CHAPTER II

AN OUTLINE OF MOHAMMED’S TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTERISTICS

One of the first thoughts that a very careful perusal of the Koran brings home to me, is the intense humanity of Mohammed and his work. The more one studies the various motives that led to his so-called revelations, the more one is struck by the strong associations that connect these divine messages and ordinances with the actions and movements that were going on all round him, as well as in his own mind--owing in a great measure to his own preaching.

In estimating the moral value of either Christianity or Islam, it is necessary to take into consideration, also to make allowance for, the times in which their founders lived. To attempt to judge one or other of them from the scientific standpoint of modern culture and civilization would be not only uneven but impossible. To gauge the standard of their mental and moral attainments, the student must investigate their work, and compare, then contrast, it with the general intellectual level of their own age. When this has been done, he should try and, if possible, realize what effect the advent and the doctrines advocated by them (in the one case some 1,900 years, and in the other 1,300 years ago) would now produce. In this way only is it feasible to arrive at a true and legitimate conclusion. But in doing so, the inquirer must divest, certainly dissociate himself, from all existing ideas on the subject, and deal with it as it is, and not what he thinks it ought to be.

The more one studies the Koran, the more obvious does it become that Mohammed had a powerfully receptive mind, and a specially retentive memory. Notwithstanding that he was illiterate, unable even to read and write, it is clear that he was well versed in all the tenets and traditions of his own people and of the Jews; and that in addition he had made himself acquainted with some of the doctrines and dogmas of the Christian Gospels. It is above all certain that for a great number of years Mohammed concentrated his mind thereon with the force and intensity of a sincere and ardent nature. But first and foremost the one great idea of the being, unity and providence of God predominated all his thoughts. Acting on a temperament that was highly emotional, and perceptibly neurotic or melancholic, the revelations embodied in the Koran were the natural result of so long and continuous a concentration. Still it is equally obvious that combining with this emotionalism and neurasthenia was a strong vein of commercialism and common sense, also marked political and administrative ability. It is further evident that in Mohammed’s character there commingled a very curious and conflicting number of elements and tendencies. Dominating all of these, however, was an intense zeal, an insatiable ambition, an overpowering individuality and egotism, and an inflexible doggedness and determination to attain his own ends. To convert, that is, the weakness and disintegration of the various tribes that composed the Arab nation into the union of one consolidated whole, with himself and family at its head, as a human representation of the unity and supremacy of the one and only God. This latter, as we know, was in no way original. It is clear all throughout that he had profited from his knowledge of Jewish tradition and experience, and that he based his theory on the dogmas of Moses and Abraham. He had long since realized that it was the worship of their own tribal and communal gods by the members of the various Arab tribes and communities that accentuated the differences and divisions between them. He determined, therefore, as the Jewish leaders long before him had attempted, to consolidate and weld them into a single nation, through the worship of the one supreme and indivisible God. It was on and through this divine indivisibility that he decided to base and construct the unity and nationalization of the people.

Unquestionably Mohammed’s movement was as much political as it was religious, as much material as it was spiritual. But being of a profoundly reflective, at the same time of a practical, turn of mind, he chose religion as the only possible and thoroughly reliable means of achieving his great and noble ends; not only possible and thorough, however, but the most potential. Mohammed, in fact, judged the capacity and characteristics of his countrymen to a nicety. Unconsciously--for legislation to him was a natural heritage--he followed the example of the most famous legislators, and instituted such laws as at the time were the best that the people were capable of receiving. Tactful and diplomatic to a degree, it was policy on his part to retain a certain number of the old beliefs and customs in order to satisfy the people. He knew, none better, the fierce and turbulent temper of his countrymen, and how it was most politic to deal with them. In making this concession he showed his political wisdom, if not a certain breadth and greatness of statecraft. After all it was, from an independent standpoint, but a small concession as compared to the prize that he got in return for it. It was a compromise in other words. Yet this and his own evidence in the Koran is important as showing that Mohammed was not so much in a strict sense the originator of a new creed as he was a reformer and the renovator of an old one. It was the impress of his great personality, distinguished as this was by the intense sincerity and earnestness of his nature, that has left its mark on human history.

