gment immediately follows. This is the dreadful day
for which all other days were made; and it will come with
blackness and consternation to unbelievers and evil doers, but
with peace and delight to the faithful. The total race of man will
be gathered in one place. Mohammed will first advance in front, to
the right hand, as intercessor for the professors of Islam. The
preceding prophets will appear with their followers. Gabriel will
hold suspended a balance so stupendous that one scale will cover
paradise, the other hell. "Hath the news of the overwhelming day
of judgment reached thee?"14 "Whoever hath wrought either good or
evil of the weight of an ant shall in that day behold the same."15
An infallible scrutiny shall search and weigh every man's deeds,
and exact justice shall be done, and no foreign help can avail any
one. "One soul shall not be able to obtain any thing in behalf of
another soul."16 "Every man of them on that day shall have
business enough of his own to employ his thoughts."17 In all the
Mohammedan representations of this great trial and of the
principles which determine its decisions, no reference is made to
the doctrine of predestination, but all turns on strict equity.
Reckoning a reception or rejection of the true faith as a crowning
merit or demerit, the only question is, Do his good works
outweigh, by so much as a hair, his evil works? If so, he goes to
the right; if not, he must take the left. The solitary trace of
fatalism or rather favoritism is this: that no idolater, once in
hell, can ever possibly be released, while no Islamite, however
wicked, can be damned eternally. The punishment of unbelievers is
everlasting, that of believers limited. The opposite of this
opinion is a great heresy with the generality of the Moslems. Some
say the judgment will require but the twinkling of an eye; others
that it will occupy fifty thousand years, during which time the
sun will be drawn from its sheath and burn insufferably, and the
wicked will stand looking up, their feet shod with shoes of fire,
and their skulls boiling like pots. At last,

11 Ch. lxxxiv.

12 Ch. lxxv.

13 Ch. xxxvii., lvi.

14 Koran, ch. lxxxviii.

15 Ibid. ch. xcix.

16 Ibid. ch. lxxxii.

17 Ibid. ch. lxxx.

when sentence has been passed on them, all souls are forced to try
the passage of al Sirat, a bridge thinner than a hair, sharper
than a razor, and hotter than flame, spanning in one frail arch
the immeasurable di