terrible punishment was in store for them either in this world or the next. Time after time he compares himself to the ancient prophets--Noah, Abraham, Moses, and their successors--who are represented as employing exactly the same arguments and receiving the same answers as Muḥammad; and bids his people hearken to him lest they utterly perish like the ungodly before them. The truth of the Koran is proved, he says, by the Pentateuch and the Gospel, all being Revelations of the One God, and therefore identical in substance. He is no mercenary soothsayer, he seeks no personal advantage: his mission is solely to preach. The demand for a miracle he could not satisfy except by pointing to his visions of the Angel and especially to the Koran itself, every verse of which was a distinct sign or miracle (_áyat_).[324] If he has forged it, why are his adversaries unable to produce anything similar? "_Say: 'If men and genies united to bring the like of this Koran, they could not bring the like although they should back each other up'_" (Kor. xvii, 90). [Sidenote: Resurrection and Retribution.] 3. Such notions of a future life as were current in Pre-islamic Arabia never rose beyond vague and barbarous superstition, _e.g._, the fancy that the dead man's tomb was haunted by his spirit in the shape of a screeching owl.[325] No wonder, then, that the ideas of Resurrection and Retribution, which are enforced by threats and arguments on almost every page of the Koran, appeared to the Meccan idolaters absurdly ridiculous and incredible. "_Does Ibn Kabsha promise us that we shall live?_" said one of their poets. "_How can there be life for the ṣadá and the háma? Dost thou omit to ward me from death, and wilt thou revive me when my bones are rotten?_"[326] God provided His Apostle with a ready answer to these gibes: "_Say: 'He shall revive them who produced them at first, for He knoweth every creation_" (Kor. xxxvi, 79). This topic is eloquently illustrated, but Muḥammad's hearers were probably less impressed by the creative power of God as exhibited in Nature and in Man than by the awful examples, to which reference has been made, of His destructive power as manifested in History. To Muḥammad himself, at the outset of his mission, it seemed an appalling certainty that he must one day stand before God and render an account; the overmastering sense of his own responsibility goaded him to preach in the hope of saving his countrymen, and supplied him, weak and timorous as he was, with strength to endure calumny and persecution. As Nöldeke has remarked, the grandest Súras of the whole Koran are those in which Muḥammad describes how all Nature trembles and quakes at the approach of the Last Judgment. "It is as though one actually saw the earth heaving, the mountains crumbling to dust, and the stars hurled hither and thither in wild confusion."[327] Súras lxxxii and ci, which have been translated above, are specimens of the true prophetic style.[328]