Mohammed was a thinker and a worker not only for his own, but for all time. He recognized that man was equally a political and religious product of God’s creation. He understood that as a counterpoise to man’s materialism and to the destructive in his nature, is that indefinable essence which we call the spiritual and the constructive. The more one looks into and understands the Koran, the more obvious is it that Mohammed concentrated all the active and vigorous energies of his vivid and powerful imagination, also his virile mentality, on the accomplishment of his great design. For design it certainly was. The wish undoubtedly was father to the thought. Not, however, in an invidious sense, but in the firm conviction that design and not accident or chance is one of the controlling principles of God and His creation, and that, consistent with this principle, he, Mohammed, had been chosen as the divine agent. Personal ambition and aggrandizement never for a moment entered his head, or formed part of it. The national good, to be attained only by a national or universal God--the one and only God of the universe--was the one great ambition that inspired and impelled him. Because although every one for himself and God for us all is presumably a natural law, Mohammed managed to evade it. But in evading it, he was not revolutionary. On the contrary, in this way he rose one step upward above the lower human level towards that higher humanity which approaches the divine.

This design, as I have just said, originated from the doctrine of divine unity attributed to Moses and Abraham. Indeed, as one reads the Koran carefully and steadily through from beginning to end, it is manifested in every surah--almost, in fact, on every page. The whole work, in fact, is saturated with the one idea, inspired by the one thought. Everywhere there is evidence of the final object in view, the unconquerable will, the inflexible resolve, the fixed purpose, the indomitable perseverance, the unyielding persistency, the infinite and interminable patience, the calm endurance, the irresistible courage, and the grim tenacity of the ego. So much so is this evident, that when I compare this determinism with the neurotic element in Mohammed’s character, I am obliged to admit that the balance remains with the former. Yet--and this I think is the strangest feature about this strange but commanding personality--there is no getting away from the fact that he was much under the influence of the latter.

It is, of course, possible that Mohammed was what in Arabia is called a “Saudawi,” or person of melancholy temperament--what nowadays would be called a hypochondriacal dyspeptic. Melancholia is a complaint that the Arabs are subject to, students, philosophers and literary men more especially. A distaste for society, a longing for solitude, an unsettled habit of mind, and a neglect of worldly affairs are always attributed to it. It is very probably--to some extent at least--as Burton suggests, the effect of overworking the brain in a hot, dry atmosphere; also due in some measure to the highly nervous and bilious temperament constitutional to the Arabs: a temperament that in Mohammed’s case was aggravated by excessive emotionalism.

It is clear that once Mohammed got hold of, or was obsessed by, the idea that he was God’s chosen messenger, and that his sayings were inspired by God (a very old and primitive belief remember): or rather as soon as ever Khadija and others of his household were imbued with the idea, then he never relaxed his hold of it for a moment. The confidence of those about him, his faithful spouse more especially, gave him confidence in himself. Confidence engendered conviction, and conviction led to the Koran and the ultimate triumph of his cause. That he was sincere in all this, there is not the slightest doubt, but in taking the measure of his sincerity we must be guided entirely by the fact that he was essentially a man who had long before made up his mind to bring about the unity of his country. Indeed the whole history of Khadija’s association with the matter shows this. To be a prophet in his own country or household, a man must inspire respect, or the still greater feeling of veneration. No man, unless he is earnest and devout, could possibly impress the members of his family. They are bound to find him out. This applies all the more forcibly to an eastern household in which polygamy prevails, and that is made up of so many opposing elements and conflicting interests, the atmosphere of which is only too often one necessarily of envies, jealousies, rivalries, suspicions, intrigues, and even conspiracies. If Mohammed had been insincere, if instead of convictions, his belief had been a mere profession or a sham; if it had not been one of austere, rigid practice and self-denial, then those about him would neither have been impressed, nor would they have espoused his cause as warmly and valiantly as they did. Not only were they impressed, however, but convinced, and it was their convictions that strengthened and confirmed his own faith. But once he had gained their confidence, his mission was assured. There was no doubt whatever then in his own mind that he was God’s chosen apostle, to whom God had revealed His word--the words of truth and life. From this out, his own vigour, his own extraordinary individuality and inflexibility carried him through from beginning to end. Once others believed in and relied on him, his own latent self-reliance grew into a living and active factor that carried all before it. But as he looked at it, all his strength was from God. God was at his elbow and in his heart, therefore he could not fail. Nothing, in fact, shows better than this aspect of the matter how very wise and all-knowing (his constant refrain about God in the Koran) Mohammed himself was. How tactful and diplomatic, but above all, how deep his knowledge of human nature. Had Khadija and his household not believed in him, it is safe to assume that then there would have been no Prophet and no Islam. As Novalis says: “My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.” So it was with Mohammed. So it is with us all. So Carlyle pithily observes: “A false man found a religion? Why a false man cannot build a brick house!” I have already shown that Mohammed was not false. But neither did he found a religion. Apart from the fact that he was a reality, and as true as any of the world’s great prophets, Mohammed was unable to perform the impossible. Religion as a natural product was beyond his comprehension and potentialities. Islam like Christianity was a creed--a human or artificial development--the healthy and vigorous offspring of a noble and sublime, yet in no sense original conception. But there was no demerit in this want of originality. Because as Carlyle says: “The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity”: and with regard to Mohammed, this has been more than once acknowledged.

