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 THE HERO AS PROPHET. 
 
 A LECTURE., 
 
 M. T. it.Ess. ( Price per copy two annas.) 
 
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REMARKS OF EUROPEAN TRAVELLERS ON ISLAMIC EFFFf'TS 
 IN AFRICA. 
 
 “ As to the effects of Islam when first embraced by a Negro tribe there cm* 
 not, when viewed as a whole be any reasonable doubt. Polytheism ’disappears 
 almost instantaneously, sorcery with its attendant evils gradually dies V-viv'- 
 human sacrifice becomes a thing of the past. The general moral elevation is most 
 
 ; < rf'IfA. b . egm f ° r fi,st tirac ^ their history to dress, ami that 
 neatly. Squalid filth is replaced by some approach to personal cleanliness- 
 hospitality becomes a religious duty; drunkenness instead of the rule becomes a 
 comparatively rare exception. Though poligamy is allowed by the Koran it is 
 not common m practice, and, beyond the limits laid down by the Prophet incontin- 
 ence is rare ; chastity is looked upon as one of the highest, and becomes in fact one 
 of the commoner virtues. It is idleness henceforward that degrades and industry 
 that elevates, instead of the reverse. OfEenccs are henceforward measured by a 
 written code instead of the arbitrary caprice of a chieftain, a step as every one 
 will admit of vast importance in the progress of a tribe. The Mosque ra ve- an 
 idea of architecture at all events higher, than any the Negro has vet had A thirst 
 for literature is created, and that for works of science and philosophy ~ - 
 
 for commentaries on tim k-r.ro.> 1 — — 3 
 
 course, enormous trades of heathenism were left, and are still left, in vari- 
 ous parts of this area, and if is mainly among these that, at this day, Mohammadan 
 Missionaries are meeting everywhere with a marked success which is denial to our 
 own. We hear of whole tribes laying aside their devil-worship, or memorial 
 Fetish, and springing at a bound, as it were, from the very lowest to one of the 
 highest forms of religious belief — Christian travellers, with every wish to thank 
 otherwise, have, remarked that the Negro who accepts Mohammadanism acquires 
 at once a sense of the dignity of human nature not commonly found even among 
 
 those who have been brought to accept Christianity The Itev. James 
 
 Johnson, a native clergyman, and a man of remarkable energy and intelligence as 
 well as of very Catholic spirit deplores the fact that of the total number of 
 Mohammadans to be found in Sierra Leone and its neighbourhood, three-fourths 
 were not born Mohammadans, but have become so by conversion, whether from a 
 nominal Christianity or from Paganism. — Bosworth Smith. 
 
 At Niger tire houses were square and very often whitewashed, and that there 
 were Moorish Mosques in every quarter. ‘The view of this extensive city,’ the 
 numerous canoes upon the river, the crowded population, and the cultivated state of 
 the surrounding country, formed altogether a prospect of civilisation and magnifi- 
 cence which I little expected to find in the bosom of Africa , ‘The 
 
 beverages of the pagan Negroes’ are beer and mead, of which they frequently drink 
 in excess. The Mohammadan converts drink nothing but water. — Mungo Park. 
 
 That the only art that the natives of Africa have acquired from their five 
 hundred years’ acquaintance with the Portuguese has been the art of distilling 
 spirits from a gunybarrel ; and that the only permanent belief they owe to them 
 is the belief that man may sell his brother man. — Dr. Livingstone. 
 
 If these Christians who arc so unmeasured in their denunciations of Moham- 
 madanism could travel as I have travelled, through those countries in the interior 
 of West Africa, and witness, as I have witnessed, the vast contrast between the 
 l’aran and Mohammadan communities the habitual listlessness and continued 
 deterioration of the one, and the activity and growth, physical and mental, of the 
 other, the caparicious and unsettled administration of law, or rather absence of 
 law, in the one, and the tendency to order and regularity in the other ; the increas- 
 ing prevalence of ardent spirits in tlic one, and the rigid sobriety and conservative 
 abstemiousness of the other — they would cease to regard the Mussulman systems 
 as au unmitigated evil in the interior of Africa. — Itevd. Edward Blydcn. 
 
 As to the rapid spread of Islam, Dr. Barth says that a great part of the 
 Berbers of the desert were once Christians ami they afterwards changed their religion 
 and adopted Islam ; and he describes that continual struggle which; always extend- 
 ing further and further, seems destined to overpower the nations at the very 
 Equator if Christianity docs not presently step in to dispute the ground with it. 
 
 lie remarks in another place, that Mohammadans alone seem able to maiutinn 
 any Government in Africa; and, what is more important, that there “ is a vital 
 principle in Islam which lias only to be brought out by a reformer to accomplish 
 great things.” 
 
 Note. — A ll interesting lecture on “Islam in Africa," containing the detailed and 
 elaborate accounts of the rapid progress and spread of Islam there, recently delivered 
 at Lahore by Mr, Mohammad Shah-ud-din, B.A., Bar, -at- Law, will be out, shortly. 
 
TIIE HERO AS PROPHET. MOHAMMAD : ISLAM. 
 
 . o oo— # 
 
 F ROM tlie first rude times of Paganism among tlio Scandina- 
 vians in the North, we advance to a very different epoch of re- 
 ligion, among a very different people ; Muhammadanism among the 
 Arabs. A great change ; what 4V H " An< i pro'gress is indicated 
 ! l .3£?5 ^“ifedmrver sal condition and thoughts of men ! 
 
 The Hero is not now regarded as a God among his fellow-men ; 
 hut as one God-inspired, as a Prophet. It is the second phasis of 
 Hero-worship ! the first or oldest, we may say, has passed away 
 without return ; in the history of the world there will not again 
 be any man, never so great, whom his fellow-men will take for a 
 god. ' Nay we might rationally ask, Did any set of human beings 
 ever really think the man they saw there standing beside them a 
 god, the maker of this world? Perhaps not ; it was usually some 
 man thev remembered, or had seen. Rut neither can this any 
 more be.' The Great Man is not recoguised henceforth as a god 
 rt nny more. 
 
 It was a rude gross error, that of counting the Great Man 
 a god. Yet let us say that it is at all times difficult to know 
 what he is, or how to account of him and receive him ! The 
 most significant feature in the history of an epoch is the manner 
 it has of welcoming a Great Man. Ever, to the true instincts 
 of men, there is something godlike in him. Whether they shall 
 take him to be a god, to be a prophet, or what they shall take 
 him to be? that is ever a grand question; by their way of 
 answering that, 'we shall see, as through a little window, into 
 the very heart of these men’s spiritual condition. For at bottom 
 the Great Man, as he comes from the hand of Nature, is ever 
 the same kind of thing : Odin, Luther, Johnson, Burns ; I hope 
 to make it appear that these are all originally of one stuff ; 
 that only by the world’s reception of them, and the shapes they 
 assume, are they so immeasurably diverse. The worship of Odin 
 astonishes us, — to fall prostrate before the Great Man, into 
 deliquium of love and wonder over him, and feel in their hearts 
 that he was a denizen of the skies, a god ! This was imperfect 
 enough: but to welcome, for example, a Burns as we did, was 
 that what we can call perfect ? The most precious gift that Heaven 
 can give to the Earth ; a man of ‘ genius’ as we call it ; the Soul 
 of a Man actually sent down from the skies, with a God’s- 
 message to us, — this we waste away as an idle artificial firework, 
 
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 sent to amuse ns a little, and sink it into ashes, ^rcoh and 
 ineffectuality: such reception of a Great Man I do; no ■ ? 
 
 perfect either! Looking into the heart of the thing. . J 
 
 perhaps call that of Burns a still uglier phenomenon ‘waning 
 still sadder imper-footionsin mankind’s ways, than the Scan . 
 method itself! To fall into mere unreasoning dehquium ot love 
 and admiration, was not good ; hut such unreasoqwg, nay * - ‘ 
 
 supercilious no-love at all is perhaps still wor^J-It 
 forever changing, this of Hero-worship : d itiei ent in • * » ’ 
 
 grio do° w 5i in .m, ot the wll0le 
 
 business of the age, one may say, is to do it wef 
 
 We have chosen Mohammad not as the most eminent Prophet ; 
 but as the one we are freest to speak of. lie is by no means 
 the truest of Prophets ; but I do esteem him a true one. Farther, 
 as there is no danger of our becoming, any of us, Moliammadans, 
 
 I mean to say all the good of him I justly can. It is the way 
 to get at his secret ; let us try to understand what he meant with 
 the world ; what the world meant and means with him, will then 
 bo a more answerable question. Our current hypothesis about 
 Mohammad, that he was a scheming Impostor, a Falsehood incar- 
 nate, that his religion is a mere mass of quackery and fatuity, begins 
 really to be now untenable to any one. The lies, which well-meaning *• 
 zeal has heaped round this man, are disgraceful to ourselves only. 
 When Pococke inquired of Grotius. Where the proof was of that 
 story of the pigeon, trained to pick peas from Mohammad’s ear, and 
 pass for an angel dictating to him ? Grotius answered that there 
 was no proof! It is really time to dismiss all that. The word 
 this man spoke has been the life-guidance now of a liundred-and- 
 ■ eighty millions of men these twelve-hundred years. These 
 hundred- and-eighty millions were made by God as well as we. 
 
 A greater number of God’s creatures believe in Mohammad’s word 
 at this hour than in any other word whatever. Are we to suppose 
 that it was a miserable piece of spiritual legerdemain, this which 
 so many creatures of the Almighty have lived by and died by? I, 
 for my part, cannot form any such supposition. I will believe most 
 things sooner than that. One would be entirely at a loss what to 
 think of this world at all, if quackery so grew and were sanctioned 
 here. 
 
