be allowed to rank as a commonplace. We will not insult our readers, therefore, by arguing in its favor, nor by showing that Mahomet is entitled to the benefit of it. With ourselves we believe they will be persuaded that the view which every Christian would be most eager to take of Mahomet and his system, and which, as a Christian, he will gain most by taking, is the view that accords to Mahomet the largest possible amount of credit for every excellent human quality that a man may possess out of the pale of Christian discipleship. Mahometanism, represented as the best possible product of one of the best possible specimens of the natural Arabic mind working after human, and, if abnormal, still natural methods; and not Mahometanism represented as a wretched piece of imposture, cobbled by a clever wretch for his own bad ends-such, surely, is the Mahometanism with which the Christian would be proud and anxious to place his own faith in contrast. By this abnegation, however, of the old hypothesis of imposture, the problem of Mahomet's character is made much more complex and difficult; nor do we think that those, in this country at least, who have passed the subject through their hands, have fairly faced the difficulty, or duly elaborated | the solution. To say that Mahomet was an earnest and sincere man, preaching a kind of Theism, or natural religion, to his countrymen, and thus to pass him on, as it were, with his ticket to a place in the hall of heroes, is too hasty a mode of procedure. The rule of Socrates and Plato, we repeat, does not fit the case of Mahomet. He distinctly avowed himself as a prophet, qualified by a divine mission; and it is as he shall be found to have made this declaration honestly or dishonestly that he must stand or fall. If Mahomet said that he had a divine mission, and yet did not himself thoroughly believe his own statement, then, let his honesty in every other point have been never so exact, and let the value of his teachings, in themselves, have been never so great, he was an impostor, a rogue, and a hypocrite. Nor will it do to equivocate about the sense in which he meant to be understood, when he called himself a prophet. That it was not in that sense in which, by a figure of speech, or even in the glow of an intensely excited consciousness, a teacher of important truths will sometimes, even in our parts of the earth, announce himself as inspired, is clear, as well from the plain and literal language in which the prophetic claim is advanced, as from the fact that Mahomet's own contemporaries, peculiarly tolerant as their Shemitic way of thinking would necessarily have rendered them of any mere metaphorical assertion of apostleship, were accustomed to accuse him of imposture in precisely the same terms as modern and European critics have used. It was in the fortieth year of Mahomet's age, say the ancient and authentic accounts, that, spending as usual the month of Ramadhan in his solitary cave on mount Hara, he one night received the divine call which he had long expected. As he lay on the ground, wrapped in his mantle, after long prayer and fasting, he heard a voice call him, and saw a great light. On this he swooned away, and when he came to himself, he saw an angel, in human form, standing before him. The angel held a roll of silk, whereon were inscribed certain characters, and said to Mahomet, "Read." "I cannot read," replied Mahomet. "Read," repeated the angel, "in the name of thy Lord, who hath created all things; who hath created man of clotted blood. Read, by thy most beneficent Lord, who taught the use of the pen, who teacheth man that which he knoweth not." On hearing these words, (which were afterward inserted in the Koran, and are to be found there at the opening of chap. 96,) Mahomet looked on the scroll, and was able to read what was inscribed on it. Then the angel departing, said, "O Mahomet, thou art the apostle of God, and I am Gabriel." Amazed and bewildered, proceeds the story, Mahomet told his wife Kadijah what had happened; and she, eager and excited by the news, informed her cousin Waraka. The opinion of this sage, expressed after he had duly deliberated, was, that the appearance was no delusion, but a real call by the Deity to the prophetic office. And from that day Mahomet was subject to prophetic dreams, and angelic visitations; and the revelations that from time to time were made to him through this means, were written down from his dictation by Waraka, or by the slave Zaid, and carefully treasured as the words of God. Such, in its simplest form, is the story of Mahomet's call; and, though in the Koran there is not the slightest warrant for any of the extravagant circumstances with which the story has been embellished, nor any evidence that Mahomet himself propagated such astounding details of his subsequent intercourse with the angelic world, as those which the fortile imaginations of his devout followers have supplied, (the only allusion, for example, to the