Launched upon the world of Arabia in no false and unreal spirit, but with the spirit of grim sincerity and earnestness, Islam has proved its stability spiritually and materially, the present result of which speaks for itself. It is enough to say that a creed whose followers now number over 250,000,000, or some 15 per cent. of the human race (an under- rather than an over-estimate), could have sprung from a healthy and vigorous seed only--a seed that has been nourished and kept alive by the vital spark of human sympathies, hopes and aspirations.

What appears to me as so remarkable and so significant, so truly characteristic of the man, is the way in which he never lets go his grip of the central idea and purpose, but follows it up step by step. And as he follows, he makes every point that he can, seizes every opportunity, takes every advantage of every ordinary event and occurrence that is going on around him, makes the best of every reverse, turns even his set-backs and reverses into moral victories; and accepts it all as inevitable with the calmness of a philosophy that emanated from his own wondrous egoism and that inexhaustible fund of patience and reserve of courage which so distinguishes his character. In this respect alone Mohammed truly was a remarkable man--a man infinitely above, not only his surroundings, but his age. With Mohammed, not only was the great fact of his own existence great to him, but in almost every page of the Koran it is obvious that God’s omnipresence and omnipotence had made a profound and lasting impression on him. Everywhere and in everything--in natural objects more especially--he saw and felt the hand and the power of God. And to him it was a power so overwhelmingly terrific and transcendent in all its aspects, that it defied description and demonstrated the insignificance and impotence of man. In more senses than one he was a pantheist. To him, either God was Nature and Nature God, or God was in Nature and Nature was in God. At bottom of him the old primitive belief was there, but in unity and concentration he saw strength. In his mind there was no room, no place, for lesser deities. The power and the splendour of the one creative God--who lived and moved and had His being throughout the universe, overshadowed, or, rather, had absorbed, them all. In the grim silence of the desert, in the vastness of the heavens, in the great infinity of space, in the scintillation of the stars, in every fibre of his own consciousness, God was with him. To Mohammed God was not a personal being but the God and Maker of the universe and all mankind. With him the entire theme and volume of his stream of thought was God and his religion. Coming from the core and centre of him as it did, even through the long vista of thirteen centuries, one can picture this overmastering element in every line of his stern-set and yet gentle face: a face reflective and speaking, that not only had a history stamped upon every feature, but a great, a strenuous, and a commanding history. _In vino veritas_ is as true to-day as when first it was uttered. So too the saw, that “mastership like wine unmasks the man.” But Mohammed needed no unmasking. God and the truth--the truth about God as it dominated him--was the rich, strong wine which coursed through every vein and fibre of his mental organism, stimulating and spurring him onwards to a sustained and continuous effort that ended only in death. A sincere and earnest man, a natural, therefore a deeply religious man, to him God was also a Dayyan (one of the ninety-nine epithets of God), i.e. “A weigher of good and evil”; One who computed and settled accounts; the holder of the even balance and scales of justice, the Judge and Arbiter of all mankind.

