wear a veil in public, and never to expose themselves unveiled except to near male relations, slaves, or women (K., p. 569.—Sura xxxiii. 51, 53, 55).
Texts like these exhibit the degeneracy of the prophet's character in his later days. He wanted the stimulus of adversity to keep him pure. But he had done his work, and that work was on the whole a good one. Not indeed that there was anything very original or striking in the doctrines he announced. The Koran rings the changes on the unity of God, his power, his mercy, and his other well-known qualities; on the resurrection, with its delights for the faithful and its terrible judgments for the wicked; and on the vast importance of belief in the prophet and submission to his decrees. But this religion, though containing no elements that did not already exist in its two parents, Judaism and Christianity, was an improvement on the promiscuous idolatry which it superseded. It was less sensual and more abstract; and its moral tone was higher. Greater still than the improvement in the creed of the Arabs was the improvement in their material status. Unity of faith brought with it unity of action. From a number of scattered, independent, and often hostile tribes, the Arabs became a powerful and conquering nation. Other peoples were in course of time converted, and the religion of Mahomet was in the succeeding centuries carried in triumph over vast districts where the name of Christ had hitherto reigned supreme. Districts of heathen Africa have also accepted it. Were the prophet able to speak to us now, he would be entitled to say that the manifest blessing of Allah had rested upon the work he had begun in obscurity and persisted in through persecution; and that the partiality of heaven was evident from the fact that Christianity had never succeeded- and had no prospect of succeeding, in regaining the vast territory in Europe and in Africa from which Islam has expelled it.
Section VI.—Jesus Christ.
When we endeavor to write the life of Jesus Christ, the greatest of the prophets, we are beset by peculiar difficulties arising from the nature of the materials. While in the case of the Buddha we receive from authorities a life which, though
