o faith; and similarly he does not pose as a foreteller,
but as an organ of the divine will for the present. As the ruler of a
theocracy, the leader of armies, the judge in many a civil case, the
guardian of the manners of the people, the officiating minister in
public worship, and, let it also be mentioned, the head of a very
peculiar domestic establishment, he has a hundred matters of
immediate concern to attend to; and when he has formed his decision
on any of these matters, it takes its place in the Koran. The book
thus produced is far from being an attractive one; even in the
translation of Professor Palmer[5] it can afford pleasure to no
reader. The translation, it is true, loses the poetry and music of
the original, which are highly spoken of; but the main obstacle to
reading the Koran is its want of arrangement. The earliest suras
(chapters; literally courses of bricks) stand mostly towards the end
of the collection; the long ones in the beginning and middle are
later, and many of them are composite: two or several chapters have
been joined into one. When read in their historical order, the suras
can be read with pleasure by the student as showing the growth of the
prophet's ideas and of his cause. The earliest ones are short,
poetical, and intense. These are the suras which threw the prophet
into such excitement and distress that his hair turned white. They
are full of the wonders of God in nature and in history, of fiery
denunciation of idolatry, and of fearful threatenings. In later
pieces we come to long legends taken chiefly from the Jewish Haggadah
and the Christian Apocrypha, in which the prophet displays much
ignorance of the commonest facts of the Bible history; and as his
power increases and his functions multiply, we come to the
miscellaneous matters spoken of above. The style, at first poetic and
exalted, becomes afterwards prosaic and diffuse; it is not the
inspired seer who speaks, but the statesman or the judge; and the
placing of these later utterances in the mouth of God could not
deceive the original hearers. The Koran, like the Vedas and the
Gathas and the Jewish Scriptures, was exalted in later stages of the
religion to the highest conceivable honours; and one of the greatest
controversies of Islam raged round the question whether it had
existed from eternity and was uncreated.

[Footnote 5: _Sacred Books of the East_, vols. vi. and xi.]

Islam a Universal Religion.--What is most remarkable