But apart from these functions, the power and sublimity of the Supreme Being, as he saw it expressed in the silent grandeur of the desert, the death-like stillness of the sandy sea, the frowning ruggedness and majesty of the mountains, the immense universality of Nature, was always before his eyes and in all his thoughts. Full of this feeling, of the awe and veneration innate in man and co-existent with the eternal ages, he bursts out in the second surah: “God! there is no God but He; the living, the self-subsisting: neither slumber nor sleep seizeth Him; to Him _belongeth_ whatsoever is in heaven, and on earth. Who is he that can intercede with Him, but through His good pleasure? He knoweth that which is past, and that which is to come unto them, and they shall not comprehend anything of His knowledge, but so far as He pleaseth. His throne is extended over heaven and earth, and the preservation of both is no burden unto Him. He is the high and mighty.”

As a natural outburst of emotions and convictions that had been pent up within his own inner consciousness, that were the offspring of some twenty years of journeyings to and fro across the deserts where “Amin” the faithful one was in direct and constant contact with Nature, and often in silent communion with the Infinite, these few words are truly magnificent and sublime; magnificent not only for the boldness and sublimity of their imagery and conception, but magnificent also with the intensity and profundity of true sincerity. Few, but all the more pithy for that, these words are from the heart and soul of the man--a man who speaks not unadvisedly with his lips, but who feels with every nerve and fibre of his intensely emotional being. They are (as he himself feels) the outpouring of an insignificant and impotent atom, yet of a sincere and earnest man approaching in all humility and veneration, and with the loyalty and allegiance of a true believer and servant, the great, invisible He, who holds him and all creatures in the hollow of His mighty hand.

In a conversation that Luther had one day with some friends at table, he spoke of the world as a vast and magnificent pack of cards composed of emperors, kings, princes and so forth. For several ages these had been vanquished by the Pope. Then God had come upon the scene, and chosen the “ace,” the very smallest card in the pack--himself, in a word--and overthrown this conqueror of worldly powers and principalities. Mohammed, as much as Luther, was one of “God’s Aces.” Seldom, indeed, in the history of the world, has so great a human river flowed from a source so puny. Never did the divine manifest itself in a single pip, so seemingly small and insignificant as a cause, yet so pre-eminently and consistently great as an effect!

“Men,” says Dumas in one of his historico-romantic masterpieces, “are visible, palpable, moral. You can meet, attack, subdue them; and when they are subdued you can subject them to trial and hang them. But ideas you cannot oppose in that way. They glide unseen; they penetrate; they hide themselves especially from the sight of those who would destroy them. Hidden in the depths of the soul, they there throw out deep roots. The more you cut off the branches which imprudently appear, the more powerful and inextirpable become the roots below.

“An idea is a young giant which must be watched night and day; for the idea which yesterday crawled at your feet, to-morrow will dispose of your head. An idea is a spark falling upon straw.” ... “For the mind of man is no inert receptacle of knowledge, but absorbs and incorporates into its own constitution the ideas which it receives.” Thus it was with Mohammed. God was the spark, the vital spark of spiritual flame, and this humble but honest Arab trader was the straw, that after twenty years of silent but tenacious smouldering God had set a light to.

The better, however, to understand his character and purpose, we must divide his life into two sections. The first when, as trader from the age of thirteen up to forty, first for his uncle and then for Khadija, he was the man of business. Yet synchronous with this the man of ideas and ideals that he kept to himself however; that he divulged to no one. For not until the time was ripe and the hour had come, not until he felt the call--felt, that is, that he was ready and able to begin--did he confide even in Khadija. The second section when, as the apostle of God, he worked with all the fiery fervour yet steady zeal of a true prophet, to put his ideas into practice. But there was this difference with regard to Mohammed as a theorist. He was not a man of many ideas. In reality one central idea alone inspired him. But great and magnificent as that was, it was equal to a multitude. It was a growing and a spreading giant which, like the prolific banyan tree, threw out branch and root with such extravagant luxuriance, that it completely overshadowed and predominated the entire expanse of his mental area. We know what this idea was. We know that round and out of the central stem of God’s overmastering unity Mohammed had determined to construct an Arabian nation--possibly something even greater. We know, too, that the one was but the offspring of the other. Or it may be that they were the twin offspring of all this profound and concentrated contemplation. But we do not know how this great idea first took root. Let us, however, try and trace it to its source as nearly as we can.

