ost degenerate times; how that the universal recognition
of this sovereign Power and Providence was necessary to the salvation
of society. He had learned much from the study of the Talmud and the
Jewish Scriptures; he had reflected deeply in his isolated cave; he knew
that there was but one supreme God, and that there could be no elevated
morality without the sense of personal responsibility to Him; that
without the fear of this one God there could be neither wisdom
nor virtue.

Hence his soul burned to tell his countrymen his earnest belief in a
supreme and personal God, to whom alone prayers should be made, and who
alone could rescue by His almighty power. He pondered day and night on
this single and simple truth. His perpetual meditations and ascetic
habits induced dreams and ecstasies, such as marked primitive monks, and
Loyola in his Manresan cave. He became a visionary man, but most
intensely earnest, for his convictions were overwhelming. He fancied
himself the ambassador of this God, as the ancient Jewish prophets were;
that he was even greater than they, his mission being to remove
idolatry,--to his mind the greatest evil under the sun, since it was the
root of all vices and follies. Idolatry is either a defiance or a
forgetfulness of God,--high treason to the majesty of Heaven, entailing
the direst calamities.

At last, one day, in his fortieth year, after he had been shut up a
whole month in solitude, so that his soul was filled with ecstasy and
enthusiasm, he declared to Cadijeh that the night before, while wrapped
in his mantle, absorbed in reverie, a form of divine beauty, in a flood
of light, appeared to him, and, in the name of the Almighty who created
the heavens and the earth, thus spake: "O, Mohammed! of a truth thou art
the Prophet of God, and I am his angel Gabriel." "This," says Carlyle,
"is the soul of Islam. This is what Mohammed felt and now declared to be
of infinite moment, that idols and formulas were nothing; that the
jargon of argumentative Greek sects, the vague traditions of Jews, the
stupid routine of Arab idolatry were a mockery and a delusion; that
there is but one God; that we must let idols alone and look to Him. He
alone is reality; He made us and sustains us. Our whole strength lies in
submission to Him. The thing He sends us, be it death even, is good, is
the best. We resign ourselves to Him."

Such were the truths which Mohammed, with preternatural earnestness, now
declared,--