famous night-journey from Mecca to Jerusalem, being a few passing words in chap. 17th, which do not necessarily imply anything so grotesquely miraculous as the legend describes,) yet it is clear that, to the extent, at least, of sanctioning and asserting this fact of a supernatural vocation vouchsafed to Mahomet by visible signs and angelic agencies, the Koran itself stands literally and expressly committed. (In proof of this see passages in chapters 29th and 53d). One of two things, therefore: either Mahomet saw no such signs and visions, but only said he saw them, in order to impress people, and stun them into certain beliefs he had excogitated, or resolved for some reason to advocate; in which case, we repeat, he was, let his aims have been never so elevated, a base and unmitigated scoundrel; or he did actually think he saw visions and signs; in which case, whatever fallacy there was, is to be charged, not to himself morally, but to some aboriginal singularity, or superinduced idiosyncrasy, in his mental constitution. Adopting, as we do, the second hypothesis, we would willingly take the present opportunity to sketch, generally, our idea, dim as it is, of that higher kind of psychological calculus, under which, we think, rather than under the calculus in use for ordinary and normal cases, such characters as those of Mahomet, Swedenborg, and other men of the same stamp, ought to be treated. Failing space for this, however, we must content ourselves with an observation or two, special to the case of Mahomet. And first, it might be demonstrated, we think, that pari pussu with that spiritual process of change which we have described as going on in the mind of Mahomet, in the interval between his twenty-eighth and his fortieth year, there was going on also, an elaboration, according to his peculiar Arabic way of thinking, of a preconceived theory of revelation. Like Cromwell, whom in many respects he resembles, Mahomet is distinguished, in the midst of all his emotional incontinences, and intermittent blasts of tumultuous fury, by a very large constant amount of a quality which we will venture to name propositionalness. Out of the Koran, incoherent mass of rubbish as it at first appears, (especially to such readers as attack only the beginning of it, which is by far the poorest part,) it would be possible to cull not a few lumps of the most luminous and clear propositional matter. Now one of the propositions most frequently repeated or taken VOL. XXI. NO. I. 66 for granted in the Koran is the theory of periodical revelation. Thus in chap. 13th, Every age hath its book of revelation; God shall abolish and shall confirm what He pleaseth ;" and again, in chap. 44th, "Verily, we have even used to send apostles with revelations at proper intervals, as a mercy from the Lord." In short, it was from the first a settled notion in the mind of Mahomet, that God's method of keeping up the true religion among mankind was by maintaining on the earth a succession of expressly commissioned men; it was a notion of his also, derived, doubtless, from the evident example of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, that God's mode of qualifying these missionaries for their work was by dictating sacred words to them, that is, furnishing them with a book which men might read. Full of this belief, Mahomet appears from the first to have meditated, with special interest and enthusiasm, on the lives of those men of the Shemitic race, whether Biblical heroes or mere personages of Arabian legend, in whom, as he fancied, the true conditions of the messenger of God were most conspicuously realized. Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Hud the Addite, Saleh the Thamudite, Job, Moses, Ezra, and many more, were included in this list; in which, also, he did not hesitate to place our Lord himself, as the last and greatest, as he seems to have believed, of all the Divine prophets. Whatever books, or fragments of books, could be traced to these prophets, were, he believed, infallible revelations of the truth, transcripts from the eternal table kept before the throne of God. Nations, too, beyond the Shemitic circle, had had prophets sent to them, the names of whom no man knew. Holding, to use a modern phrase, this theory of Revelation, it was almost a matter of course that Mahomet, when he had been roused to a sense of the degraded condition of his countrymen under the Polytheism and Sadduceeism that divided and embruted them, and of the necessity of a universal national reform, should begin to ask whether the series of commissioned teachers was closed, whether there might not yet perchance be one specific revelation in store for poor benighted Arabia. An Arabic book sent down from heaven, through some appointed prophet-this, according to his theory, must be the way and plan of ti.e great reform, if it were to be vouchsafed at all! And then, as this theoretical train of contemplation mingled with his own vehement impulses to