koran have received many
fictitious additions and sectarian interpretations in the course of
ages. In the popular superstition angels and genii largely figure. The
latter, being of a grosser fabric, eat, drink, propagate their kind, are
of two sorts, good and bad, and existed long before men, having occupied
the earth before Adam. Immediately after death, two greenish, livid
angels, Monkir and Nekkar, examine every corpse as to its faith in God
and Mohammed; but the soul, having been separated from the body by the
angel of death, enters upon an intermediate state, awaiting the
resurrection. There is, however, much diversity of opinion as to its
precise disposal before the judgment-day: some think that it hovers near
the grave; some, that it sinks into the well Zemzem; some, that it
retires into the trumpet of the Angel of the Resurrection; the
difficulty apparently being