 Alas, such theories are very lamentable. If we would attain to 
 knowledge of anything in God’s true Creation, let us disbelieve 
 them wholly ! They are the product of an Age of Scepticism ; 
 they indicate the saddest spiritual paralysis, and mere death-life of 
 the souls of men : more godless theory, I think, was never pro- 
 mulgated in this Earth. A false man found a religion? Why, a 
 false mail cannot build a brick house ! If ho do not know and 
 follow truly the properties of mortar, burnt clay and what else ho 
 
( » ) 
 
 works in, it is no house that lie makes, but a rubbish-heap. It 
 will not stall'd for twelve centuries, to lodge a lnmdred-and-eighty 
 millions ; it will fall straightway. A man must conform himself 
 to Nature’s laws, be verily in communion with Nature and the 
 truth of things, or Nature will answer him, No, not at all ! Spe- 
 ciosities are specious — all me ! — a (Jagliostro, many C’agliostros, 
 prominent world-leaders, do prosper by their quackery, tor a day. 
 Is it like a forged bank-note ; they get it passed out ot their worth- 
 less hands : others, not they, have to smart for it. Nature bursts- 
 up in fire-flames, French Revolutions and suchlike, proclaiming 
 with terrible veracity that forged notes aro forged. 
 
 But of a Great Man especially, of him 1 will venture to assert 
 that it is incredible he shoyld have been other than true. It seems 
 to me the primary foundation of him, and of all that can lie in 
 him, this. No Mirabeau, Napoleon, Burns, Cromwell, no man 
 adequate to do anything, but is first of all in right earnest about 
 it ; what I call a sincere man. 1 should say sincerity, a deep, 
 great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in 
 any way heroic. Not the sincerity that calls itself sincere ; ah no 
 that is a very poor matter indeed ; — a shallow braggart conscious 
 sincerity; oftenest self-conceit mainly. The Great Man’s sincerity 
 is of the kind he cannot speak of, is not conscious of : nay, I sup- 
 pose, he is conscious rather of /^sincerity ; for what man can 
 walk accurately by the law ot truth for one day? No, the Great 
 Man does not boast himself sincere, far from that ; perhaps does 
 not ask himself if he is so : I would say rather, his sincerity does 
 not depend on himself; he cannot help being sincere ! The great 
 Fact of Existence is great to him. Fly as he will, he cannot get 
 out of the awful presence of this Reality. His mind is so made ; 
 he is great by that, first of all. Fearful and wonderful real as 
 Life, real as Death, is this Universe to him. Though all men 
 should forget its truth, and walk in a vain show, lfc cannot. At 
 all moments the Flame-image glares-in upon him ; undeniable, 
 there, there ! — I wish you to take this as my primary definition 
 of a Great Man. A little man may have this, it is competent to 
 all men that God has made : bat a Great Man cannot be with- 
 out it. 
 
 Such a man is what we call an original man ; he comes to us 
 at first-hand. A messenger he, sent from the Infinite Unknown 
 with tidings to us. We may call him Poet, Prophet, God ; — in 
 one way or other, we all feel that the words he utters are as no 
 other man’s words. Direct from the Inner Fact of things ; — he 
 lives, and has to live, in daily communion with that. Hearsays 
 cannot hide it from him ; he is blind, homeless, miserable, following 
 hearsays ; it glares-in upon him. Really his utterances, are they not 
 a kind of * revelation ’ ; — what we must call such for want of soma 
 
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 other name ? It is from the heart of the world that he comes ; he 
 is portion of the primal reality of things. God has* made many 
 revelations : but this man too, has not God made him, the latest 
 and newest of all ? The ‘ inspiration of the Almighty giveth him 
 understanding’ : we must listen before all to him. 
 
 This Mohammad, then, we will in no wise consider as an Inanity 
 and Theatricality, a poor conscious ambitious schemer : we cannot 
 conceive him so. The rude message he delivered -was a real one 
 withal ; an earnest confused voice from the unknown Deep, The 
 man’s words were not false, nor liie workings here below ; no 
 Inanity and Simulacrum: a fiery mass of Life cast-up from the 
 great bosom of Nature herself. To kindle the world ; the world’s 
 Maker had ordered it so. Neither can the faults, imperfections, 
 insincerities even, of Mohammad, if such were never so well 
 proved against him, shake this primary fact about him. 
 
 Ou the whole, we -make too much of faults ; the details of the 
 business hide the real ceutro of it. Faults? The greatest of 
 faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. Readers of the 
 Bible above all, one would think, might know better. Who is 
 called there ‘ the man according to God’s own heart ? ’ David, the 
 Hebrew King, had fallen into sins enough ; blackest crimes; there 
 was no want of sins. And thereupon the unbelievers sneer and ask, 
 Is this your man according to God’s heart? The sneer, I must 
 say, seems to mo but a shallow one. What are faults, what are 
 the outward details of a life ; if the inner secret of it, the remorse, 
 temptations, true, often-baffled, never-ended struggle of it, be 
 forgotten? ‘ It is not in man that walketh to direct his steps.’ 
 Of all acts, is not, for a man, repentance the most divine? The 
 deadliest sin, I say, were that same supercilious consciousness of 
 no sin ; — that is death ; the heart so conscious is divorced from 
 sincerity, humility and fact; is dead : it is ‘pure’ as dead dry 
 sand is pure. -David’s life and history, as written for us in those 
 Psalms of his, I consider to he the truest emblem ever given of a 
 man’s moral progress and warfare here below. All earnest souls 
 will ever discern in it the faithful struggle of an earnest human 
 soul towards what is good and best. Struggle often baffled, sore 
 baffled, down as into entire wreck ; yet a struggle never ended ; 
 ever, with tears, repentance, true unconquerable purpose, begun 
 anew. Poor human nature ! Is not a man’s walking, in truth, 
 always that: \u succession of falls?’ Man can do no other. In 
 this wild element of a Life, he has to struggle onwards; now 
 fallen deep-abased ; and ever, with tears, repentance, with bleed- 
 ing heart, lie has to rise again, struggle again still onwards. That 
 his struggle he a faithful unconquerable one : that is the question 
 of questions. We will put-up with many sad details, if the soul of 
 it wore true. Details by themselves will never teach us what it is. 
 
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 1 believe we misestimate Mohammad’s faults even ns faults ; but the 
 secret of him will never 1)0 got by dwelling there. We will leave 
 all this behind us : and assuring ourselves that lie did mean some 
 true thing, ask candidly what it was or might be. 
 
 These Arabs Mohammad was born among are certainly a not- 
 ablo people. Their country itself is notable ; the fit habitation 
 for such a race. Savage inaccessible rock-mountains, great grim 
 deserts, alternating with beautiful strips of verdure : wherever 
 water is, there is greenness, beauty ; odoriferous balm-shrubs, 
 
 ( fc date-trees, frankincense-trees. Consider that wide waste horizon 
 of sand, empty, silent, like a sand-sea, dividing habitable place 
 from habitable. You are all alone there, left alone with the 
 Universe ; by day a fierce sun blazing down on it with intolerable 
 radiance ; by night the great deep Heaven with its stars. 
 Such a country is fit for a swift-handed, deep-hearted race of 
 men. There is something must agile, active, and yet most medi- 
 tative, enthusiastic in the Arab character. The Persians are 
 called the French of the East; we will call the Arabs Oriental 
 Italians. A gifted noble people ; a people of wild strong feelings, 
 and of iron restraint over them : the characteristic of nobleminded- 
 ness, of genius. The wild Bedouin welcomes the stranger to his 
 tent, as one having right to all that is there ; were it his worse 
 enemy, he will slay his foal to treat him, will serve him with 
 sacred hospitality for three days, will set him fairly orl his way ; — 
 and then, by another law as sacred, kill him if he can. In words 
 too, as in action. They are not a loquacious people, taciturn 
 rather ; but eloquent, gifted when they, do speak. An earnest, 
 truthful kind of men. They are, as we know, of Jewish kindred : 
 but with that deadly terrible earnestness of the Jews they seem 
 to combine something graceful, brilliant, which is not Jewish. 
 They had ‘ Poetic contests’ among them before the time of 
 Mohammad. Sale says, at Ocadh, in the South of Arabia, there 
 w r ere yearly fairs, and there, when the merchandising was done, 
 Poets sang for prizes : — the wild people gathered to hear that. 
 
 One Jewish quality these Arabs manifest ; the outcome of 
 many or of all high qualities : what we may call religiosity. 
 From of old they had been zealous -worshippers, according to then- 
 light. They worshipped the stars, as Sabeans ; worshipped many 
 natural objects, — recognised them as symbols, immediate manifes- 
 tations, ot the Maker of Nature. It was wrong ; and yet not 
 wholly wrong. All God’s works are still in a sense sjunbols of 
 God. Do we not, as I urged, still account it a merit to recognise 
 a certain inexhaustible significance, ‘ poetic beauty ’ as we name it, 
 in all natural objects whatsoever? A man is a poet, and honoured, 
 fordoing that, and speaking or singing it, — a kind of diluted 
 worship. They had many Prophets, these Arabs ; Teachers each 
 
( « ) 
 
 to Ills tribe, eacli according to the light he had. But indeed, 
 have we not from of old the noblest of proofs, still palpable to 
 every one of us, of what devoutness and noblemindedness had 
 dwelt in these rustic thoughtful peoples ? Biblical critics seem 
 agreed that our own Books of Job was written in that region of 
 the world. 1 call that, apart from all theories about it, one of 
 the grandest things ever written with pen. One feels, indeed, as 
 if it were not Hebrew ; such a noble universality, different from 
 noble patriotism or sectarianism, reigns in it. A noble Book ; all 
 men’s Book ! It is our first, oldest statement of the never-ending 
 Problem, — man’s destiny, and God’s ways with him here in this 
 earth. And all in such free flowing outlines ; grand in its sincerity, 
 in its simplicity ; in its epic melody, and repose of reconcilement. 
 There is the seeing eye, the mildly understanding heart. So true 
 everyway ; true eye-sight and vision for all things ; material things 
 no less than spiritual : the Horse, — ‘bast thou clothed bis neck 
 with thunder V — he ‘ laughs at the shaking of the spear!’ Such 
 living likenesses were never since drawn. Sublime sorrow, sub- 
 lime reconciliation ; oldest choral melody as of the heart of man- 
 kind ; — so soft, and great ; as the summer midnight, as the world 
 with its seas and stars ! There is nothing written, I think, in the 
 Bible or out of it, of equal literary merit. — 
 
