r's
successive sins, forward his ambitions and quackeries: but really it
is time to dismiss all that. I do not assert Mahomet's continual
sincerity: who is continually 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 writing
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. We said 'stupid:' yet natural stupidity is
by no means the character of Mahomet'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 breathless haste and vehemence of a man
struggling in the thick of battle for life and salvation; this is the
mood he is in! A headlong haste; for very magnitude of meaning, he
cannot get himself articulated into words. The successive utterances
of a soul in that mood, coloured by the various vicissitudes of
three-and-twenty years; now well uttered, now worse: this is the
Koran.

For we are to consider Mahomet, through these three-and-twenty years,
as the centre of a world wholly in conflict. Battles with the Koreish
and Heathen, quarrels among his own people, backslidings of his own
wild heart; all this kept him in 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 any light of a
decision for them as a veritable light from Heaven; _any_ making-up of
his mind, so blessed, indispensable 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
j