the nature of the Qur'an, and how can Muslims trust even it, if it has failed to discharge the task committed unto it by God, as they believe?

But, thank God, the Word of God has neither perished nor been corrupted. God has been its Preserver. Even the Qur'an assists the Muslim truthseeker to recognize that the Bible is the Word of God.

Yet, strangely enough, in this matter we Christians have often to uphold the correctness of the statements which the Qur'an makes about the Bible, and in this way to defend the Qur'an from some of the Muslims themselves, who, not having considered that any attack on the Bible is an attack on the Qur'an which "confirms" and "protects it", rashly do injury to their own honoured Book.

For instance, Shaikh Haji Rahmatu'llah of Dehli, in his Izharu'l Haqq (إظهار الْحقّ), published in A.H. 1284, tells us that certain of the 'Ulama' at Dehli in A.H. 1270 put forth a fatwa', in which they said: "This¹ collection (of books), which is now known as the New Testament, is not received among us; and this is not the Injil which is mentioned in the Qur'an, but, on the contrary, in our opinion, the latter denotes the Word which was sent down upon Jesus." Rahmatu'llah himself through prejudice has fallen into the same error, for he says: "The² original Torah and so also the original Injil

were both lost before the mission of Muhammad, and those which are now extant are in the position of two books of romances collected from true and false anecdotes: and we do not say that they were extant in their genuineness up to the dispensation of the Prophet, and that then falsification (التّحريف) befel them both. By no means." Of course this author, when he speaks of the

"original Torah" and the "original Injil", cannot mean the original manuscripts, for those of the Qur'an have likewise perished. Doubtless he means the true and actual contents of those MSS. Hence his statement is wrong, as not only Christians, but almost every learned Muslim in India in our own day will admit. In ancient times there was some excuse for ignorance and error on this subject, but there is none now.

Shaikh Rahmatu'llah tries to make the ignorant believe that the Torah entirely perished when the Temple was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 587 B.C. In order to prove this he quotes a forged book entitled by some the Second Book of Esdras, and by others the Fourth Book of Esdras, and wishes Muslims to believe that Esdras, i.e. Ezra (عُزيَر), compiled ¹ a volume, and pretended that it was the true and genuine Torah of Moses. But when we turn to the worthless book to which the Shaikh refers us, we do not find anything to support the Shaikh's statement. On the contrary, that book informs us (Chapter XIV, 21, 22) that Ezra caused his scribes to write

"all that hath been done in the world since the beginning, which were written in Thy Law" That is to say, according to this account, Ezra was a Hafiz of the Torah, and when he dictated the Torah to the scribes he was not forging a false revelation. Baizawi in his commentary on Surah ix. (At Taubah), ver. 30, relates a tale which, though totally unreliable, supports this explanation and opposes that of Shaikh Rahmatu'llah. Baizawi says that the Jews, "because after Nebuchadnezzar's onslaught no one was