 To the idolatrous Arabs one of the most ancient universal 
 objects of worship was that Black Stone, still kept in the building 
 called Caabali at Mecca. Hioodrus Siculus mentions this Caabali 
 in a way not to be mistaken, as the oldest, most honoured temple 
 in his time ; that is, some half-century before our Era. Silvestre 
 de Sacy says there is some likelihood that the Black Stone is an 
 aerolite. In that case, some man might see it fall out of Heaven ! 
 It stands now beside the Well Zemzem ; the Caabali is built over 
 both. A Well is in all places a beautiful affecting object, gushing 
 out like life from the hard earth ; — still more so in those hot 
 dry countries, where it is the first condition of being. The Well 
 Zemzem has its name from the bubbling sound of the waters, zem- 
 zem; they think it is the Well which Hagar found with her 
 little Ishmael in the wilderness : the aerolite and it have been 
 sacred now, and had a Caabali over them, for thousands of years. 
 A curious object, that Caabali! There it stands at this hour, in the 
 black cloth-covering the Sultan sends it yearly; ‘twenty-seven cubits 
 ‘ high with circuit, with double circuit of pillars, with festoon-rows 
 of lamps and quaint ornaments : the lamps will be lighted again this 
 night, — to glitter again under the stars. An authentic fragment 
 of the oldest Past. It is the Keblali of all Moslems : from Delhi 
 all onwards to Morocco, the eyes of innumerable praying men are 
 turned towards it, five times, this day and all days : one of tho 
 notablest centres in tho Habitation of Men. 
 
( 7 ) 
 
 It had been from the sacredness attached to this Oaabali Stone 
 and llagar’s Well, from the pilgrimings of all tribes of Arabs 
 thither, that Mecca took its rise as a Town. A great town once, 
 though much decayed now. It has no natural advantage for a 
 town ; stands in asandy hollow amid bare barren hills, at a distance 
 from the sea ; its provisions, its very bread, have to be imported. 
 But so many pilgrims needed lodgings : and then all n aces ot pil- 
 grimage do, from the first, become places of trade, The first day 
 pilgrims meet, merchants have also met: where mensee themselves 
 assembled for one object, they find that they can accomplish 
 other objects which depend on meeting together. Mecca became 
 the Fair of all Arabia. And thereby indeed the chief staple and 
 warehouse of whatever Commerce there was between the Indian 
 and the Western countries, Syria, Egypt, even Italy. It had at 
 one time a population of 100,000 ; buyers, forwarders of those 
 Eastern and Western products ; importers for their own behoof of 
 provisions and corn. The government was a kind of irregular 
 aristocratic republic, not without a touch of theocracy. Ten Men 
 of a chief tribe, chosen in some rough way, were Governors of 
 Mecca, and Keepers of tho Caabah. The Koreish were the chief 
 tribe in Mohammad’s time ; his own family was of that tribe. The 
 rest of the Nation, fractioned and cutasunder by deserts’ lived 
 under similar rude patriarchal governments by one or several : 
 herdsmen, carriers, traders, generally robbers too ; being oftenest 
 at war one with another, or with all : held together by no open 
 bond, if it were not this meeting at the Caabah, where all forms of 
 Arab Idolatry assembled in common adoration ; — held mainly by 
 the inward indissoluble bond of a common blood and language. 
 In this way had the Arabs lived for long ages, unnoticed by the 
 world ; a people of great qualities, unconsciously waiting for the day 
 when they should become notable to all the world. Their Idola- 
 tries appear to have been in a tottering state-; much was getting 
 into confusion and fermentation among them. Obscure tidings of 
 the most important Event ever transacted in this world, the Life 
 and Death of the Divine Man in Judea, at once the symptom and 
 cause of immeasurable change to all people in the world, had in 
 the course of centuries reached into Arabia too ; and could not but, 
 of itself, have produced fermentation there. 
 
 It was among this Arab people, so circumstanced, in the year 
 570 of our Era, that the man Mohammad was born. He was of the 
 family of Hashem, of the Koreish tribe as we said ; though poor, 
 connected with the chief persons of his country, Almost at his 
 birth he lost his Father : at the age of sis years his Mother too, a 
 woman noted for her beauty, her worth and sense : he fell to the 
 charge of his Grandfather, an old man, a hundred years old. A 
 good old man : Mohammad’s Father, Abdullah, had been his young- 
 
C 8 ) 
 
 est favourite son. Ho saw in Mohammad with his old life-worn 
 eyes, a century old, the lost Abdullah come back again, all that 
 was left of Abdullah. He loved the little orphan Boy greatly; 
 used to say, They must take care of that beautiful little Boy, 
 nothing in their kindred was more precious than he. At his 
 death, while the boy was. still but two years old, he left him in 
 charge to Abu Thaleb the eldest of the Uncles, as to him that now 
 was head of the house. But this Uncle, a just and rational man 
 as everything betokens, Mohammad was brought-up in the best 
 Arab way. 
 
 Mohammad, as he grew up, accompanied his Uncle on trading 
 journeys and suchlike; in his eighteenth year one finds him a 
 tighter following his Uncle in war. But perhaps the most signifi- 
 cant of all his journeys is one we find noted as of some years’ 
 earlier date : a journey to the Fairs of Syria. The young man 
 here first came in contact with a quite foreign world, — with one 
 foreign element of endless moment to him : the Christian Religion. 
 I know not what to make of that ‘ Sergiu*, the Nestorian Monk,’ 
 whom Abu Thaleb and he are said to have lodged with; or how 
 much any monk could have taught one still so young. Probably 
 enough it is greatly exaggerated, this of the Nestorian Monk. 
 MoliamVnad was only fourteen ; had no language but his own : much 
 in Syria must have been a strange unintelligible whirlpool to him. 
 But the eyes of the lad were open ; glimpses of many things 
 would doubtless be taken-in, and lie very enigmatic as yet, which 
 were to ripen in a strange way into views, into beliefs and insights 
 one day. These journeys to Syria were probably the beginning 
 of much to Mohammad. 
 
 One other circumstance we must not forget : that he had no 
 school-learning; of the thing wo call school-learning none at all. 
 The art of writing was but just introduced into Arabia ; it seems 
 to be the true opinion that Mohammad never could write. Life in 
 f he Desert, with its experiences, was all his education. What of 
 this infinite Universe he, from his dim place, with his own eyes 
 and thoughts, could take in, so much and no more of it was he to 
 know. Curious, if we will reflect on it, this of having no books. 
 Except by what he could see for himself, or hear of by uncertain 
 rumour of speech in the obscure Arabian Desert, he could know 
 nothing. The wisdom that had been before him or at a distance 
 from him in the world, was in a manner as good as not there for 
 him. Of the great brother souls, flame-beacons through so many 
 lands and times, no one directly communicates with this great 
 soul, lie is alone their, deep down in the bosom of the Wilder- 
 ness ; has to grow up so, — alone with Nature and his own 
 Thoughts. 
 
 But from an curly age, ho had boon remarked as a thoughtful 
 
( 0 ) 
 
 man. His companions named him 1 Al Amin, The Faithful.’ A 
 man of truth and fidelity ; true in vvliat he did, in what he spake and 
 thought. They noted that he always meant something. A man 
 rather taciturn in speech ; silent when there was nothing to ho 
 said ; but pertinent, wise, sincere, when he did speak ; always 
 throwing light on the matter. This is the only sort of speech 
 worth speaking ! Through life w r e find him to have been regarded 
 as an altogether solid, brotherly, genuine man. A serious, siucero 
 character ; yet amiable, cordial, companionable, jocose even ; — a 
 good laugh in him withal : there are men whose laugh is as untruo 
 L as anything about them ; who cannot laugh. One hears of 
 Mohammad’s beauty : his fine sagacious honest face, brown florid 
 complexion, beaming black eyes ; — I somehow like too that vein 
 on the brow, which swelied-up black when ho was in anger : like 
 the ‘ horse-shoe vein’ in Scott's liedjauntlet. It was a kind of 
 feature in the Hashem family, this black swelling vein in the 
 brow ; Mohammad had it prominent, as would appear. A spon- 
 taneous, passionate, yet just, true-meaning man ! Full of wild 
 faculty, fire and light ; of wild worth, all uncultured ; working 
 out his life-task in the depths of the Desert there. 
 
 How he was placed with Kadijah, a rich Widow, as her 
 Steward, and travelled in her business, again to the Fairs of 
 Syria ; how he managed all, as one can well understand, with 
 fidelity, adroitness ; how her gratitude, her regard for him grew : 
 the story of their marriage is altogether a graceful intelligible 
 one, as told us by the Arab authors. He was twenty-five ; she 
 forty, though still beautiful. He seems to have lived in a most 
 affectionate, peaceabe, wholesome way with this wedded bene- 
 factress ; loving her truly, and her alone. It goes greatly against 
 the imposter theory, the fact that he lived in this entirely un- 
 exceptionable, entirely quiet and commonplace way, till the heat 
 of his years was done. He was forty before he talked of any 
 mission from Heaven. All his irregularities, real and supposed, 
 date from after his fiftieth year, when the good Kadijah died. 
 All his ‘ ambition,’ seemingly, had been, hitherto, to live an 
 honest life ; his ‘ fame,’ the mere good opinion of neighbours 
 that knew him, had been sufficient hitherto. Not till he was 
 already getting old, the prurient heat of his life all burnt out, 
 and peace growing to be the chief thing this world could give him, 
 did he start on the ‘ career of ambition’ ; and, belying all his 
 past character and existence, set-up as a wretched empty charlatan 
 to acquire what he could now no longer enjoy ! For my share, 
 I hav3 no faith whatever in that. 
 