proclaim the strong Theistic con. victions with whieh his soul had begun to indeed that would seek the root of the entire overflow, might there not come the query, matter in such facts as these, yet neither faint and timid at first, but afterward louder ought these facts, we think, to be hastily set and more distinct, whether, if Arabia were to aside. There is, doubtless, a perfect prehave a Prophet, he, Mahomet Ibn Abdallah, established harmony, if we had but intellect might not be the appointed man? But the enough to discover it, between the whole necessary Arabic book! Alas! he was mind of a man and every part or peculiarity illiterate; he could neither read nor write! of the corporeal organism through which it All this he could revolve and ponder, till the acts. Recently, too, science has more than very pores and channels of his brain became begun to surmise the existence of certain clogged, as it were, with the details of the recondite but appreciable connections between notion. Waraka, too, with his sharp and abnormal mental experiences and unusual subtle wit, may have sometimes helped him states of body. It is weak, therefore, to out in his speculations. And, at all events, eschew, on any supposed æsthetic ground, his theory would have this negative effect this field of explanations. But, indeed, there upon him, that it would prevent him from is no choice. If we are to adhere to the entering with any confidence on the mere hypothesis, that Mahomet was himself concareer of a sage or uncommissioned human vinced of his divine mission, then, by the teacher, appealing in behalf of his views only necessity of the case, we must make a large to the ordinary authority of the Arabic draft in his favor upon the region of yet unreason. No, if Arabia were to receive en- determined physiological possibilities. Two lightenment, it must be by the established alternatives only appear to offer themselves: instrumentality of a revealed book, dictated-Either, first, Mahomet, like Julius Cæsar, to some chosen man let then that be waited for! possessed an extraordinary mind in conjunction with a congenital peculiarity or malady And here a particular fact regarding of body; till his mature age, the two series Mahomet puts itself forward to our aid. of manifestations, the bodily and the mental, Even before his assumed call to the Prophet-proceeded, to a certain extent, as if distinct ship, there seems to be no doubt, that, like Swedenborg, Le was subject to certain extraordinary physical excitements, trances, or derangements. Medical investigators have even tried explicitly to identify certain facts related of him with the symptoms of epilepsy; the malady, it may be remembered, of another great man, Julius Cæsar. Mahomet," says Mr. Irving, quoting from a note in the Mohammed der Prophet, sein Leben und seine Lehre of Dr. Gustav Weil, "would sometimes be seized with a violent trembling, followed by a kind of swoon, or rather convulsion, during which perspiration would stream from his forehead in the coldest weather; he would lie with his eyes closed, foaming at the mouth, and bellowing like a He had such attacks in young camel. Mecca, before the Koran was revealed to him." To one of his followers, who asked him what were the peculiar sensations that accompanied his reception of a revelation, he replied that, though usually an angel appeared to him in human form, yet sometimes he saw no form or shape at all, but only heard "a sound like the tinkling of a bell," on the cessation of which he found himself in possession of what had been revealed. But, say medical men, a ringing in the ears is one of the signs of epilepsy. Now, although it would be a gross mind and parallel, the mind taking its own splendid course, unimpeded by the bodily paroxysms, and all but regardless of them; but, at length, in his fortieth year, a sudden alliance was struck up between the two parties; the soul having arrived, in its independent investigations, precisely at that point (the theory of revelation by periodical Prophets, and the earnest longing to be one of them) where the co-operation of the body, in the shape of certain novel, and as might then have been thought, preternatural sensations, was necessary to relieve it; and the body, on the other hand, heretofore weakened and fatigued, doubtless, by long fasting and solitary thought, being but too ready to yield the necessary obedience. Or, secondly, Mahomet had no congenital malady of body, but was a man moved by such a tremendous power of mind, as caused him, about his fortieth year, to tumble suddenly, body and soul together, over the brink of the ordinary phenomenal platform whereon most men stand, into the outlying region of phantasms, ringing sounds, and frenzies. In this last supposition (and the analogy of such cases as those of Socrates and Swedenborg seems to favor it) there is postulated, it will be observed a new law, the law, namely, of the power of a mental effort or strain, if continued up to