This is another proof that the Bible has never at any time been corrupted, whether before or after the Hijrah, and that no other books have ever been substituted for the genuine books of the Old Testament and the New.

If a body of wicked and godless men in Muhammad's time or later had wished to corrupt, change, or falsify the Holy Scriptures, they would have found it an absolutely impossible undertaking. They would have had to obtain and falsify all Biblical MSS. in the original Hebrew and Greek, wherever these might be. This would entail travelling over a large part of Europe, Asia, and Africa, visiting every Church and Synagogue, every library, every Christian or Jewish house of any importance. But it would have been necessary to find and alter all copies of the Versions of the Bible too. These were in Latin, Greek, Coptic, Gothic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Armenian, Georgian, &c. Then a visit would have had to be paid to the Samaritans, and permission gained to tamper with their ancient and carefully treasured MSS. of the Torah and their later version of it into their own tongue. The Jews would have had to corrupt their Aramaic Targums. Then the forgers would have had to find every Christian book written in the languages already mentioned, in order to falsify the quotations from the Sacred Scriptures which it might contain. If a single book in any of these languages escaped falsification, all their trouble would be in vain. Then it would be necessary to get all Jews and Christians to forget what they had learnt of the Bible, and to falsify the tablets of their memories too. No man of understanding will fancy that all this was possible: still less will he believe that men would be able to prevail on the whole Jewish and Christian world to agree to such a crime¹ in order that they

might here be oppressed by Muslims and hereafter might justly suffer from God's wrath.

Let us imagine, if we can, a body of Muslims in our own day, or even before the invention of printing and lithography, determining to falsify every copy of the Qur'an and all the religious books of the whole Islamic world. How absurd does such an idea seem! Yet the Qur'an is not translated into so many tongues as the Bible was in Muhammad's time. Even if every copy of the Qur'an were lost or corrupted, its text might easily be reproduced from the quotations in the works of the Commentators, and even in such books as Ibn Hisham's Siratu'r Rasul, in Katibu'l Waqidi's Kitabu'l Maghazi, Futuhu'sh Sham, Futuhu'l Misr, Futuhu'l 'Ajam, in the Histories of At Tabari and Ibn Athir, and in other ancient books. No one can conceive of the possibility of corrupting all these, even though they are all in one and the same language. How much greater the task of falsifying all Biblical quotations in so many different languages!

But, had this task been accomplished, the fraud would have been exposed through the discovery of the very ancient MSS. of long-lost early Christian works during the last few years. Not a few writings of ancient times in Greek, Coptic, Armenian, and Syriac, the names of which were known to us, but which every scholar believed to have perished many hundreds of years ago, have recently been found in old convent libraries and elsewhere. Of these three are especially famous: (1) the Didakhe or "Teaching of the Twelve Apostles" (A.D. 131-160); (2) the Apology of Aristides (A.D. 138-147); and (3) the Diatessaron of Tatian (A.D. 160-170). As these books were lost long before Muhammad's time, they cannot possibly have been corrupted after his appearance. They show us that the Christian Faith in those very early days taught exactly the same doctrines that are found in the Old Testament and the New now in circulation throughout the world. Hence the Christian Faith taught in the