of those who before him had been accepted as God's messengers, and the message itself as confirming, and confirmed by, the previous revelations. There are passages in the Qur'an which lead one to conclude that he regarded Christianity as the reformation, if not the fulfilment of Judaism, for he speaks of Jesus as witnessing in the day of judgement against His own people because they did not accept Him.

But, however that may be, it is plain that he had no right conception of the true relation between Judaism and Christianity. Of Judaism he evidently knew more, and understood better what he did know. Of Christianity his knowledge was very elementary and crude, and he did not clearly understand what he had heard of the teachings of the younger faith. He appears to have come to the conclusion that Jesus tried to reform Judaism as he himself was now trying to reform Judaism and Christianity. He thus was ignorant of the real difference between the two, or else he simply shut his eyes to any great difference which he did not comprehend, and thus he easily passed over the differences between them, and seized what appeared to him to be the fundamental teachings of both; namely, that God the Maker of heaven and earth, is one; that mankind owes Him worship and obedience; and that the day will come when every one will have to give an account to Him of the deeds done in the body, whether they

be good or whether they be evil. He was so convinced of the necessity for affirming the great truth of the Unity of God, in opposition to the polytheism of the Arab tribes, that he practically omitted or passed by all else in these two religions, especially their common idea of the absolute necessity of an atonement.

The supreme place which he gave to the thought of God's Unity and his sole agency in the world drove him finally to the conclusion that this was the one article of faith in all previous revelations, and the only way in which he could attempt to maintain this in the face of the great divergences which all saw and recognized between Judaism and Christianity, was to assert that both had been corrupted from their original purity—that, in principle, they were one, and that this principle was, 'there is no god but God.' It was therefore necessary for him to deny the various tenets of Christianity which distinguished it from Judaism. To this end he denied that Jesus claimed to be more than a prophet; and asserted that He distinctly stated that He was but a man as other men. He denied that Jesus was in any sense the centre of Christianity, or that through Him man has access to God, and receives the forgiveness of sins. This of course forced him to deny the crucifixion and the resurrection.

It is thus easy to see how he came to distinguish Christianity as taught by Jesus, and Christianity