 Ah no : this deep-hearted Son of the Wilderness, with his 
 beaming black eyes aud open social deep soul, had other thoughts 
 in him than ambition. A silent great soul ; he was one of those 
 
( 10 ) 
 
 Avlio cannot but bo in earnest; whom Nature herself has appointed 
 to be sincere. While others walk in formulas and hearsays, 
 contented enough to dwell there, this man could not screen him- 
 self in formulas ; he was alone with his own soul and the reality 
 of things. The great Mystery of Existence, as I said, glared, in 
 upon him, with its terrors, with its splendours; no hearsays 
 could hide that unspeakable fact, “ Here am I !” Such sincerity, 
 as we named it, has in very truth something of divine. The word 
 of such a man is a Voice direct from Nature’s own Heart. Men 
 do and must listen to that as to nothing else ; — all else is wind in 
 comparison. From of old, a thousand thoughts, in his pilgrim- 
 ings and wanderings, had been in this man : What am I ? What 
 is this unfathomable Thing I live in which men name Universe ? 
 What is Life ; what is Death ? What am I to believe ? What 
 am I to do ? The grim rocks of Mount Hara of Mount Sinai, the 
 stern sandy solitudes answered not. The great Heaven rolling 
 silent overhead, with its blue-glancing stars, answered not. There 
 was no answer. The man’s own soul, and what of God’s inspira- 
 tion dwelt there, had to answer. 
 
 It is the thing which all men have to ask themselves ; which 
 we to have to ask, and answer. This wild man felt it to bo of 
 infinite moment : all other things of no moment whatever in com- 
 parison. The jargon of argumentative Greek Sects vague tradi- 
 tion of Jews, the stupid routine of Arab Idolatry : there was no 
 answer in these. A Hero, as I repeat, has this first distinction, 
 which indeed we may call first and last, the Alpha and Omega of 
 his whole Heroism. That he looks through* the shews of things 
 into things. Use and wont, respectable hearsay, respectable 
 formula : all these are good, or are not good. There is something 
 behind and beyond all these, which all these must correspond 
 with, be the image of, or they are — Idolatries ; ‘bits of black 
 wood pretending to be God’ ; to the earnest soul a mockery and 
 abomination. Idolatries never so gilded, waited on by heads of 
 the Koreish, will do nothing for this man. Though all men walk 
 by them, what good is it ? The great Reality stands glaring thero 
 upon him. He thero has to answer it, or perish miserably. Now, 
 even now, or else through all Eternity never ! Answer it, thou 
 must find an answer. — Ambition ? What could all Arabia do for 
 this man ; with the crown of Greek Ileraclius, of Persian Clios- 
 roes, and all crown in the Earth ; — what could they all do for 
 him ? It was not of the Earth he wanted to hear tell ; it was of 
 the Heaven above and of the Hell beneath. All crowns and 
 sovereignties whatsoever, where would they in a few brief years 
 be ? To be Sheikh of Mecca or Arabia, and have a bit ot gilt 
 wood put into your hand, — will that bo one’s salvation ? I 
 decidedly think, not. Wo will leave it altogether, this impostor- 
 
( 11 ) 
 
 hypothesis, as noL credible ; not very tolerable even, worthy chiefly 
 of dismissal by us. 
 
 Mohammad had been wont to retire yearly, during the month 
 Ramadhan, into solitude aud silence ; as indeed was the Arab 
 custom ; a praiseworthy custom, which such a man, above all, 
 would find natural and useful. Communing with his own heart, 
 in the silence of the mountains ; himself silent ; open to the ‘small 
 still voices’ : it was a right natural custom ! Mohammad was in 
 his fortieth year, when having withdrawn to a cavern in Mount lluru, 
 near Mecca, during this llamadhan, to pass the month in prayer, 
 and meditation on those great questions, ho one day told his wife 
 Khadijah, who with his household was with him or near him this 
 year. That by the unspeakable special favour of Heaven lie lmd 
 now found it all out ; was in doubt and darkness no longer, but 
 sasv it all. That all those Idols and Formulas were nothing, 
 miserable bits of wood ; that there was one God in aud over ad ; 
 and we must leave all Idols, and look to Him. That God is great; 
 aud that there is nothing else great! He is the Reality. Wooden 
 Idols are not real ; He is real. He made us at first, sustains us 
 yet; we and all things are but the shadow of Him; a transitory 
 garment veiling the Eternal Splendour. ‘ Allahu-akbar, God is 
 g^reut — and then also ‘Islam,’ That we must submit to God. 
 That our whole strength lies in resigned submission to Him, what- 
 soever He do to us. For this world, and for the other ! The 
 thing He sends to us, were it death and worse than death, shall be 
 good, shall be best; we resign ourselves to God. — ‘If this be 
 Islam,’ says Goethe, ‘do we not all live in Islam?’ Yes, all of 
 us that have any moral life ; we all live so. It has ever been held 
 the highest wisdom for a man not merely to submit to Necessity, 
 — Necessity will make him submit, — but to know and believe well 
 that the stern tiling which Necessity had ordered was the wisest, 
 the best, the thing wanted there. To cease his frantic pretension 
 of scanning this great God’s-World in his small fraction of a brain; 
 to know that it had verily, though deep beyond bis soundings, a 
 Just Law, that the soul of it was Good ; — that his part in it was 
 to conform to the Law of the Whole, aud in devout silence follow 
 that ; not questioning it, obeying it as unquestionable. 
 
 I say, this is yet the only true morality known. A man is 
 right and invincible, virtuous and on the road towards sure con- 
 quest, precisely while he joins himself to the great deep Law of 
 the World, in spite of all superficial laws, temporary appearances, 
 profit-and-loss calculations ; he is victorious while he cooperates 
 with that great central Law, not victorious otherwise : — and sure- 
 ly his first chance of cooperating with it, or getting into the course 
 of it, is to know with his whole soul that it is ; that it is good, and 
 alone good 1 This is the soul of Islam ; it is properly the. soul of 
 
( 12 ) 
 
 Christianity ; — for Islam is definable as a confus ed form of Chris- 
 tianity : had Christianity not been, neither had it been Chris- 
 tianity also commands us, before all, to be resigned to God. We 
 are to take no counsel with flesh-and-blood ; give ear to no 
 vain cavils, vain sorrows and wishes : to know that we know no- 
 thing; that the worst and cruelest to our eyes isnotwhat it seems; 
 that we have to receive whatsoever befalls us as sent from God 
 above, and say. It is good and wise, God is great ! “ Though he 
 
 slay me, yet will I trust in Him.” Islam means in its way Denial 
 of Self, Annihilation of Self. This is yet the highest Wisdom that 
 Heaven has revealed to our Earth. 
 
 Such light had come, as it could, to illuminate the darkness 
 of this wild Arab soul. A confused dazzling splendour as of life 
 and Heaven, in the great darkness which threatened to be death : 
 he called it revelation and the angel Gabriel; — who of us yet can 
 know wliat to call it? It is the ‘inspiration of the Almighty that 
 giveth us understanding. To kncno ; to get into the truth of any- 
 thing, is ever a mystic act, — of which the best Logics can but 
 babble on the surface. ‘Is not Belief the true god-announcing 
 Miracle?’ says Novalis — That Mohammad’s whole soul, set in 
 flame with this grand Truth vouchsafed, him, should feel as if it 
 were important and the only important thing, was very natural. 
 That Providence had unspeakably honoured him by revealing it, 
 saying him from death and darkness ; that he therefore was bound 
 to make known the same to all creatures; this is what was meant 
 by ‘Mohammad is the Prophet of God’ ; this too is not without its 
 true meaning. — 
 
 The good Khadijah, we can fancy, listened to him with wonder, 
 with doubt: at length she answered : Yes, it was true this that he 
 said. One can fancy too the boundless gratitude of Mohammad ; 
 aud how of all the - kindnesses she had done him, this of believing 
 the earnest struggling word he now spoke was the greatest. ‘It is 
 certain,’ says Novalis, ‘my Conviction gains infinitely, the moment 
 another soul will believe in it.’ It is a boundless favour. — He 
 never forget this good Khadijah. Long afterwards, Ayeslia his 
 young favourite wife, a woman who indeed distinguished herself 
 among the Moslem, by all manner of qualities, through her whole 
 long life ; this young brilliant Ayeslia was, one day, questioning 
 him: “Now am not 1 better than Khadijah? She was a widow ; 
 old, and had lost her looks : you love mo better than you did her?” 
 
