Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 5 (1897).djvu/354

332 THE DECLINE AND FALL children of Israel, whom they resembled in the outward mark The Christians of circumcision. The Christian missionaries wei*e still more active and successful : the Catholics asserted their universal reign ; the sects whom they oppressed successively retired beyond the limits of tlie Roman empire ; the Marcionites and the Manichaeans dispersed their phaniastic opinions and apocryphal gospels ; the churches of Yemen, and the princes of Hira and Gassan, were instructed in a purer creed by the Jacobite and Nestorian bishops.*^"^ The liberty of choice was presented to the tribes : each Arab was free to elect or to compose his own private religion ; and the rude superstition of his house was mingled with the sublime theology of saints and philosophers. A funda- mental article of faith was inculcated by the consent of the learned strangers : the existence of one supreme God, who is exalted above the powers of heaven and earth, but who has often revealed himself to mankind by the ministry of his angels and prophets, and whose grace or justice has interrupted, by seasonable miracles, the order of nature. The most rational of the Arabs acknowledged his power, though they neglected his worship ; '^* and it was habit rather than conviction that still attached them to the relics of idolatry. The Jews and Chris- tians were the people of the book ; the Bible was already trans- lated into the Arabic language, '^^ and the volume of the Old Testa- ment was accepted by the concord of these implacable enemies. In the story of the Hebrew patriarchs, the Arabs were pleased to discover the fathers of their nation. They applauded the birth and promises of Ismael ; revered the faith and virtue of Abraham ; traced his pedigree and their own to the creation of the first man, and imbibed with equal credulity the prodigies of the holy text and the dreams and traditions of the Jewish rabbis. ^3 The state of the Jews and Christians in Arabia is described by Pocock from Sharestani, &c. (Specimen, p. 60, 134, &c.), Hettinger (Hist. Orient, p. 212-23S), d'Herbelot (Bibhot. Orient, p. 474-476), Basnage (Hist, des Juifs, torn. vii. p. 185, torn. viii. p. 280), and Sale (Preliminary Discourse, p. 22, <S;c. 33, &c. ). [Shahra- stani, Religionspartheien und Philosophen-Schule ; a translation by Th. Haar- briicker, 1850-1.] Min their offerings, it was a maxim to defraud God for the profit of the idol, not a more potent, but a more irritable patron (Pocock, Specimen, p. 108, 109). •'Our versions now extant, whether Jewish or C'hristian, appear more recent than the Koran ; but the existence of a prior translation may be fairly inferred : I. From the perpetual practice of the synagogue, of expounding the Hebrew lesson by a paraphrase in the vulgar tongue of the country ; 2. From the analogy of the Armenian, Persian, ^,thiopic versions, expressly quoted by the fathers of the fifth century, who assert that the Scriptures were translated into'<z// the Barbaric languages (Walton, Prolegomena ad Biblia Polyglot, p 34,93-97; Simon, Hist. Critique du V. et du N. Testament, torn. i. p. 180, 181, 282-286, 293, 305, 306, torn. iv. p. 206).