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the righteousness of God. Sublime indeed is the scene when the victorious Prophet made his triumphant entry into the sacred city, where he had preached so long, and whence he had been driven at the peril of his life. Compare Mahomet with his own degenerate followers, with Timour at Isfahan, with Nadir at Delhi, with the wretches who in our own times have desolated Chios and Cyprus and Kassandra. The entry of an Eastern victor is ordinarily the signal for plunder and massacre alike of the armed and the unarmed, of the innocent and the guilty. Mahomet had his wrongs to avenge, but they are satisfied by a handful of exceptions to a general amnesty, and the majority even of these are ultimately forgiven. It is the temple of God desecrated by idols which he had come to ransom. With the sublime words, "Truth is come; let falsehood disappear," he shivers in succession the three hundred and sixty abominations which were standing in the holy place; as Hezekiah broke in pieces the brazen serpent of Moses, so Mahomet destroys the forms of the patriarchs of his race when Abraham and Ishmael are represented in the act of a superstitious divination. And, his work once accomplished, he did not, like his victorious namesake in later times, fix his throne in the city he had won. He reared no palace for his own honor by the side of the temple which he had recovered to the honor of God. The city of his fathers, the metropolis of his race, the shrine of his religion, was again deserted for his humble dwelling among those who had stood by him in the day of trial, who, while he won baser hearts by costly spoils, had taken God and his Prophet for their sufficient portion.

Mahomet was now alike spiritual and temporal chief of his own people; it remained for him to appear in the character of universal prophet and universal conqueror. "There is no God but God; Mahomet is the apostle of God." If these be indeed the words of saving truth, it is not to the sons of Ishmael alone that they must be proclaimed, it is not within the Arabian peninsula alone that obedience is due to him who proclaims them. "There is no God but God." The Persian must no longer divide his homage between good and evil, but must turn to the worship of one almighty Lord who reigns alike over the just and the unjust. "There is no God but God; Mahomet is the apostle of God," and Chosroes and Cæsar must be told that He from whom they hold their crowns has another and more special vicegerent upon earth. But that vicegerent lived not himself to teach them the lesson. He indeed in warning letters summoned their allegiance and placed the name of the camel-driver of Mecca before those of the successors of Augustus and of Artaxerxes. The proud Persian, descendant of a line of kings, scatters to the winds the insolent missive; his doom is fixed: "So shall God tear his kingdom.” The Roman, who had himself shown how a bold man might rise to empire, knew better with whom he had to deal. The African provincial arrayed in the imperial purple could sympathize with the bold Arab, and dismissed the messenger with honorable treatment. It would have been a strife indeed had the victor of Beder been matched in deadly conflict with the victor of Nineveh. But the immutable will had doomed it otherwise; the Saracen was indeed to measure himself with the

THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

ASTOR LENOX

MENDATIONS

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Roman, and to overthrow the hosts which had delivered Byzantium and had conquered Persia. But the Arabian Prophet, the Carthaginian hero, were no more among them. Heraclius, worn out with toils and triumphs, resigned the defence of Syria to weaker hands, and Mahomet in his tomb at Medina left the mightiest work of his prophetic mission to the sage policy of Abu-Bekr the Righteous and to the irresistible arm of Khaled the Sword of God.

Now, putting aside for the present the question of Mahomet's supposed imposture and assuming for the time his principle of propagating his religion by force, there is really but little to condemn in his character and conduct. According to the morality of his own age and nation, there was absolutely nothing to censure in his public and very little in his private life. Even judging him by a higher and severer standard, we may fairly say that few men have risen from a private station to sovereign power with so noble an end before them, and with so little of recorded crime. His early life appears to have been absolutely blameless; he won the esteem of many who did not admit his pretensions, and it is certainly in his favor that those who knew him best trusted him the most. No man, they tell us, is a hero to his valet-de-chambre. The simple life of the Arab admitted of no one in that exact capacity, but in the nearest approach to it, in his noble freedman Zeyd, Mahomet found one in whose eyes he was emphatically a hero. The confidence and affection of a wife to whom he owed his position, and one fifteen years older than himself; the constant confidence and affection of men of the noblest and at the

same time the most opposite characters, the calm Abu-Bekr, the chivalrous Ali, the fiery Omar,-certainly tend to show that the personal character of Mahomet in no way gave the lie to his lofty pretensions. To say with Prideaux that his early life was " very wicked and licentious is mere calumny without proof. Everything shows that-at least, during his residence at Mecca-Mahomet lived externally the life of a really good man according to his light. If he was a hypocrite, he was a hypocrite of the most consummate subtlety.