 . — “No, by Allah!” answered Mohammad: No, by Allah! Sho 
 believed in mo when none else would believe. In the whole world 
 I had but one friend, and she was that!” — Zeid, his Slave, also 
 believed in him ; these with his young Cousin Ali, Abu Taleb’s 
 son, wore his first converts. 
 
 lie spoke of his Doctrine to this man and that ; but the meat 
 
( 13 ) 
 
 treated it with ridicule, with indifference ; in three year?, I think, 
 he had gained but thirteen followers. Iiis progress was slow 
 enough. His encouragement to go on, was altogether the usual 
 encouragement that such a man in such a case meets. After some 
 three years of small success, he invited forty of his chief kindred to 
 an entertainment ; and there stood-up and told them what his pre- 
 tension was ; that ho had this thing to promulgate abroad to all 
 men ; that it was the highest tiling, the one thing : which of them 
 would second him in that ? Amid the doubt and silence of all, 
 young Ali, as yet a lad of sixteen, impatient of the silence, started- 
 up and exclaimed in passionate fierce language. That he would ! 
 The assembly, among whom was Abu Taleb, Ali’s Father, could 
 not be unfriendly to Mohammad ; yet the sight there, of one un- 
 lettered elderly man, with a lad of sixteen, deciding on such an 
 enterprise against all mankind, appeared ridiculous to them ; the 
 assembly broke-up in laughter. .Nevertheless it proved not a 
 laughable thing; it was a very serious thing ! As for this young 
 Ali, one cannot but like him. A noble-minded creature, as ho 
 shows himself, now and always afterwards ; full of affection, of 
 fiery daring. {Something chivalrous in him ; brave as a lion ; yet 
 with a grace, a truth and affection worthy of Christian knighthood. 
 He died by assassination in the Mosque at Bagdad ; a death occa- 
 sioned by his own generous fairness, confidence in the fairness of 
 others : lie said. If the wound proved not unto death, they must 
 pardon the Assassin ; but if it did, then the}' must slay him 
 straightway, that so they two in the same hour 'might appear be- 
 fore God, and see which side of that quarrel was the just one ! 
 
 Mohammad naturally gave offence to the Koreisli, Keepers of 
 the Oaabah, superintendents of the Idols. One or two men of in- 
 fluence had joined him : the thing spread slowly, but it was spread- 
 ing. Naturally he gave offence to everybody : Who is this that 
 pretends to be wiser than we all ; that rebukes us all, as mere fools 
 and worshippers of wood ! Abu Taleb the good Uncle spoke 
 with him : Could he not be silent about all that ; believe it all for 
 himself, and not trouble others, anger the chief men, endanger 
 himself and them all, talking of it ? Mohammad answered : If the 
 Sun stood on his right hand and the Moon on his left, ordering 
 him to hold his peaee, he could not obe}' ! No ; there was some- 
 thing in this Truth he had got which was of Nature herself ; equal 
 in rank to Sun, or Moon, or whatsoever thing Nature had made. 
 It would speak itself there, so long as the Almighty allowed it, in 
 spite of Sun and Moon, and all Koreish and all men and things. 
 It much do that, and could do no other. Mohammad answered so ; 
 and, they say, ‘ burst into tears.’ Burst into tears : he felt that 
 Abu Taleb was good to him ; that the task he had got was no 
 soft, but a stem and great one. 
 
( H ) 
 
 He went on speaking to who would listen to him ; publishing 
 his Doctrine among the pilgrims as they came to Mecca ; gaining 
 adherents in this place and that. Continual contradiction, hatred, 
 open or secret danger attended him. His powerful relations 
 protected Mohammad himself; but by and by, on his own advice, 
 all his adherents had to quit Mecca, and seek refuge in Abyssinia 
 over the sea. The Koreish grew ever angrier ; laid plots, and 
 swore oaths among them, to put Mohammad to death with their 
 own hands. Abu Taleb was dead, the good Khadijah was dead. 
 Mohammad is not solicitous of sympathy from us ; but his outlook ->• 
 at this time was one of the dismalest. lie had to hide in caverns, 
 escape in disguise ; Hy hither and thither ; homeless, in continual 
 peril of his life. More than once it seemed all-over with him ; 
 more than once it turned on a straw, some rider’s horse taking 
 fright or the like, whether Mohammad and his Doctrine had not 
 ended there, and not been heard of at all. But it was not to end so. 
 
 In the thirteenth year of his mission, finding his enemies all 
 banded against him, forty sworn men, one out of every tribe, 
 waiting to take his life, and no continuance possible at Mecca 
 for him any longer, Mohammad fled to the place then called 
 Yathreb, where he had gained some adherents ; the place they 
 now call Medina, or ‘ Medinat al Nabi, tlie City ot the Prophet, 
 from that cricumstance. It lay some 200 miles off, through rocks 
 and deserts ; not without great difficulty, in such mood as we may 
 fancy, he escaped thither, and found welcome. The whole East 
 dates its era from this Flight Hegira as they name it : the Year 
 1 of this Hegira is 622 of our Era, the fifty-third of Mohammad’s 
 life. He was now becoming an old man ; his friends sinking 
 round him one by one ; his path desolate, encompassed with dan- 
 ger : unless lid could find hope in his own heart, the outward 
 face of things was but helpless for him. It is so with all men in 
 the like case. Hitherto Mohammad had professed to publish his 
 Religion by the way of preaching and persuasion alone. But now, 
 driven foully out of his native country, since unjust men had not 
 only given no ear to his earnest Heaven’s-message, the deep cry 
 of his heart, but would not even lot him live if he kept speaking 
 it, — the wild Son of the Desert resolved to defend himself, like a 
 man and Arab. If the Koreish will have it so, they shall have it. 
 Tidings, felt to be of infinite moment to them and all men, they 
 would not listen to these ; would trample them down by sheer 
 violence, steel and murder : well, let steel try it then ! Ton years 
 more this Mohammad had ; all of fighting, of breathless impetuous 
 toil and struggle ; with what result we know. 
 
 Much has been said of Mohammad’s propagating his Religion 
 by the sword. It is no doubt far nobler what we have to boast of 
 the Christian Religion, that it propagated itself peaceably in tho 
 
 > 
 
( 15 ) 
 
 •way of preaching anil conviction. Yet, withal, if wo take this for 
 an argument of the truth or falsehood of a religion, there is a 
 radical mistake in it. The sword indeed : but where will you get 
 your sword ! Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in 
 a minority of one. In one man’s head alone, there it dwells as yet. 
 One man alone of the whole world believes it; there is one man 
 against all men. That he take a sword, and try to propagate with 
 that, will do little for him. You must first get your sword ! On 
 the whole, a thing will propagate itself as it can. We do not find, 
 of the Christian Religion either, that it always disdained the 
 sword, when once it had got one. Charlemagne’s conversion of 
 the Saxons was not by preaching. I-care little about the sword : 
 I will allow a thing to struggle for itself in this world, with any 
 sword or tongue or implement it has, or can lay hold of. Wo 
 will let it preach, and pamphleteer, and fight, and to the uttermost 
 bestir itself, and do, beak and claws, whatsoever is in it; very sure 
 that it will, in the long-run, conquer nothing which does not 
 deserve to lie conquered. What is better than itself, it cannot put 
 away, but only what is worse. In this great Duel, Nature herself 
 is umpire, and can do uo wrong ; the thing which is deepest- 
 rooted in Nature, wlmt we call truest, that thing and not tho 
 other will be found growing at last. 
 
 Here however, in reference to much that there is in Moham- 
 mad and his success, we are to remember what an umpire Nature 
 is ; what a greatness, composure of depth and tolerance there is 
 in her. You take wheat to cast into the Earth’s bosom : your 
 wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings, 
 dust and all imaginable rubbish ; no matter : you cast it into the 
 kind just Earth ; she grows the wheat, — the whole rubbish she 
 silently' absorbs, shrouds it in, says nothing of the rubbish. The 
 yellow wheat is growing there ; the good Earth is silent about all 
 the rest, — has silently turned all the rest to some benefit too, and 
 makes no complaint about it ! So everywhere in Nature ! She 
 is true and not a lie ; and yet so great, and just, and motherly in 
 her truth. She requires of a thing only that it he genuine of 
 heart ; she will protect it if so ; will not, if not so. There is a 
 soul of truth in all the things she ever gave harbour to. Alas, is 
 not’this the history of all highest Truth that comes or ever came 
 into the world ? The body of them all is imperfection, an element 
 of light in darkness : to us they have to come embodied in mere 
 Logie, in some merely scientific Theorem of the Universe ; which 
 cannot be complete ; which cannot but be found, one day in- 
 complete, erroneous, and so die and disappear. The body' of all 
 Truth dies ; and yet in all, I say, there is a soul which never dies ; 
 which in new and ever-nobler embodiment lives immortal as man 
 himself ! It is the way T with Nature. The genuine essence of Truth 
 
( 16 ) 
 
 never dies. That it be genuine, a voice from the great Deep of 
 Nature, there is the point at Nature’s judgment seat. What we 
 call pure or impure, is not with her the final question- Not how 
 much chaff is in you ; but whether you have any wheat. Pure ! 
 I might say to many a man : Yes, you are pure ; pure enough ; 
 but you are chaff, — insincere hypothesis, hearsay? formality ; you 
 never were in contact with the great heart of the Universe at all ; 
 yon are properly neither pure nor impure ; you are nothing. 
 Nature has no business with you. 
 
