Page:History of Mahomet, the great imposter.pdf/11

 religion, but to revive the old one, which God first gave unto Adam ; and when lost in the corruption of the old world, restored it again by revelation to Abraham, who taught it to his son Ishmael, their forefather; and that he, when he first planted himself in Arabia, instructed men in the same religion which he had received from Abraham; but their posterity afterwards corrupted it into idolatry, and that God had now sent him to destroy this idolatry, and again restore the religion of Ishmael, their forefather. And therefore, according to his own doctrine, it is not unfitly called Ishmaelism by the Jews, although they call it so only out of contempt, by transposition of the letters from Islamisme, the namoname [sic] whereby the Mahometans themselves most love to call it, from the Arabic word Salama, which in the fourth conjugation is Aslama, to enter into the state of salvation; hence Eslam, the saving religion, and Muislmon, or, as we call it, Mussleman, he that believeth therein.

He allowed both the old and the New Testaments, and that Moses and Jesus Christ were prophets sent from God: but that the Jews and Christians had corrupted these holy writings, and that he was sent to purge them from thesothese [sic] corruptiouscorruptions [sic] and restore the law of God to that purity in which it was first delivered: and therefore most of those passages which he takes out of the Old and New Testament, are related otherwise by him in his Alcoran, than wo have them in those sacred books; and in this, certainly he acted much wiser than our Sociniaus, who, with him, denying the Holy Trinity and the Divinity of our Saviour, yet still allow the Holy Scriptures, as now in our hands, to be genuine and uncorrupted, with which their doctrine is in the most manifest manner totally