The only place in the Koran in which it can be pretended that a sensible miracle is referred to (for I do not allow the secret visitations of Gabriel, the night-journey of Mahomet to heaven, or the presence in battle of invisible hosts of angels, to deserve the name of sensible miracles) is the beginning of the fifty-fourth chapter.  The words are these:—­“The hour of judgment approacheth, and the moon hath been split in sunder:  but if the unbelievers see a sign, they turn aside, saying, This is a powerful charm.”  The Mahometan expositors disagree in their interpretation of this passage; some explaining it to be mention of the splitting of the moon as one of the future signs of the approach of the day of judgment:  others referring it to a miraculous appearance which had then taken place. (Vide Sale, in loc.) It seems to me not improbable, that Mahomet might have taken advantage of some extraordinary halo, or other unusual appearance of the moon, which had happened about this time; and which supplied a foundation both for this passage, and for the story which in after times had been raised out of it.

After this more than silence, after these authentic confessions of the Koran, we are not to be moved with miraculous stories related of Mahomet by Abulfeda, who wrote his life about six hundred years after his death; or which are found in the legend of Al-Jannabi, who came two hundred years later.* On the contrary, from comparing what Mahomet himself wrote and said with what was afterwards reported of him by his followers, the plain and fair conclusion is, that when the religion was established by conquest, then, and not till then, came out the stories of his miracles.

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* It does not, I think, appear, that these historians had any written accounts to appeal to more ancient than the Sonnah; which was a collection of traditions made by order of the Caliphs two hundred years after Mahomet’s death.  Mahomet died A.D. 632; Al-Bochari, one of the six doctors who compiled the Sonnah, was born A.D. 809; died 869.  Prideaux’s Life of Mahomet, p. 192, ed. 7th. _________

Now this difference alone constitutes, in my opinion, a bar to all reasoning from one case to the other.  The success of a religion founded upon a miraculous history shows the credit which was given to the history; and this credit, under the circumstances in which it was given, i. e. by persons capable of knowing the truth, and interested to inquire after it, is evidence of the reality of the history, and, by consequence, of the truth of the religion.  Where a miraculous history is not alleged, no part of this argument can be applied.  We admit that multitudes acknowledged the pretensions of Mahomet:  but, these pretensions being destitute of miraculous evidence, we know that the grounds upon which they were acknowledged could not be secure grounds of persuasion to his followers, nor their example any authority to us.  Admit the whole of Mahomet’s authentic history, so