BIBLE.

Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

The merciful doeth good to his own soul; but he that is cruel, troubleth his own flesh.

Not rendering evil for eyil, but contrariwise, blessing.

Call ye on the name of your gods, and I will call on the name of the Lord. And they cried aloud. And it came to pass that there was neither voice nor any to answer.

All that are in the graves shall bear his voice, and shall come forth. All nations shall be gathered before him.

But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day,

Go to, now, ye that say, To-day or to-morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year; and buy and sell and get gain: Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live and do this or that.

But of that day and that hour knoweth no man; no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.

KORAN.

Out of the ground have we created you, and to the same will we cause you to return.

If ye do well, ye will do well to your own souls; and if ye do evil, ye will do it unto the same.

Turn aside evil with that which is better.

And it shall be said unto the idolaters, call now upon those whom ye have associated with God: and they shall call upon them but they shall not answer.

And the trumpet shall be sounded again, and behold they shall comè forth from their graves, and shall hasten unto the Lord.

But God will not fail to perform what he hath threatened and rerily one day with the Lord is as a thousand years of those which ye compute.

Say not of any matter, I will surely do this to-morrow; unless thou add, If God please.

They will ask thee concerning the last hour; at what time its coming is fixed? Answer, Verily, the knowledge thereof is with my Lord; none shall declare the fixed time thereof except he.

From the foregoing examples it will appear manifest, that the plagiarisms of the Koran are not limited to the leading facts and narratives of the Bible, but extend to many of its minuter peculiarities; to its modes of thought, its figures of speech, and even to its very forms of expression. Yet, in several instances, we meet with such egregious blunders, as to plain matters of fact, stated in the sacred volume, as must convict the copyist of the most arrant ignorance, or of downright falsification. Thus he makes the prophet Elijah (Al Kedr) contemporary with

Moses, Ishmael to have been offered in sacrifice instead of Isaac, Saul to have led the ten thousand down to the river's brink instead of Gideon, and, by the most monstrous anachronism represents Mary, the mother of Jesus, to have been the same person with Miriam, the sister of Moses!

The palpable obligations of this spurious revelation to Holy Writ, and the real or supposed incompetence of its nominal fabricator, have very naturally given birth to inquiries into the history of its composition. The great mass of writers on Mohammedanism, following the opinion of the Eastern Christians, have generally agreed in supposing that in the construction of the Koran, the Prophet was indebted to the assistance of one or more accomplices. It is certain, from the pages of the work itself, that this was objected to him at the outset of his career. "We also know that they say, Verily a certain man teacheth him to compose the Koran." "And the unbelievers say, This Koran is no other than a forgery, which he hath contrived: and other people have assisted him therein: but they utter an unjust thing and a falsehood." But this emphatic disclaimer of the Apostle has failed to produce conviction. The unbelievers of Christendom have continued to side with those of Mecca, and as many as eight or ten different persons have been designated as having been, some one or more of them, associated with the impostor in the promulgation of his counterfeit oracles. The more general belief has been, that Mohammed received his principal aid from a Nestorian monk, named Sergius, supposed to be the same person as the Boheira, with whom he became acquainted at an early period of his life, at Bosra, in Syria. On this, the learned Sale remarks: "If Boheira and Sergius were the same men, I find not the least intimation in the Mohammedan writers, that he ever quitted his monastery to go into Arabia, and his acquaintance with Mohammed at Bosra was

too early to favour the surmise of his assisting him in the Koran, though Mohammed might, from his discourse, gain some knowledge of Christianity and the Scriptures, which might be of some use to him therein." The same writer, however, admits with Prideaux and others, that while Mohammed is to be considered as the original projector and the real author of the Koran, he may have been assisted, in some measure, by others, though his successful precautions of secrecy make it impossible to determine, at this day, by what agents, or to what extent, this was done. After all, the assertions advanced in respect to the part borne by others in the composition of the Koran have never been authenticated by proofs, and the whole story has the air of an hypothesis framed to meet the difficulties of the case. And even were the popular belief on this question to be admitted, it would not do away all the difficulties which embarrass the subject. For who was capable, in that dark period, of producing such a work? This pretended revelation, independently of its plagiarisms from our Scriptures, contains passages as much superior to any remains, whether Jewish or Christian, of the literature of the seventh century, as they are utterly inferior to the contents of that sacred volume which the Koran blasphemously assumes to resemble and supplant. The whole subject, therefore, of the origin of this remarkable book, with the history of its composition, as well as the question how far Mohammed was acquainted with the Christian Scriptures, must doubtless remain an unsolved problem to the end of time.

Of the literary merits of the Koran, a fair estimate is not easily to be formed from a translation. By those who are acquainted with the original, it is universally acknowledged to possess distinguished excellences, which cannot be transfused into any other language. It is confessedly the standard of the Arabic tongue; is written, for the most part, in

a pure and elegant style, abounding with bold figures after the oriental manner; and aiming at a conciseness which often renders it obscure. Though written in prose, the sentences usually conclude in a long continued rhyme, for the sake of which, the sense is often interrupted, and unnecessary repetitions introduced. This feature of the composition, though a disadvantage and a deformity to a translation, is one of its superlative charms in the estimate of the native Arabs, whose ear is singularly susceptible to the harmony of the rhythmical cadences with which the periods conclude.

When we pass from the mere sound and diction which mark “the perspicuous book," it is indubitable that its finest passages are devoid of the merit of originality. Sir William Jones remarks; "The Koran indeed shines with a borrowed light, since most of its beauties are taken from our Scriptures; but it has great beauties, and the Mussulmans will not be convinced that they are borrowed." In describing the majesty and the attributes of God, and the variety and grandeur of the creation, it often rises to an impressive elevation; but in almost every instance of this kind, it is evident that some passage of inspiration of corresponding import was in the eye of the writer, and the copy is invariably inferior to the original. Yet the result of a candid examination of this pseudo-bible of Mohammedans, even in our English version, would probably be a more favourable impression of the book on the score of its composition, and a conviction that amid the multitude and heinousness of its defects, scarcely common justice had been done by Christian writers either to the character of its beauties, or the extent in which they obtain. Taken however as a whole, so far from supporting its arrogant claims to a superhuman origin and eloquence, it sinks below the level of many confessedly human productions, to be found in different languages and regions of the earth.