A little farther on he says: "When Mutawakkil was raised to the throne, the Rationalists were the directing power of the State; they held the chief offices of trust; they were professors in colleges, superintendents of hospitals, directors of observatories; they were merchants; in fact, they represented the wisdom and wealth of the Empire; Rationalism was the dominating creed among the educated, the intellectual, and influential classes of the community" (p. 646). When these heretics lost their political power and orthodox Muhammadanism (styled Patristicism by Amir 'Ali) again asserted its authority, the short but brilliant period of intellectual growth and progress in Muslim lands swiftly passed away. It is unfair, therefore, to attribute to Islam results which ensued from the cultivation of Aristotelian philosophy and Grecian science, and which disappeared for ever when the true Spirit of Islam reasserted itself. The result of the latter in every Muhammadan land has been what the author well states regarding one part of the Muslim world: "A death-like gloom settled upon Central Asia, which still hangs heavy and lowering over these unhappy countries" (p. 589).

APPENDIX C.

THE "TESTAMENT OF ABRAHAM" AND MUHAMMADAN TRADITIONS.

IN the foregoing Lectures I have pointed out not a few instances in which the Muslims are deeply indebted to the later Jews for their traditional accounts of Heaven and Hell and of the Patriarchs and

Prophets of the Old Testament. It has also been shown that much of current Muhammadan belief originated with the Zoroastrians; and that apocryphal books current among certain Christian sects are responsible for many other absurd legends.

An apocryphal work of very great interest in this connexion has recently been discovered and published ¹ by the Cambridge University Press. It is entitled The Testament of Abraham. The Editor shows good reason to believe that the work was originally written in Egypt, that it was known to Origen, and that it was probably composed by a Jewish convert to Christianity in the second century or not later than the third. The book exists in two Greek recensions, and the language is much modernised, in not a few places showing forms now used in modern Romaic. It exists also in an Arabic version. After a very careful study of this apocryphal Testament of Abraham I am inclined to agree with him in his conclusions. The Egyptian origin of the work seems to be beyond dispute.

The number of points of agreement between this book and Muhammadan traditions is so great that it must be due to something more than a fortuitous coincidence. Much that the Testament relates in connexion with Abraham is by Muhammadan tradition referred to others, but the very fact that so many of the leading features of the tractate in question thus reappear, though in a confused and fragmentary form, leads me to imagine that the book was known to Muhammad's early followers, if not to the