be? to which he replied, when men and women should mix together without shame or distinction, as if they were of one sex; when the abundance of provisions should not lower their price; when the poor, on account of the total extinction of charity, should find no body to administer to their distress; when the holy scriptures should be scoffed at and made a joke of, and the mysteries contained in them, be derided in ridiculous couplets; and when the temples dedicated to the true God, should be occupied by idols; then we might conclude, the final day of judgment was near at hand; and having said this, he disappeared. XIX. There is involved in this story, a manifest inversion of that part of the sacred text, which speaks of the snatching away of Elias, in consequence of which, and its being corroborated by other parts of the holy scripture, many of both Christians and Jews think alike, with respect to the continuance of that prophet upon earth, until the end of the world. Elias was destined to this near nine hundred years before the coming of Christ; and this Mahometan account attributes this destination of him to have been made by our Saviour; which is a shocking anachronism. But we should not be surprized at this gross ignorance of the Mahometans; who, together with their false prophet, in their expositions of the scripture, confound times and persons, in the most extravagant manner that can be conceived. In the third sura or chapter of the alcoran, Mahomet identifies Mary the sister of Moses, and Mary the mother of Christ, as one and the same person; the first of whom was much more anterior to the last, than Elias was to Christ; and agreeable to the seventeenth sura or chapter, according to the exposition given of it by their famous commentator Gelaledin, the invasion of Palestine by the army in which Goliah was, was a punishment, for the Israelites having put to death Zacharias the father of John the Baptist, and the invasion of it by Nebuchadnezzar, was for their having killed the Baptist himself.