With still greater emphasis than Chrysostom, who asserted that “the true Shekinah is man,” Carlyle says: “the essence of our being, the mystery in us that calls itself ‘I,’ is a breath of heaven; the highest Being reveals Himself in man.” An idea such as this would never have occurred to Mohammed. The fatherhood of God in its accepted human sense was repugnant to him. The mere thought was sacrilege!

His conception of God was much too exalted, much too divine for this. God and humanity could have no possible connexion. God was the Creator--the Potter, who out of the clay or matter in chaos had made the world and all therein. Humanity was but a small part only of His creation. Men were but as clay in His hands--mere creatures of His. Beyond this hard and fast line there could be no relationship between God and man. Association was as impossible as comparison was objectionable. God, as supreme Creator and Director of the universe, was a Being altogether distinct and apart from His own creation. Yet as such He was the soul or spirit of it, the breath of life to all that lived, and of death to all that died. Man was as evil, as puny, and as weak as God was great and good and strong. God was too exalted and glorious for words. Incomprehensible and inscrutable, He was beyond the power of language, outside the narrow limitations of thought to imagine. Just as the heavens were divided from the earth by boundless space, so far apart was God from man. The endless immensity of everything was insufficient to express His omnipotence--fell far short of the unthinkable reality. Even the heavens and earth as His handiwork did not convey as completely as it might appear to do the capacity of the power that belonged to Him. To Mohammed, in every vibrating star an all-seeing eye and glory of the great Creator, God, was visible; in every tiny blade of grass, in every spring of water, He was manifest and tangible. So some eleven centuries after Mohammed was laid to rest, a poor, struggling, but undaunted artist-poet, looking from his mean London garret with the eyes of a dreamer-mystic into the great invisible above and beyond him (just as Amin the faithful one had done), yearned:

“To see the world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower; Hold Infinity in the palm of “his” hand, And eternity in an hour.”

And in the middle of the late departed century--which rushed across the great void of Time like a hissing meteor--thus Tennyson:

“Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower; but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.”

While to Wordsworth, with a faith in Nature and Nature’s God as deep as Mohammed, the meanest flower that blows, gave thoughts that often lay too deep for words.

Society is only too apt to judge or condemn facts and men; also to ridicule the age and its spirit. This drastic method saves the trouble of comprehending them. The society of keen Arab traders and wily Bedouins which environed Mohammed did not comprehend him. To them he was not so much like a fish out of water, as a land quadruped at sea, altogether out of his element as well as out of his depth--a flotsam struggling to get to dry land as a jetsam.

Immeasurably above and beyond his social contemporaries either morally or spiritually, to them Mohammed was an enigma and a mystery. “Scenting a mystery is like the first bite at a piece of scandal, and holy souls do not detest it. In the secret compartments of bigotry there is some curiosity for scandal.” But among Mohammed’s opponents--the Koreish more particularly--it was not merely scandal that moved them: it was jealousy, envy, malice, and in the end sheer diabolical hatred. In describing the state of a mind that is advancing, we must remember that all progress is not made in one march or even series of marches. Mohammed’s march was entirely uphill, dead against the collar, the whole way and all the time, except, perhaps, just towards the end. Yet each day’s march brought him nearer to the goal of his desires. Slowly but surely he made progress, and with it reputation. The slowness of his movement, his advance, made progress and reputation all the more not a dead, but a living certainty. But there is always anarchy in reputation. It was this reputation--this individuality that dared to insolently assert itself in the overthrow of their ancestral gods--which explained Koreish hostility.

