(_a_) As to the Qur´an they held that it was eternal in God, but its expression in words and syllables was created in time. This does not of course mean that the expression was due to the Prophet to whom it was revealed, but to God, so that the doctrine of literal inspiration was asserted in the strictest form. Nor was it thus created when it was revealed, but long before in remote ages when it was first uttered to the angels and “august beings,” and was afterwards disclosed by the angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad. This, which is now the orthodox belief, has furnished an opportunity for controversy to Christians and modern rationalists, who have fixed upon the use of particular words, introduced into Arabic as loan words from Syriac, Persian, and Greek, and appear in the Qur´an: how, they ask, can it be explained that words revealed at a remote period of past eternity, long before the creation of the world, as it is commonly asserted, show the influence of foreign languages which were brought to bear upon Arabic in the 7th cent. A.D.? and Muslim apologists, who have always maintained the absolute purity of Qur´anic Arabic as one of the evidences of Divine origin, seem to regard this as a serious difficulty. The view that the Qur´an is eternal in substance, and thus in substance revealed to the Prophet, who was left to express it in his own words, which would thereby show the limitations of his time, is not admitted by the orthodox. It will be noted also that the Ash`arite teaching evades and does not answer an old difficulty: if the substance of the Qur´an is the wisdom of God and is co-eternal with Him, even though emanating from Him, we have something other than God, namely, His wisdom, eternally existing with Him, and this can be represented as parallel with the persons of the Christian Trinity, so as to be inconsistent with the absolute unity of God.