What! a spurious faith, a false prophet, a counterfeit Messiah, the fulfilment of a promised blessing! Is this the mode in which God fulfils His promises? To discover a parallel between Christianity and this "spurious revelation," is the object of the whole book, and it is very ably dealt with by a succession of curious analogies in the prophetical anticipations,¹ morality, doctrine, ritual, scriptures, heresies, crusades, and civilisation of Mohammedanism, Judaism and Christianity. These analogies, prove nothing, because the foundation of the argument, as we have shown, is unsound; but they contain a vast fund of useful information, which will well repay the trouble of a perusal.

The nature of Forster's argument is such that upon approaching it, he is always led into confusion or inconsistency. Thus he acknowledges that the lesser blessing of Ishmael was "manifestly of a temporal nature"; yet he hence deduces that, "through the Gospel and the Coran, the promise to Abraham, continually advanced towards its fulfilment, in the posterity of his sons, until of these two brethren was the whole earth overspread"; we have here the temporal confused with a spiritual blessing. Again he says, "the one was the covenant of the spirit'; the other the covenant of the flesh .... the arm of flesh therefore was the natural and proper weapon for its enforcement." It is acknowledged to be "a covenant of the flesh," then why attempt to make it spiritual? Again, "the grand feature in the promise concerning Isaac was, that in his seed all the nations of the earth should be blessed"; and the responding feature in the parallel