Mohammed was a calm, yet by no means an unprogressive agent of Providence. Brains that are absorbed either in mania or wisdom, or, as often happens, in both at once, are permeated very very slowly by the things of this world. But even admitting that there was melancholia, there was no mania about Mohammed. If ever a man was sane and healthy, he was. “You grant a devout man, you grant a wise man: no man has a seeing eye without first having had a seeing heart.” This fits his case to a nicety. A more devout man than Mohammed never lived. He was as pre-eminently wise as he was devout. He utilized his wisdom to the fullest extent of his capacity, and he proved his devoutness by putting his beliefs to the infallible test of stern and rigid practice. A trader to his finger tips, a clear-sighted man of business, and a statesman with prophetic instincts, who profited by the past, utilized the present, and prepared for the future, in this sense he was a contradiction. The being absorbed in wisdom did not prevent him from carrying on his worldly duties in the most conscientious and thorough manner. _Per contra_, his worldly duties did not prevent him from philosophical absorption. The one was his duty, the other the breath of life to him. His veneration of God gradually crystallized the religion in him into a creed. This is generally the result of concentration. His absorption of God ended in God’s absorption of him. It was a long and gradual process which occupied twenty years. During this period of embryonic development he withdrew, as it were, into himself. Then when the crisis arrived, it came out of him, as a river flows out of a spring, and was called Islam. “Our chimeras,” says Victor Hugo, “are the things which most resemble ourselves, and each man dreams of the unknown, and the impossible according to his nature.” Mohammed’s chimera, as we know, was God and Arabian unity. But there was nothing chimerical about the former, and with this invincible lever, the latter too was a distinct probability. For although he was doubtless superstitious--that is natural--and wrestled with shadows and visions, Mohammed dealt in realities. To him God was the most real thing, the sternest reality of all in the universe. God, in fact, was the Universe. These, which to another would have been the unknown and the impossible, were to him the possible and the inevitable. The nature that was in him was the nature of God and the universe. There is a point where profundity is oblivion, when light becomes extinguished. Though from a literary aspect Mohammed was not profound, in a religious sense his profundity, centring as it did in God, burst forth into the Cimmerian darkness which enveloped his country with the brilliancy of a meteor that illumines the blackest night.

