the highest moral principles, and as a paragon of temperance and
high-toned living--while he has faithfully conveyed the message, and has
sincerely and honestly preached religious reforms, and the sublimity of
his preachings have in themselves the marks of divine truth.

If the said prophet defends his stains or immoral deeds by professed
revelations, and justifies himself in his flagrant breaches of morality
by producing messages from heaven, just and equally as he does when he
teaches the purer theology and higher morality for which he is
commissioned, then and from that time only we will consider him as an
impostor, guilty of high blasphemy in forging the name of God for his
licentious self indulgences.

But in the case of Mohammad, in the first place, the charges of cruelty
and sensuality during a period of six or seven years towards the end of
his life, excepting three years, are utterly false; and secondly, if
proved to have taken place, it is not proved that Mohammad justified
himself by alleging to have received a divine sanction or command to the
alleged cruelties and flagrant breaches of morality. The charges of
assassinations and cruelties to the prisoners of war and others, and of
the alleged perfidy and craftiness enumerated by Sir W. Muir, have been
examined and refuted by me in this book. _Vide_ pp. 60-73 and pp. 76-97.
The cases of Maria, a slave-girl, and Zeinab not coming directly under
the object of this book have been treated separately in Appendix B, pp.
211-220 of this work.

Mohammad, in his alleged cruelties towards his enemies, is not
represented by Sir W. Muir to have justified himself by special
revelation or sanction from on high, yet the Rev. Mr. Hughes, whose work
has been pronounced as having "_the rare merit of being accurate_,"
makes him (Mohammad) to have done them under the sanction of God in the
Koran.

"The best defenders of the Arabian Prophet[141] are obliged to
admit that the matter of Zeinab, the wife of Zeid, and again of
Mary, the Coptic slave, are 'an indelible stain' upon his memory;
that he is untrue once or twice to the kind and forgiving
disposition of his best nature; that he is once or twice
unrelenting in the punishment of his personal enemies, and that he
is guilty even more than once of conniving at the assassination of
inveterate opponents; but they do not give any satisfactory
explanation or apology for all this bei