 Mohammad’s Creed we called a kind of Christianity ; and 
 really, if we look at the wild rapt earnestness with which it was 
 believed and laid to heart, I Should say a better kind than that of 
 those miserable Syrian Sects, with their vain janglings about 
 Homoiousion and Homoousion, the head fall of worthless noise 
 the heart empty and dead ! The truth of its embedded in 
 portentous error and falsehood ; but the truth of it makes it be 
 believed, not the falsehood : it succeeded by its truth. A bastard 
 kind of Christianity, but a living kind ; with a heart-life in it ; 
 not dead, chopping barren logic merely! Out of all that rubbish 
 of Arab idolatries, argumentative theologies, traditions, subtleties, 
 rumours and hypotheses of Greeks and Jews, with their idle wire- 
 drawings, this wild man of the Desert, with his wild sincere heart, 
 earnest as death and life, with his great flashing natural eyesight, 
 had seen into the kernal of the matter. Idolatry is nothing : these 
 Wooden Idols of yours, ‘ye rub them with oil and wax, and the 
 flies stick on them,’ — these are wood, 1 tell you ! They can do 
 nothing for you ; they are an impotent blasphemous pretence; a 
 horror and abomination, if ye knew them. God alone is ; God 
 alone has power ; He made us, He can kill us and keep us alive : 
 ‘ Allahu-akhar , God is great.’ Understand that His will is the best 
 for you ; that howsoever sore to flesh-and-blood, you will find it the 
 wisest, best : you are bound to take it so ; in this world and in the 
 next, you havo no other thing that you can do ! And now if the 
 wild idolatrous men did believe this, and with their fiery hearts lay 
 hold of it to do it, in what form soever it came to them, I say it 
 was well worthy of being believed. In one form or the other, I 
 say it is still the one thing worthy of being believed by all men. 
 Man does hereby become the high-priest of this Temple of a 
 World. He is in harmony with the Decrees of the Author of this 
 World; cooperating with them, not vainly withstanding them: 
 know, to this day, no better definition of Duty than that same. 
 All that is right includes itself in this of cooperating with the real 
 Tendency of the World : you succeed by this (the World’s Ten- 
 dency will succeed), you are good, and in the right course there. 
 Homoiousion, Homoousion , vain logical jangle, then or before or 
 at any time, may jangle itself out, and go whither and how it 
 
( 17 ) 
 
 likes : this is the (lung it all struggles to moan, if it •would mean 
 anything. If it do not succeed in meaning this, it means nothing. 
 Not that Abstractions, logical Propositions, ho correctly worded 
 or incorrectly ; hut that living concrete Sons of Adam do lay this 
 to heart : that is the important point. Islam devoured all these 
 vain jangling Sects ; and I think had right to do so. It was a 
 Reality, direct from (lie great Heart of Nature once more. Arab 
 idolatries, Syrian formulas, whatsoever was not equally real, had 
 to go up in flame, — more dead fuel , in various senses, for this 
 V which was fire. 
 
 It was during the wild warfarings and stragglings, especially, 
 after the Flight to Mecca, that Mohammad dictated at intervals 
 his Sacred Book, which they name Koran, or Reading, ‘Thing to 
 be read.’ This is the Work he and his disciples made so much of, 
 asking all the word. Is not that a miracle ? The Mohamrnadans 
 regard their Koran with a reverence which few Christians pay 
 even to their Bible. It is admitted everywhere as the standard of 
 all Jaw and all practice ; the thing to be none upon in speculation 
 and life: the message sent direct out of Heaven, which this Earth 
 has to conform to, and walk by ; the thing to be read. Their 
 Judges decide by it ; all Moslems are bound to study it, seek in it 
 for the light of their life. They have mosques where it is all read 
 daily ; thirty relays of priests take it up in succession, get through 
 the whole each day. There, for twelve-hundred years, has the 
 voice of this Book, at all moments, kept sounding through the 
 ears and the hearts of so many men. We hear of Mohammadan 
 Doclors that had read it seventy thousand times ! 
 
 Very curious: if one sought for ‘discrepancies of national 
 taste,’ here surely were the most eminent instance of that ! We 
 also can read the Koran ; our Translation of it, by Sale, is known 
 to be a very fair one. I must say, it is as toilsome reading as I 
 ever undertook. A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite ; 
 endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement ; most crude, 
 incondite; — insupportable stupidity, in short! 'Nothing but a 
 sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran. We 
 read in it, as we might in the State-Paper Office, unreadable masses 
 of lumber, that perhaps we may get some glimpses of a remark- 
 aide man. It is true we have it under disadvantages : the Arabs 
 see more method in it than we. Mohammad’s followers found the 
 Koran lying all in fractions, as it had been written-down at first 
 promulgation ; much of it, they say, on shoulder-blades of mutton, 
 flung pellmell into a chest : and they published it, without any 
 discoverable order as to time or otherwise ; — merely trying, as 
 would seem, and this not very strictly, to put the longest chapters 
 first. The real beginning ot it, in that way, lies almost at the 
 end : for the earliest portions were the shortest. Head in its 
 
< 18 ) 
 
 historical sequence it perhaps would not be so bad. Much of it, 
 too, they say, is rhythmic ; a kind of wild chanting song, in the 
 original. This may be a great point ; much perhaps has been lost 
 in the Translation here. Yet with every allowance, one feels it 
 difficult to see how any mortal ever could consider this Koran as a 
 Book written in Heaven, too good for the Earth ; as a well-written 
 book, or indeed as a book at all ; and not a bewildered rhapsody ; 
 written , so far as writing goes, as badly as almost any book ever 
 was 1 So much for national discrepancies, and the standard of 
 taste. 
 
 Yet I should say, it was not unintelligible how the Arabs 
 might so love it. When once you get this confused coil of a Koran 
 fairly off your hands, and have it behind you at a distance, the 
 essential type of it begins to disclose itself ; and in this there is 
 a merit quite other than the literary one. If a book come from 
 the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and author- 
 craft are of small amount to that. One would say the primary 
 character of the Koran is this of its genuineness , of its being a 
 bona-fide book. Prideaux, I know, and others have represented 
 it as a mere bunlde of juggleries ; chapter after chapter got up 
 to excuse and varnish the author’s successive sins, forward his 
 apibitions and quackeries : but really it is time to dismiss all that. 
 I do not asseit Mohammad’s continual sincerity: who is con- 
 tinually sincere ? But I confess I can make nothing of the critic, 
 in these times, who would accuse him of deceit prepense ; of 
 conscious deceit generally, or perhaps at all ; — still more, of living 
 in a mere element of conscious deceit, and writting this Koran as 
 a forger and juggler would have done ! Every candid eye, I think, 
 will read the Koran far otherwise than so. It is the confused 
 ferment of a great rude human soul : rude, untutored, that cannot 
 even read ; but fervent, earnest, struggling vehemently to utter 
 itself in words. With a kind of breathless intensity he strives to 
 utter himself ; the thoughts crowd on him pellmell : for very 
 multitude of things to say, he can get nothing said. The meaning 
 that is in him shapes itself into no form of composition, is stated 
 in no sequence, method or coherence ; — they are not shaped, at all, 
 these thoughts of his ; flung out unshaped, as they struggle and 
 tumble there, in their chaotic inarticulate state. Wo said ' stupid;’ 
 yet natural stupidity is by no means the character of Mohammad’s 
 Book ; it is natural uncultivation rather. The man has not 
 studied speaking ; in the haste and pressure of continual fighting, 
 has not time to mature himself into fit speech. The panting 
 bieathless haste and vehemence of a man struggling in the thick 
 of battle for life and salvation ; this is the mood ho is in 1 A 
 headlong haste ; for very magnitude of meaning, he cannot get 
 himself articulated into words. The successivo utterances of a 
 
( 19 > 
 
 soul in that mood, ‘coloured by tho various vicissitudes of tliree- 
 and-twenty years ; now well uttered, uovv worse : this is tho 
 Koran. 
 
 For we are to consider Mohammad, through these three-and- 
 twenty years, as the centre of a world wholly iu conflict. Battles 
 with the Koreish and Heathen, quarrels among his own people, 
 baekslidings of bis own wild heart ; all this kept him iu a perpetual 
 whirl, his soul knowing rest no more. In wakeful nights, as one 
 may fancy, the wild soul of the man, tossing amid these vortices, 
 would hail auy light of a decision for them as a veritable light 
 from Heaven ; any making-up of his mind, so blessed, indispen- 
 sable for him there, would seem the inspiration of a Gabriel. 
 Forger and juggler? No,, no ! This great fiery heart, seething, 
 simmering like a great furnace of thoughts, was not a juggler’s. 
 His life was a Fact to him ; this God's Universe an awful Fact 
 and Reality. He has faults enough. The man was an uncultured 
 semi-barbarous Son of Nature, much of the Bedouin still clinging 
 to him : we must take him for that. But for a wretched Simula- 
 crum, a hungy Impostor without eyes or heart, practising for a 
 mess of pottage such blasphemous swindlery, forgery of celestial 
 documents, continual liigh-treason against his Maker and Self, 
 wo will not and cannot take him. 
 
 Sincerity, in all senses, seems to me the merit of the Koran ; 
 what had rendered it precious to the wild Arab men. It is, after 
 all, the first and last merit in a book ; gives rise to merits of all 
 kinds, — nay, bottom, it alone can gives rise to merit of all kind. 
 Curiously, through these incondite masses of tradition, vituperation, 
 complaint, ejaculation in the Koran, a vein of true direct insight, 
 of what we might almost call poetry, is found straggling. Tho 
 body of the Book is made up of mere tradition, and as it were 
 vehement enthusiastic extempore preaching. He returns forever 
 to the old stories of the Prophets as they went current in the Arab 
 memory : how Propdiet after Prophet, the Prophet Abraham, the 
 Prophet Hud, the Prophet Moses, Christian and other real and 
 fabulous Prophets, had come to this Tribe and to that, warning 
 men of their sin ; and been received by them even as he Moham- 
 mad was, — which is a great solace to him. These things he 
 repeats ten, perhapis twenty times ; again and ever again, with 
 wearisome iteration ; has never done repeating them. A brave 
 Samuel Johnson, in his forlorn garret, might study the Biogra- 
 phies of Authors iu that way ? This is the great staple of the 
 Koran. But curiously, through all this, comes ever and anon 
 some glance as of the real thinker and seer. He has actually an 
 ej^e for.tlie world, this Mohammad : with a certain directness and 
 rugged vigour, he bring home still, to our heart, the thing his own 
 heart has been opened to. I make but little of his praises of Allah, 
 
( 20 ) 
 