There is too a way of encountering error by going all the way to meet the truth, also by a sort of violent good faith which accepts everything unconditionally. There was nothing violent (certainly not for a long period), but there was everything that stands for goodness and stability in Mohammed’s faith. It was thus--in the spirit of a hero and the valour of a Paladin--he encountered the error and opposition of his enemies by first of all going out of his way to meet the truth; then, in spite of themselves and their hostility, by enforcing it upon those who would not be persuaded. According to Fontenelle, “there is only truth that persuades, and even without requiring to appear with all its proofs. It makes its way so naturally into the mind, that when it is heard for the first time, it seems as if one were only remembering.” This was very much the case with Mohammed. This was why he tried at first to lead and not to drive his countrymen to the truth. To him who saw the truth of God’s existence, His mercy written as plainly in the falling raindrop as His power of retribution is in the lightning that flashes across the sky as if it would rend it, their stubbornness in rejecting God was utterly incomprehensible. His mind had two attitudes. The one was turned to God, the other to man. In contemplating God, he but studied man’s interests and his own. But contemplation with Mohammed did not end by becoming a form of indolence. Imaginative--visionary, in fact--as he was, he did not allow his imagination to play tricks with him. He did not fancy that he wanted for nothing. Even when married to Khadija, and in tolerable affluence, there was obviously a great void in his life. This want of course was spiritual. Exact and punctilious as he was in his temporal duties, his whole bent and inclination was towards the former. As a younger and poorer man, he had looked so much at the humanity around him that he saw right down into its very soul. With the same fervent intensity he had looked into nature until he saw or rather felt the creator and controller thereof. “There are times when the unknown reveals itself in a mysterious way to the spirit of man. A sudden rent in the veil of darkness will make manifest things hitherto unseen, and then close again upon the mysteries within. Such visions have occasionally the power to effect a transfiguration in those whom they visit. They convert a poor camel-driver into a Mahomet; a peasant girl tending her goats into a Joan of Arc.” A conscientious and faithful worker, Mohammed was at the same time a dreamer. But his dreams were but the reflex of his work and of his ideas. These came to him like mountainous waves, or the swell of an angry surf as it thunders on the beach with a threatening roar, a mass of water that would submerge the very earth. His ideas did not, however, submerge him. Nor did they destroy or bury him. Out of their unknown and bosky depths Mohammed invariably rose to the surface with the buoyancy of a life-belt, calm and unmoved, for his spiritual centre of gravity always held him up. He dreamt of man, but chiefly of God--of God’s goodness and greatness, of man’s impotence and frailty. He looked at the solid earth on which he stood, with its stones and its sand, its wheat and its tares, its joys and sorrows, but particularly its suffering children and helpless women. Then he looked at the vast void above, with its star-spangled sky, its sun and moon, and the God that made all and was in all. This led him to think of the void that was in himself, and to compare the one with the other. Then he pondered and compared. The greatness of it all passed into him and he dreamt again. There was no void above, for God filled it. So too his own emptiness gave place to the Supreme. All at once a great feeling of tenderness was aroused within him. From the egotism of the _genus vir_, he passed to the contemplation of the _genus homo_, the man who contemplates and feels. God had touched his heart. In forgetfulness of self was born a great compassion for all. For years and years Mohammed lived with his neck in a noose of obstacles composed of human thorns and millstones. He was, so to speak, an outcast, thrown on the dung heap, and into the brambles; at times even in the mud. Yet no mud clung to him, not even to his feet. His head at all events was always in the light, his hand always resting on the omnipotence of the Almighty. Invariably gentle, attentive, serious, benevolent, easily satisfied, he remained serene and peaceful. It was only in the last extremity, when all his persuasive earnestness failed him, that his enemies stirred him to wrath. But it was a just and dispassionate wrath; it was the wrath of God. For whether they liked or no, Mohammed in his dual capacity as God’s agent and Arabian patriot had made up his mind that they should have God. On this point he was inexorable. Feeling that there is an eternity in justice, he felt that in justice to God, and to themselves, and in spite of themselves, it was his duty to proclaim the truth. Many a less tenaciously sincere man, many a real hero, would have shrunk from and have succumbed before an ordeal so terrific, a contest so supremely Titanic. But Mohammed was made of sterner stuff, of the spirit that gods are made of. Failure was a word that he did not recognize. With God at his back, success was an absolute certainty--a foregone conclusion.

Whatever might be his desire to remain where he was and cling to it, he was impelled to advance, to continue, to go on further and still further. Yet to think and to ask himself where it was all going to lead him to? But although he thought, he never hesitated, never turned back. His hand was to the plough--the plough God. God was the goal, the end, the summit of human existence and ambition. Humanity was the soil, and to get there he must furrow his way through its enmities and affections. Firm and exceptional natures are thus moulded out of miseries, misfortunes and afflictions. As a result of his work history shows us more and more that Mohammed was firm and exceptional to the very highest degree. Yet there was nothing of that hypocrisy which Victor Hugo calls supreme cynicism about him. He was too human, too much in earnest, to be anything but Amin the Faithful. There is, after all, more in a name than meets the eye. In some names there is history and the tragedy of history. In others there is the might and majesty of a commanding magnetism, which recognizes the sublimity of truth. In Mohammed’s case, even to this day over two hundred and fifty million human beings bow the knee through him to God. Yes, there is much--a world of meaning--that is inexpressible in a name--a magic and a _je ne sais quoi_ which under the label of Napoleon led men to the Kingdom Come of glory--in other words, to destruction and the devil--but that with Mohammed was the open sesame to the glory and power of God. A rose by any other name may smell as sweet. But Islam without the halo of time-honoured sanctity that attaches to the name of Mohammed, would sound as but a hollow brass or a tinkling cymbal. Just, in fact, as the man himself was sincere and faithful, there is, and there will continue to be, a magic in his name--more so even than that of Christ has for the Christian--drawing men to God, as he in person drew them not alone by sheer force of will and character, but by a force which was even stronger, the force of sincerity and truth.