d
earth, which will precede the universal dissolution, when life shall
be destroyed, and the order of creation shall be confounded in the
primitive chaos. At the blast of the trumpet, new worlds will start into
being: angels, genii, and men will arise from the dead, and the human
soul will again be united to the body. The doctrine of the resurrection
was first entertained by the Egyptians; [106] and their mummies were
embalmed, their pyramids were constructed, to preserve the ancient
mansion of the soul, during a period of three thousand years. But the
attempt is partial and unavailing; and it is with a more philosophic
spirit that Mahomet relies on the omnipotence of the Creator, whose word
can reanimate the breathless clay, and collect the innumerable atoms,
that no longer retain their form or substance. [107] The intermediate
state of the soul it is hard to decide; and those who most firmly
believe her immaterial nature, are at a loss to understand how she can
think or act without the agency of the organs of sense.

[Footnote 106: See Herodotus (l. ii. c. 123) and our learned countryman
Sir John Marsham, (Canon. Chronicus, p. 46.) The same writer (p.
254-274) is an elaborate sketch of the infernal regions, as they were
painted by the fancy of the Egyptians and Greeks, of the poets and
philosophers of antiquity.]

[Footnote 107: The Koran (c. 2, p. 259, &c.; of Sale, p. 32; of Maracci,
p. 97) relates an ingenious miracle, which satisfied the curiosity, and
confirmed the faith, of Abraham.]

The reunion of the soul and body will be followed by the final judgment
of mankind; and in his copy of the Magian picture, the prophet has too
faithfully represented the forms of proceeding, and even the slow
and successive operations, of an earthly tribunal. By his intolerant
adversaries he is upbraided for extending, even to themselves, the hope
of salvation, for asserting the blackest heresy, that every man who
believes in God, and accomplishes good works, may expect in the last day
a favorable sentence. Such rational indifference is ill adapted to the
character of a fanatic; nor is it probable that a messenger from heaven
should depreciate the value and necessity of his own revelation. In the
idiom of the Koran, [108] the belief of God is inseparable from that
of Mahomet: the good works are those which he has enjoined, and the two
qualifications imply the profession of Islam, to which all nations and
all sects are equally in