 ■which many praise ; they are borrowed I suppose mainly from the 
 Hebrew, at least they are far surpassed there. But the eye that 
 flashes direct into the heart of things, and sees the truth ot them ; 
 this is to me a highly interesting object. Great Nature’s own 
 gift ; which she bestows on all ; but which only one in the thou- 
 sand does not cast sorrowfully away : it is what I call sincerity 
 ot vision ; the test of a sincere heart. Mohammad can work no 
 miracles ; he often answers impatiently ; I can work no miracles. 
 I ? ‘I am a Public Preacher’ ; appointed to preach this doctrine 
 to all creatures. Yet the world, as we can see, had really from 
 of old been all one great miracle to him. Look over the world, 
 says he ; is it not wonderful, the work of Allah ; wholly ‘a sign 
 to you,’ if your eyes were open ! This Earth, God made it for 
 you ; ‘appointed paths in it’ ; you can live in it, go to and fro 
 on it. — The clouds in the dry country of Arabia, to Mohammad 
 they are very wonderful : Great clouds, he says, born in the 
 
 deep bosom of the Upper Immensity, where do they come from I 
 They hang there, the great black monsters ; pour down their rain- 
 deluges ‘ to revive a dead Earth,’ and grass springs, and ‘ tall leafy 
 palm ‘trees with their date-clusters hanging round. Is that not a 
 sign ?’ Your cattle too, — Allah made them ; serviceable dumb 
 creatures ; they change the grass into milk ; you have your cloth- 
 ing from them, very strange creatures ; they come ranking home 
 at evening time, ‘and,’ adds he, ‘and are a credit to you!’ 
 Ships, — he talks often about ships : Huge moving mountains, they 
 spread-out their cloth wings, go bounding through the water there 
 Heaven’s wind driving them ; anon they lie motionless, God has 
 withdrawn the wind, they lie dead, and cannot stir! Miracles? 
 cries he : What miracle would you have? Are not you yourselves 
 there? God mado you, shaped you out of little clay.’ Ye were 
 once small ; a few years ago ye were not at all. Ye have 
 beauty, strength, thoughts, ‘ye have compassion on one another.’ 
 Old age comes on you, and grey hairs ; )'our strength fades into 
 feebleness ; ye sink down, and again are not. ‘Ye have compas- 
 sion on ono another ;’ this struck me much: Allah might have 
 made you having no compassion on one another, — how had it 
 been then ! This is a great direct thought, a glance at first-hand 
 into the very fact of things, llude vestiges of poetic genius, of 
 whatsoever is best and truest, are visible in this man. A strong 
 untutored intellect ; eyesight, heart : a strong wild man — might 
 have shaped himself into Poet, King, Priest, any kind of Hero. 
 
 To his eyes it is forever clear that this world wholly is miracu- 
 lous. Ho sees what, as we said once before, all great thinkers, 
 the rude Scandinavians themselves, in one way or other, have 
 contrived to see : That this so solid-looking material world is, at 
 bottom, in very deed, Nothing ; is a visual and tactual Manifes- 
 
( 21 ) 
 
 tation of God’s power and presence, — a shadow lain" out hy Ilim 
 on the bosom of the void Infinite; nothing more. The mountains, 
 ho says, these great rock-mountains, they shall dissipate them- 
 selves ‘like clouds’; melt into the Blue as clouds do, and not be! 
 He figures Use Earth, in the Arab fashion, Sale tells us, as an 
 immense Plain or flat Plate of ground, the mountains are set on 
 that to steady it. At the Last Day they shall disappear ‘like 
 clouds ’; the whole Earth shall go spinning, whirl itself oft’ into 
 wreck, and as dust and vapour vanish in the Inane. Allah with- 
 ^ draws his hand from it, and it ceases to be. The universal empire 
 of Allah, presence everywhere of an unspeakable Power, a Splen- 
 dour, and a Terror not to be named, as the true force, essence .and 
 reality, in all things whatsover, was continually clear to this man. 
 AVhat a modern taiksofby the name. Forces of Nature, Laws of 
 Nature ; and does not figure as a divine thing ; not even as one 
 thing at all, but as a set of things, undivine enough, — saleable, 
 curious, ijood for propelling steam-ships ! With our Sciences and 
 Cyclopaedias, we are apt to forget the divineness, in those labora- 
 tories of ours. We ought not to forget it ! That once well for- 
 gotten, I know not what else were worth remembering. Most 
 sciences, I think were then a very dead thing ; withered, conten- 
 tious, empty; — a thistle in lateautumn. The best science, without 
 this, is but as the dead timber ; it is not the growing tree and 
 forest, — which gives ever new-timber, among other things ! Man 
 cannot know either, unless he can worship in some way. His 
 knowledge is a pedantry, and dead thistle, otherwise. 
 
 Much has been said and written about the sensuality of 
 Mohammad’s Heligion ; more than was just. The indulgences, 
 criminal to us, which he permitted, were not of his appointment ; 
 he found them practised, unquestioned from immemorial time in 
 Arabia ; what ho did was to curtail them, restrict them, not on 
 one but on many sides. His Religion is not an easy one : with 
 rigorous fasts, lavations, strict complex formulas, prayers five 
 times a day, and abstinence from wine, it did not ‘succeed ' by 
 being an easy religion.’ As if indeed any religion, or cause hold- 
 ing of religion, could succeed by that ! It is a calumny on men 
 to say that they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of plea- 
 sure, recompense, — sugar-plums of any kind, in this world or the 
 next ! In the meanest mortal there lies something nobler. The 
 poor swearing soldier, hired to be shot, has his ‘honour of a 
 soldier,’ different from drill-regulations and the shilling a day. It 
 is not to taste sweet things but to do noble and true things, and 
 vindicate himself under God’s Heaven as a god-made Man, that the 
 poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing 
 that, the dullest daydrudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man 
 greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnega- 
 
( 22 > 
 
 tion, martyrdom-, death are the allurements that act on the heart 
 of man. Kindle the inner genial life of him, you have a flame 
 that burns-up all lower considerations. Not happiness, but some- 
 thing higher : one sees this even in the frivolous classes, with their 
 ‘point of honour’ and the like. Not by flattering our appetites ; 
 no, by awakening the Heroic that slumbers in every heart, can 
 any iieligion gain followers. 
 
 Mohammad himself, after all that can be said about him, was 
 not a sensual man. We shall err widely if we consider this man 
 as a common voluptuary, intent mainly on base enjoyments — nay ^ 
 on enjoyments of any kind. His household was of the frugalest ’ r 
 his common diet barley-bread and water: sometimes for months 
 there was not a fire once lighted on his hearth. They record with 
 just pride that he would mend his own shoes, patch his own cloak. 
 
 A poor, hard-toiling, ill-provided man; careless of what vulgar 
 men toil for. Not a bad man, I should say; something better in 
 him than Imager of any sort, — or these wild Arab men, fighting 
 and jostling three-and-twenty years at his hand, in close contact 
 with him always, would not have reverenced him so 1 They were 
 wild men, bursting ever and auon into quarrel, into all kinds of 
 fierce sincerity; without right worth and manhood, no man could 
 have commanded them. They called him Prophet, you say ? Why, 
 he stood there face to face with them ; bare, not enshrined in auy 
 mystery ; visibly clouting his own cloak, cobbling his own shoes; 
 fii'htinff, counsclliim, orderin'; in the midst of them : they must 
 have seen what kind of a man he was, let him be called what you 
 like I No emperor with his tiaras was obeyed as this man in a 
 cloak of his own clouting. During three-and-twenty years of 
 rough actual trial. I find something of a veritable Hero necessary 
 for that, of itself. 
 
 His last words are a prayer ; broken ejaculations of a heart 
 struggling-up, in trembling hope, towards its Maker. We cannot 
 say that his religion made him icorse ; it made him better ; good, 
 not bad. Generous things are recorded of him : when he lost his 
 Daughter, the thing he answers is, in his own dialect, everyway 
 sincere, and yet equivalent to that of Christians. The Lord giveth, 
 
 ‘and the Lord taketh away ; blessed be the name of the Lord.’ Ho 
 answered in like manner of Zeid, his emancipated well-beloved 
 Slave, the second of the believers. Zeid had fallen in the \\ ar of 
 Tabuc, the first of Mohammad’s fightings with the Greeks. 
 Mohammad said. It was well ; Zeid had done his Master’s work, 
 
 Zeid had now gone to his Master: it was all well with Zeid. Yet 
 Zeid’s daughter found him weeping over the body ; — the old grey- 
 liaired man melting in tears! “ What do I see ?” said she. — “You 
 see a friend weeping over his friend.” — He went out for the last 
 time into the mosque, two days before hi# death ; asked, It he had 
 

 ( » ) 
 
 injured nny man? Lot liis own back bear the stripes. If lie owed 
 nny man? A voice answered, “Yes, me three drachms,” borrow- 
 ed on such an occasion. Mohammad ordered them to be paid : 
 “Better bo in shame now,” said he, “than at the Day of judg- 
 ment.” — You remember Khadijah, and the “ No, by Allah ! Traits 
 of that kind show us the genuine man, the brother of us all, 
 brought visible through twelve centuries, — the veritable Sou of 
 our common Mother. 
 
 Withal I like Mohammad for his total freedom from cant. 
 
 -X- He is a rough self-helping son of the wilderness ; does not pretend 
 to be what he is not. There is no ostentatious pride in him ; but 
 neither does he go much upon humility ; he is there as he can be, 
 in cloak and shoes of his own clouting ; speaks plainly to all man- 
 ner of Persian Kings, Greek Emperors, what it is they are bound 
 to do; knows well enough, about himself, ‘the respect due unto 
 thee.’ Iu life-and- death war with Bedouins, cruel things could 
 not fail ; but neither are acts of mercy, of noble natural pity and 
 generosity wanting. Mohammad makes no apology for the one, 
 no boast of the other. They were each the free dictate of his heart; 
 each called-for, there and then. Not a mealy-mouthed man ! A 
 candid ferocity, if the case call for it, is in him ; he does not mince 
 matters! The War of Tabue, is a thing he often speaks of: his 
 men refused, many of them, to march on that occasion ; pleaded 
 the heat of the weather, the harvest, and so forth ; he can never 
 forget that. Your harvest? It lasts for a day. What will be- 
 v come of your harvest through all Eternity ? Hot weather? Yes, 
 it was hot ; ‘but Hell will be hotter!’ Sometimes a rough sar- 
 casm turns up : He says to the unbelievers. Ye shall have the 
 just measure of your deeds at that Great Day. They will be 
 weighed-out to you ; ye shall not have short weight ! — Every- 
 where he fixes the matter in his eye ; he sei-s it: his heart, now 
 and then, is as if struck dumb by the greatness of it. ‘Assuredly,’ 
 lie says : that word, in the Koran, is written-down sometimes as a 
 sentence by itself : ‘ Assuredly.’ 
 
