nded that a sensible
miracle is referred to (for I do not allow the secret visitations of
Gabriel, the night-journey of Mahomet to heaven, or the presence in
battle of invisible hosts of angels, to deserve the name of sensible
miracles) is the beginning of the fifty-fourth chapter. The words are
these:--"The hour of judgment approacheth, and the moon hath been split
in sunder: but if the unbelievers see a sign, they turn aside, saying,
This is a powerful charm." The Mahometan expositors disagree in their
interpretation of this passage; some explaining it to be mention of the
splitting of the moon as one of the future signs of the approach of the
day of judgment: others referring it to a miraculous appearance which
had then taken place. (Vide Sale, in loc.) It seems to me not improbable,
that Mahomet might have taken advantage of some extraordinary halo, or
other unusual appearance of the moon, which had happened about this
time; and which supplied a foundation both for this passage, and for the
story which in after times had been raised out of it.

After this more than silence, after these authentic confessions of the
Koran, we are not to be moved with miraculous stories related of Mahomet
by Abulfeda, who wrote his life about six hundred years after his death;
or which are found in the legend of Al-Jannabi, who came two hundred
years later.* On the contrary, from comparing what Mahomet himself wrote
and said with what was afterwards reported of him by his followers, the
plain and fair conclusion is, that when the religion was established by
conquest, then, and not till then, came out the stories of his miracles.

_________

* It does not, I think, appear, that these historians had any written
accounts to appeal to more ancient than the Sonnah; which was a
collection of traditions made by order of the Caliphs two hundred years
after Mahomet's death. Mahomet died A.D. 632; Al-Bochari, one of the six
doctors who compiled the Sonnah, was born A.D. 809; died 869. Prideaux's
Life of Mahomet, p. 192, ed. 7th.
_________

Now this difference alone constitutes, in my opinion, a bar to all
reasoning from one case to the other. The success of a religion founded
upon a miraculous history shows the credit which was given to the
history; and this credit, under the circumstances in which it was given,
i. e. by persons capable of knowing the truth, and interested to inquire
after it, is evidence of the reality of the history, and