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extended his conquest into Syria. While engaged in this victorious career, a Jewess poisoned some food which was set before him, and of which he partook heartily. He died at Medina, in the sixty-third year of his age, of a fever, though he ascribed his death to the effects of the poison.
The religious system of Mahomet is a compound of Paganism, Judaism, and Christianity. The fundamental doctrine of the Koran is, "There is but one God, and Mahomet is his prophet;" but the impostor suited his subsidiary doctrines to the grosser propensities of our nature, and allured disciples by the promise of unbounded sensual gratification, not only in the present, but in the future state. The Koran is obviously founded on the Scriptures, but is blended with extravagant and blasphemous tales and dogmas.
After the death of Mahomet, his successors used every art of seduction, fraud, and violence, to diffuse his religion, so that in less than a century, it displayed its victorious banners over all Arabia, Syria, Asia Minor, Persia, Egypt, and the coasts of Africa, and is now zealously believed from the Ganges to the Atlantic, by fully a hundred and twenty millions of people.
CHRISTIANITY.
Christianity, (to which Judaism was introductory,) is the last and more perfect dispensation of revealed religion. It was instituted by Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who appeared in Judæa nearly two thousand years ago. He was born at Bethlehem, brought up at Nazareth, and crucified at Jerusalem. His lineage, birth, life, death, and sufferings, were minutely predicted by the Jewish prophets, and his religion is now spread over a considerable portion of the globe. The evidences of the Christian religion are comprised under historical testimony, prophecies, miracles, the internal evidence of its doctrines and precepts, and the rapidity of its first propagation among the Jews and the Gentiles. Though thinking men have in every age differed widely respecting some of the doctrines of this religion, yet they are fully agreed in the divinity of its origin, and in the benevolence of its tendency.
TRINITARIANS, ATHANASIANS, SABELLIANS.
The Trinitarian believes the doctrine of a Trinity, by which is generally understood, that there are three distinct persons in one undivided Godhead—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Trinitarians may be divided two classes:—those who believe there is no proper divinity in Christ, beside that
