sway, and that there will be suffering there until guilt shall be purged away and ransomed man shall find his eternal happiness in the love and service of his God.

There remains, indeed, for the individual soul the possibility of a will irresistibly opposed to the divine will, and inaccessible to the reformatory discipline of the world to come; and if there be such souls, I cannot doubt that the mercy which fails to overcome their obduracy suffers them to fall out of being. Yet as regards the finite spirit, it is hardly conceivable that there should be less than omnipotence in infinite and everlasting love, in conflict with the determinedly stubborn will.

Andrew P. Peabody.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

GEHENNEM: THE CONCEPTION OF FUTURE RETRIBUTIONS AcCORDING TO THE MOHAMMEDAN THEOLOGY.

Free Range of Arabian Imagination in Depicting the Agonies of Hell, or "Gehennem." -In this respect, Islam is the most Uncompromising Religion in the World.— A Death-in-Life of Perpetual Torture.-It is Purely Physical, not Mental, in its Hideous Nature and Demoniacal Brutality.-Questions and Answers at the Soul's Trial by the Black Angels.-The Bed of Fire, the Hot Blasts, the Iron Clubs, and the Crawling Serpents.-At the "Last Day," the "Blast of Consternation" is Sounded and the whole Universe Shattered.-After Forty Years, the "Last Trump" Sounds, and all the Dead Arise and Stand for Many Years Naked before God.The Wicked, their Brains Boiling like a Pot, Breathless, Suffocated, Maddened. -Hell in Near View.-The Fearful Bridge "Sirat," Finer than a Hair and Sharper than a Sword.-Gabriel himself, with Mighty Scales, Weighs the Deeds of All.— The Angels ask, "Art Thou Full?" and Hell answers, "Are there More?"—The Burnings of the Wicked Cease Not and Destroy Not.-They Burn into Coal, and God Revives them for Fresh Torments.-Their Food, their Drink, and their Companions.-Literal Truth of the Koran Maintained by all Scholars, Jurists, Philosophers, and Authorities of Islam.-The Torments thus awaiting all who Deny that Faith will be Eternal.

STANLEY LANE-POOLE, Member of the Asiatic Society, Author of Picturesque Egypt,
History of the Moors in Spain, and other works.

Of all religions in the world Islam is the most uncompromising in its conception of hell. Once having announced the doctrine of eternal punishment for unbelief, Mohammed allowed his Arab imagination to run riot in devising the torments of the damned. He had no merciful Purgatory for the infidel: he preached a death-inlife of perpetual torture, and he set before the unbeliever a scene of misery as appalling as he could conceive. The conception is crude and barbarous enough; the torments are brutal, and bear no relation whatever to the sinner's faults; they are just such pains as the Prophet's hearsay acquaintance with Jewish and Magian traditions,

added to his native Arabian ideas of wretchedness, would suggest. The whole picture is horribly, coarsely realistic, and wanting in all the delicacy of ingenious torture; and if the Mohammedan Paradise is a blot upon the moral teaching of Islam, its Hell can no less be regarded as an intellectual failure. Mohammed's fancy could not reach beyond the common bodily burning, for sage and fool alike, which many a martyr has been able to support with a smile; the torment of the mind finds no place in his Gehennem, nor that most exquisite of punishments inferred in the words, "He that is impure, let him be impure still." Tantalus and Sisyphus were forced to endure the agony of deceived expectancy, and almost, never quite, achieved endeavor: the victim of Gehennem has merely to bear physical pain, as terrible as may be, but not the intolerable anguish of a disappointed, self-contemning soul. Milton's Satan suffered worse agony than any devised by Mohammed.

The grotesque side of any superstition is to be found chiefly in the Under- and Over- world: where the limited human mind tries to conceive the inconceivable and to portray what "eye hath not seen." In the case of Islam, the grotesque element becomes so overwhelming, the moment the soul leaves the body, that it is difficult to realize the fact that two hundred millions of sane people solemnly accept the absurd legends as articles of faith. We shall trace the soul's progress as recorded in the orthodox authorities.

Instead of coming forth from the body easily and sweetly, like pure water from a goatskin, and with a musky scent, as does the believer's spirit, the soul of the wicked is dragged forth by the Angel of Death, fizzing and sputtering, "as a hot spit is drawn out of wet wool." Hideous demons wrap him in sackcloth, despite his evil smell, and carry him to the gate of the lowest heaven. But the door-keepers say, "No welcome to thee, vile soul; go back, accursed the doors are not open for thee." Then God says, "Write his history in Sijjin," which is the registry of Hell; and the demons cast him violently back to earth, and he joins his body in the grave;" *Mishkat el-Masabih, i., 362-7.