a certain point, to carry on the thinking subject into a medium of new phenomenal conditions. In either case, however, it must be supposed that the new state of mind, once acquired, became chronic and permanent. Once thrown over the brink of things as they ordinarily appear, Mahomet, like Socrates in this respect, but in a far more conspicuous manner, sustained a change of intellectual structure, by which all his further relations with nature and mankind were permanently altered. Not that he lost anything of his natural disposition and peculiarity, or became less shrewd, less clear and exact in his perceptions of ordinary affairs, less liable to all his besetting infirmities and vices. The change consisted in this, that whereas before his trance on Mount Hara he walked in the strength of his own faculties, advancing the natural suggestions of his mind or temper simply on their own merits; after that trance, he assumed himself to be inspired, and advanced the same suggestions, bad and good, great and little, bold and shrewd, as no longer liable to criticism, but infallible and highly authenticated. Once convinced that he was a Prophet, then whatever arose in his mind with the ecstatic degree of force, whether it were a mere poetical conception, a political device, a personal suspicion or antipathy, or even a lustful or selfish desire, was fulminated forth by him as a divine decree. Such, we believe, is the only theory of Mahomet that remains, if it is agreed to abandon the old scandalous hypothesis of a more or less brutal amount of imposture. * from day to day, a new Sura,—that is, a new chapter or passage of the Koran, appropriate to the occasion. These Suras, which doubtless formed the texts of his public discourses, were carefully written down from his dictation by his scribes; and copies of them were distributed among his followers, many of whom committed them to memory. Sometimes he affixed a copy of the Sura last penned to the walls of the Kaaba, that all the Meccans might read it. There are incessant allusions in the Koran to the manner in which these messages were received. Thus, in chapter 21st, "They say the Koran is a confused heap of dreams: nay, he hath forged it: nay, he is a poet: let him come unto us with some miracle, in like manner as the former prophets were sent." Again, in chapter 25th, "The unbelievers say, the Koran is no other than a forgery, which he hath contrived; and other people have assisted him therein. * *And they say, what kind of apostle is this? He eateth food, and walketh in the streets, as we do: unless an angel be sent down unto him, and become a fellow-preacher with him; or unless a treasure be cast down unto him; or he have a garden, of the fruit whereof we may eat, we will not believe." Even the disciples, it seems, were not always sufficiently respectful at the promulgation of a new Sura. Thus, in chapter 9th," Which of you hath this caused to increase in faith? And whenever a Sura is sent down, they look at one another, saying, 'Doth any one see you?' Then they turn aside, [i. e. steal out of the meeting.]" Against all these obstacles Mahomet persevered. To those that demanded miraculous proofs of his mission, his uniform reply was, that he could not work miracles; that he was but "a preacher," "a public warner," "a denouncer of threats, and a promiser of rewards ;" but that the Koran itself contained, in its literary execution, as well as in its sublime matter, ample evidence of its divine origin. He challenged all Mecca to produce anything comparable to it in excellence. Never once, however, in his controversies with his obstinate opponents, did he make the slightest concession on the point of his supernatural call, and his absolute inspiration, in his prophetic capacity. He maintained his equality in this respect with Abra"ham, Moses, and the great prophets that had appeared in the world before; he was the special prophet of Arabia, he said, as they had been the prophets of other nations. After his supposed call to the prophetic office, Mahomet lived twenty-three years. Of these, the first three were spent in secret proselytism at Mecca. The only converts made during this period, that is, from his fortieth to his fifty-third year, were his wife Kadijah, her consin Waraka, his own cousin the boy Ali, the slave Zaid, Abubeker, wealthy and important citizen of Mecca, and several persons of the tribe of Koreish. After the public promulgation of his prophetic claims to the Meccans in 613, he remained in that city ten years, preaching his doctrines under great disadvantages. One by one, indeed, converts were added to his retinue; but by the great majority of the citizens, he was denounced as an impostor,' “a madman,” “a distracted poet," &c. His way of meeting these charges, and indeed of meeting every emergency that arose in his relations, either with his disciples or with the Meccans at large, was by bringing down, * ** * But for the protection afforded him by his uncle Abu