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