THE KORAN. SELECTED FROM AN ARTICLE ON THE KORAN. HE Koran is the foundation | advances. The speaker throughout is God, either in the first person singular or more commonly the plural of majesty, "we." of Islam. It is the sacred book of more than a hundred millions of men, some of them nations of immemorial civilization, by all whom it is regarded as the immediate word of God. And since the use of the Koran in public worship, in schools and otherwise is much more extensive than, for example, the reading of the Bible in most Christian countries, it has been truly described as the most widely-read book in existence. This circumstance alone is sufficient to give it an urgent claim on our attention, whether it suit our taste and fall in with our religious and philosophical views or not. Besides, it is the work of Mohammed, and as such is fitted to afford a clue to the spiritual development of that most successful of all prophets and religious personalities. It must be owned that the first perusal leaves on a European an impression of chaotic confusion not that the book is so very extensive, for it is not quite so large as the New Testament. This impression can in some degree be modified only by the application of a critical analysis with the assistance of Arabic tradition. To the faith of the Moslems, as has been said, the Koran is the word of God, and such also is the claim which the book itself It is an explicit statement of the Koran that the sacred book was revealed ("sent down") by God-not all at once, but piecemeal and gradually, This is evident from the actual composition of the book, and is confirmed by Moslem tradition. That is to say, Mohammed issued his revelations in flyleaves of greater or less extent. A single piece of this kind was called either, like the entire collection, korán-i. e., "recitation or "reading "-or kitab, "writing," or súra, which is the late-Hebrew shūrā, and means literally "series." How these revelations actually arose in Mohammed's mind is a question which it is almost as idle to discuss as it would be to analyze the workings of the mind of a poet. In his early career-sometimes, perhaps, in its later stages also many revelations must have burst from him in uncontrollable excitement; so that he could not possibly regard them otherwise than as divine inspirations. We must bear in mind that he was no cold, systematic thinker, but an Oriental visionary brought up in crass superstition and without intellectual discipline-a man whose nervous temperament had been powerfully worked on by ascetic austerities, and who was all the more irritated by the opposition he encountered because he had little of the heroic in his nature. Filled with his religious ideas and |