Thaleb, who though he did no rank himself among his nephew's disciples, | yet would not bear to see him wronged, it is probable that Mahomet's career in Mecca would have been soon brought to an end. As it was, so bitter was the persecution to which he and his followers were exposed, that not a few that had embraced his doctrines left Mecca altogether, and either emigrated to Abyssinia, or scattered themselves over safer parts of Arabia. At length, Abu Thaleb having died, and Abu Sofian, the head of another family of the Koreish having succeeded him in the supremacy of Mecca, the feud between the Meccans or Koreishites at large, and the Haschemite secretaries became so violent, that Mahomet, after much procrastination, deemed it advisable to remove with his whole retinue to another place. The town of Yathreb, afterward known as Medina or Medinat-al-nabi, i. e. "the City of the Prophet," was chosen as the new centre of operations; and so important was this Hegira or Flight from Mecca to Medina, afterward considered, that the day on which it happened (16th July 622) was fixed as the commencement of the Mahometan era. The prophet was then fifty-three years of age. Three years before, he had lost his faithful wife Kadijah; and after her death he had married several other women, the best beloved of whom, and the only one that was not a widow at the time of her marriage with the Prophet, was Ayesha, the young daughter of his follower Abubeker. In all, puring his life, Mahomet had fifteen or sixteen wives. Of his daughters by Kadija, one, named Fatima, had been given in marriage to his early and enthusiastic disciple, Ali. During the last ten years of his life, or subsequently to his removal to Medina, Mahomet appears in a new character; no longer as a mere sectary struggling for the diffusion of his opinions, but as a King and Prophet issuing his commands and leading his armies over the surface of Arabia. After eight years of warfare against Abu Sofian and the Koreishites, varied by expeditions against the Jewish tribes that inhabited certain parts of Arabia, the Moslems, or Mussulmans, as Mahomet's followers began to be called, succeeded in making themselves masters of Mecca; and Mahomet, re-entering his native city in triumph, signalized his victory by breaking in pieces the three hundred and sixty idols of the Kaaba, and purifying it as a place of Monotheistic worship. From that date Islamism may be considered as established in Arabia. The Jewish and the Christian inhabitants, indeed, or at least a certain pro portion of them, still maintained their respective worships, tolerated to a considerable extent by the Prophet, who regarded their tenets, and especially those of the Christians, rather as corrupted f rms of the ancient and pure Islamism of Palestine than as positive heresies; but the Polytheistic tribes were obliged universally to submit, and profess themselves Mussulmans. Thus supreme within the bounds of Arabia, Mahomet was led to entertain a project which, though he does not appear at any earlier period to have contemplated it, was still but a natural extension of his views-the diffusion namely of Islamism over the whole Eastern world, by means of Arabian valor. Accordingly, he was actually engaged in meditating a double war against the Greek empire on the west and the Persians on the east, when (A.D. 632) he was cut off by a rapid fever at Medina, in the sixty-third year of his age. It was reserved for his successors, the Caliphs, to undertake that wonderful series of conquests by which, in the course of a century or two, Mahometanism was extended from the shores of the Atlantic to the Ganges, and made the nominal religion of a fifth part of the human race. Of Mr. Irving's "Life of Mahomet," in which the foregoing facts are narrated at length, we have only to say, that it is an elegant but jejune compilation of legends relating to Mahomet, and by no means such a Life of the Prophet as ought by this time to have been laid before the English public. By far the truest conception of Mahomet is to be obtained from his own book, the Koran. Unfortunately, however, the peculiar shape in which this book now exists, makes it less useful as a record of Mahomet's thoughts and opinions than it otherwise might have been. It was not till some years after his death that the numberless Suras or passages which he had dictated from time to time, were collected and given to the world as a whole; and, then, they were thrown together and divided into chapters in the most arbitrary way imaginable, no attempt being made either to classify them according to their contents, or to arrange them in the order in which they had been written: hence it is not possible to trace Mahomet's life very exactly through the Koran, so as to see how circumstances developed his views. Something, however, may be inferred from the nature of the case; for, seeing that, according to the theory we have explained above, Mahomet's inspirations followed in |