 No Dilettantism in this Mohammad ; it is a business of 
 Reprobation aud Salvation with him, of Time and Eternity : he is 
 
 I in deadly earnest about it ! Dilettantism, hypothesis, speculation, 
 a kind of amateur-search for Truth, toying and coquetting with 
 Truth : this is the sorest sin. The root of all other imaginable 
 sins. It consists in the heart and soul of the man never having 
 been open to Truth ; — ‘ living in a vain show.’ Such a man not 
 only utters and produces falsehoods, but is himself a falsehood. 
 The rational moral principle, spark of the Divinity, is sunk deep 
 in him, in quiet paralysis of life-death. The very falsehoods of 
 Mohammad are truer than the truths of such a man. He is the 
 insincere man : smooth-polished, respectable in some times and 
 
( 24 ) 
 
 places : inoffensive, says nothingharsh to anybody ; most cleanly , — 
 just as carbonic acid is, which is death and poison. 
 
 We will not praise Mohammad’s moral precepts as always of 
 the superfinest sort ; yet it can be said that there is always a 
 tendency to good in them ; that they are the true dictates of a 
 heart aiming towards what is just and true. The sublime for- 
 giveness of Christianity, turning of the other cheek when the 
 one has been smitten, is not here : you are to revenge yourself, 
 but it is to be in measure, not overmuch, or beyond justice. On 
 the other band, Islam, like any great Faith, and insight into the 
 essence of man, is a perfect equaliser of men : the soul of one 
 believer outweighs all earthly kingships ; all men, according to 
 Islam too, are equal. Mohammad insists not on the propriety of 
 giving alms, but on the necessity of it : he marks-down by law 
 how much you are to give, and it is at your peril if you neglect. 
 The tenth part of a man’s annual income, whatever that may be, 
 is the property of the poor, of those that are afflicted and need 
 help. Good all this ; the natural voice of humanity, of pity and 
 equity dwelling in the heart of this wild Son of Nature speaks so. 
 
 Mohammad’s Paradise is sensual : his Hell sensual : true ; in the 
 one and the other there is enough thatshocksall spiritual feelinginus. 
 But we are to recollect that the Arabs already had it so ; that Moham- 
 mad, in whatever ho changed of it, softened and diminished all 
 this. The worst sensualities, too, are the work of doctors, follow- 
 ers of his, not his work. In the Koran there is ready very little 
 said about the joys of Paradise ; they are intimated rather than in- 
 sisted on. Nor is it forgotten that the highest joys even there shall 
 be spiritual ; the pure Presence of the Highest, this shall infinitely 
 transcend all other joys. He says, ‘Your salutation ‘ shall ho, 
 Peace.’ Salam, Have Peace ! — the thing that all rational souls 
 long for, and seek, vainly here below, as the one blessing. ‘ Ye 
 shall sit on seats, facing one another : all grudges shall bo ‘ takeu 
 away out of your hearts.’ All grudges ! Ye shall love one 
 another freely ; for each of you, in the eyes of his brothers, there 
 will be Heaven enough ! 
 
 In reference to this of the sensual Paradise and Mohammad’s 
 sensuality, the sorest chapter of all for us, there were many things 
 to he said ; which it is not convenient to enter upon here. Two 
 remarks only I shall make, and therewith leave it to your candour. 
 The first is furnished me by Goethe ; it is a casual hint of his 
 which seems well worth taking note of. In one of his Delinea- 
 tions, in Meisters Travels it is, the hero comes-upon a Society of 
 men with very strange ways, one of which was this: “ Wo 
 
 require,” says the Master, “ that each of our people shall restrict 
 himself in one direction,” shall go right against his desire in one 
 matter, and make himself; do the thing ho does not wish, “ should 
 
 
 N' 
 
 7 
 
 i 
 
( 25 ) 
 
 wo allow him tlio greater latitude on all other sides.’’ There seems 
 to me a great justness in this. Enjoying tilings which are plea- 
 sant ; that is not the evil : it is the reducing of our moral self to 
 slavery by them that is. Let a man assert withal that he is king 
 over his habitudes ; that he could and would shake them off, on 
 cause shown : this is an excellent law. The Month Ramadhan 
 for the Moslem, much in Mohammad’s Religion, much in his own 
 Life, bears in that direction ; if not by forethought, or clear pur- 
 pose of moral improvement on his part, then by a certain healthy 
 manful instinct which is as good. 
 
 But there is another thing to bo said about the Mohammadan 
 Heaven and Hell. This namely, that, however gross and material 
 they may be, they are an emblem of an everlasting truth, not 
 always so well remembered elsewhere. Thatgross sensual Paradise 
 of his ; that horrible flaming Hell ; the great enormous Day of 
 Judgment he perpetually insists on: what is all this but a rude 
 shadow, in the rude Bedouin imagination, of that grand spiritual 
 Fact, and Beginning of Facts, which it is ill for us too if we do 
 not all know and feel ; the Infinite Nature of Duty ? That man’s 
 actions hero are of infinite moment to him, and never die or end 
 at all ; that man, with his little life, reaches upwards high as 
 Heaven, downwards low as Hell, and in his threescore years of 
 Time holds an Eternity fearfully and wonderfully hidden : all this 
 had burnt itself, as in flame-characters, into the wild Arab soul. 
 As in flame and lightning, it stands written there ; awful, un- 
 speakable, ever present to him. With bursting earnestness, with 
 a fierce savage sincerity, halt, articulating, not able to articulate, 
 he strives to speak it, bodies it forth in that Heaven and that Hell. 
 Bodied forth in what way you will, it is the first of all truths. It 
 is veneYable under all embodiments. What is the chief end of 
 man here below ? Mohammad has answered this question, in a 
 way that might put some of us to shame'! He does not, like a 
 Bentham, a Paley, take Right and Wrong, and calculate the 
 profit and loss, ultimate pleasure of the one and of the other ; 
 and summing all up by addition and subtraction into a net result, 
 ask you. Whether on the whole the Right does not preponderate 
 considerably ? No ; it is not better to do the one than the other ; 
 the one is to the other as life is to death, — as Heaven is to Hell. 
 .The one must in no-wise be done, the other in nowise left undone. 
 You shall not measure them ; they are incommensurable the one 
 is death eternal to a man, the other is life eternal. Benthamee 
 Utility, virtue by Profit and Loss ; reducing this God’s-.world to 
 a dead brute Steam-engine, the infinite celestial Soul of Man to a 
 kind of Hay-balance for weighing hay and thistles on, pdeasures 
 and pains on : — If you ask me which gives, Mohammad or they, 
 the beggarlier and falser view of Man and his Destinies in this 
 
( 26 ) 
 
 Universe, X will answer. It is not Mohammad !— 
 
 On the whole, we will repeat that this Religion of Moham- 
 mad's is a kind of Christianity 5 has a genuine element of what is 
 spiritually highest looking through it, not to he hidden by all its 
 imperfections. The Scandinavian God Wish, the god ot all-rude 
 
 men? this has been enlarged into a Heaven by Mohammad ; but 
 
 a Heaven symbolical of sacred Duty, and to be earned by faith 
 and well-doing, by valiant action, and a divine patience which is 
 still more valiant. It is Scandinavian Paganism, and a truly 
 celestial element superadded to that. Call it not false ; look not 
 at tiie falsehood of it look at the truth of it. For these twelve 
 centuries, it has been the religion and life-guidance of the fifth 
 part of the whole kindred of Mankind. Above all things, it has 
 been a religion heartily believed. These Arabs believe their 
 religion, and try to live by it 1 No Christians, since the early 
 ao-es or’only perhaps the English Puritans in modern times, have 
 ever’stood by their Faith as the Moslem do by theirs,— believing 
 it wholly, fronting Time with it, and Eternity with it. This night 
 the watchman on the streets ot Cairo when he cries, "VV bo goes ? 
 will hear from the passenger, along with his answer, “There is no 
 God but God.’’ Allahu-akbar, Islam, sounds through the souls, and 
 whole daily existence, of these dusky millions. Zealous mission- 
 aries preach it abroad among Malays, black Papuans, brutal 
 Idolaters; — displacing what is worse, nothing that is better or 
 good. 
 
 To the Arab Nation it was as a birth from darkness into 
 liidit • Arabia first became alive by means ot it. A poor shepherd 
 people roaming unnoticed in its deserts since the creation of the 
 world • a Hero-Prophet was sent down to them with a word 
 thov could believe : see, the unnoticed becomes world-notable, 
 the'' small has grown world-great; within one century afterwards, 
 Arabia is at Grenada on this liana, at Delhi on that ; glancing 
 in valour and splendour and the light of genius, Arabia shines 
 through long ages over a great section of the word. Belief is 
 groat, life-*’ iving. The history of a Nation becomes fruitful, soul- 
 elevating, "great, so soon as it believes. These Arabs, the man 
 Mohammad, ’and that one century,— is it not as if a spark had 
 fallen one spark, on a world of what seemed black unnoticeable 
 sand - but lo, the sand proves explosive powder, blazes licaven- 
 hi.rh from Delhi to Grenada ! 1 said, the great Man warf always 
 
 as lightning out of Heaven ; the rest of men waited tor him like 
 fuel, "and then they too would flame. 
 
 lINlfcr.