conceding its temporary efficacy, never could succeed, when information should prevail, and a spirit of investigation be excited. These artifices, doubtless, facilitated his views, and strengthened the system 1n its incipient state, but those motives, either of interest or fear, which led men to embrace a cause without examining its evidence, have long since ceased to operate: the merits remain precisely the same, and are to be candidly and fairly appreciated.
To suppose a confederacy among Jews and Christians, for the purposes of erasing from their Scriptures testimony favourable to Mohammed, involves absurdity and impossibility. Scattered as they were throughout all the world, and armed with mutual jealousy and hatred, it cannot for a moment be imagined that they would unite for such an object, or alter their respective copies in these particular places. Such hardy assertion, de-
