, encouragement. To the Asiatic and to the
African, such devotional fragments are of far more use than any
sustained theological doctrine. The mental constitution of Mohammed
did not enable him to handle important philosophical questions with
the well-balanced ability of the great Greek and Indian writers; but
he has never been surpassed in 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."

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 endeavored 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.

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