in all ages,

In the second period of his career it is impossible not to recognize a deterioration. From the moment of his appeal to the sword something of baser leaven seems to fasten itself upon his career. In that appeal there is, indeed, nothing wonderful. It is It is easy to argue, as persecutors have done that toleration is soul-murder; that if we forbid the public dissemination of poison for the body, much more should we forbid the dissemination of poison for the soul. Yet this is a view which, if logically followed out, would lead to conclusions yet more sanguinary than those of Mahomet. No submission, no tribute, ought to be accepted; the accursed thing should be utterly put away. Mahomet had before him the example of Mosaic law, which preached a far more rigorous mandate of extermination against the guilty nations of Canaan. He had before him the practice of all surrounding powers, Christian, Jewish and heathen, though, from the disaffection of Syria and Egypt to the orthodox throne of Constantinople, he might have learned how easily persecution defeats its own end. That the *Tophane, a suburb of Constantinople.

Almighty allows differences in religion to exist, and leaves the conversion of his erring creatures to the ordinary course of his providence, might well be deemed an argument against his servants resorting in his supposed behalf to violent and extraordinary means. But experience shows how slowly and with what difficulty the human mind is brought to embrace this truth.

Under Mahomet's circumstances, it is really no very great ground for condemnation that he did appeal to the sword. He did no more than follow the precedents of his own and every surrounding nation. Yet one might say that a man of such mighty genius as Mahomet must have been might have been fairly expected to rise superior to the trammels of prejudice and precedent. And it cannot be denied that from this moment we discern a certain taint upon his whole conduct-one which does not, indeed, affect the general righteousness of his career, but which comes out in individual errors from which he had previously been free. With his first appeal to the sword there appears to have come upon him a general unscrupulousness as to the means whereby his ends were to be compassed. Compared with most Oriental conquerors, Mahomet stands generally clear both of cruelty and perfidy. He did not, like even Baber, mark his triumphs by pyramids of pyramids of skulls, nor did he, like the later Ottomans, enslave, impale or flay alive men who had surrendered upon an honorable capitulation; but, compared with the peaceful preacher of Mecca, the warrior of Medina may be called both cruel and perfidious. In his first campaign he caused his generals to attack his enemies in the sacred month, during which

the Arabs abstained from warfare; he then, like Elizabeth in the case of Davison, tried to throw the blame on his subordinate, and finally produced a revelation to abrogate the sacred month entirely. Surely this revelation should at least have been promulgated before it was acted upon. Again, in an instance to which I have already alluded, when the Jews of Koraidha agreed to surrender to the discretion of Saad, Mahomet openly applauded the decision by which that warrior sentenced them to a general destruction. Yet it is only fair to acknowledge that even this massacre was a trifle compared with the ordinary horrors of Oriental warfare, and that it stands alone in the career of Mahomet. Certainly, as a general rule, few Eastern victors of any time, few Western ones of that and many subsequent ages, kept their hands so clear from unnecessary bloodshed as Mahomet and his immediate followers.

The permission of polygamy has undoubtedly proved in its ultimate results one of the greatest and most fearful evils in the Mahometan system. But how far are we to consider it as a legitimate ground of personal blame to the prophet that he allowed and practised plurality of wives? It should not be forgotten that in this as in every other respect he was, in his own age and country, a reformer. For an utterly irregular profligacy Mahomet substituted a regulated polygamy which must then and there have seemed almost as heavy a yoke as his prohibition of the other Arab delights of strong drink and games of chance. Whatever Mahometans may choose to make their own practice, the law of the Prophet ist express. Every man of the Faithful is to confine himself to four women, whether under the

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