elief, and the four practical duties, of Islam, are
guarded by rewards and punishments; and the faith of the Mussulman
is devoutly fixed on the event of the judgment and the last day.
The prophet has not presumed to determine the moment of that awful
catastrophe, though he darkly announces the signs, both in heaven and
earth, which will precede the universal dissolution, when life shall
be destroyed, and the order of creation shall be confounded in the
primitive chaos. At the blast of the trumpet, new worlds will start into
being: angels, genii, and men will arise from the dead, and the human
soul will again be united to the body. The doctrine of the resurrection
was first entertained by the Egyptians; and their mummies were embalmed,
their pyramids were constructed, to preserve the ancient mansion of
the soul, during a period of three thousand years. But the attempt is
partial and unavailing; and it is with a more philosophic spirit
that Mahomet relies on the omnipotence of the Creator, whose word can
reanimate the breathless clay, and collect the innumerable atoms, that
no longer retain their form or substance. The intermediate state of
the soul it is hard to decide; and those who most firmly believe her
immaterial nature, are at a loss to understand how she can think or act
without the agency of the organs of sense.
The reunion of the soul and body will be followed by the final judgment
of mankind; and in his copy of the Magian picture, the prophet has too
faithfully represented the forms of proceeding, and even the slow
and successive operations, of an earthly tribunal. By his intolerant
adversaries he is upbraided for extending, even to themselves, the hope
of salvation, for asserting the blackest heresy, that every man who
believes in God, and accomplishes good works, may expect in the last day
a favorable sentence. Such rational indifference is ill adapted to the
character of a fanatic; nor is it probable that a messenger from heaven
should depreciate the value and necessity of his own revelation. In
the idiom of the Koran, the belief of God is inseparable from that of
Mahomet: the good works are those which he has enjoined, and the two
qualifications imply the profession of Islam, to which all nations and
all sects are equally invited. Their spiritual blindness, though excused
by ignorance and crowned with virtue, will be scourged with everlasting
torments; and the tears which Mahomet shed over the tomb of his m
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