his pictures of the punishment of the wicked there comes also a generalisation of the indictment of their offence. The steps here seem to be that first of all he denounces the worldly temper, as in the passage just quoted, where the niggardly and avaricious man is contrasted with him who gives and is pious. Next, some specific abuses are cited by way of illustration of the hardness of heart of the wealthy. Then, as their opposition continues he comes to regard their rejection of his message as the test of the worldly temper. We see him justifying this in Surah cvii. vv. 1-3:

Seest thou not him who disbelieves in the Judgement;
He it is who repels the orphan,
And does not encourage the feeding of the poor.

The sin of Unbelief thus includes all others, and therefore is the one which, for the most of the Meccan period, is almost exclusively denounced. Muhammad becomes the preacher of imminent punishment and Judgement upon those who have shown themselves unthankful, i.e. have rejected his first appeal and refused to believe.

The question then arises: Did Muhammad adopt the idea of the coming Judgement merely from the desire to frighten the Meccans into acceptance of his religious reform, or was it one of his fundamental convictions from the first? According to Sprenger ¹ "Muhammad clearly understood that these terrifying bogeys are the best means to procure from men acceptance of beliefs". That is, however, a rather rough and

ready judgement. That motives of that kind influenced him to some extent is not to be denied, though there was less conscious insincerity in the matter than we, might imagine. The business man turned religious is often not meticulously scrupulous as to methods. That does not mean that he is insincere or dishonest, but only that the practical instinct to get things done, does not allow scruples as to methods overmuch weight. Nor have we any reason to suppose that Muhammad did not himself thoroughly believe in the pictures of the coming Judgement by which he sought to impress the Meccans. For one thing, his descriptions of the Judgement and the punishments of the future did not procure from the Meccans acceptance of his religion. On the contrary, the doctrine of the Resurrection which was necessarily involved, became the object of their worst ridicule. Yet he never drops the idea of the Divine Judgement upon man's conduct. We shall find that his conceptions of how the Judgement and punishment come, are not always the same, but the fact itself remains clear and distinct throughout the Qur'an from start to finish. Even if, as I have said, the appeal to gratitude to God for His bounties was prominent to begin with, some notion of the Divine wrath lurks in the background. For the almsgiving and generosity which he demanded are as much motived by the desire of standing well with God as by humanity. That is implied in the use of the word tazakka, of which I have already spoken. There is a passage which belongs to the very earliest portions of the Qur'an which shows the