this he was pursued by his countrymen, and fled
from thence to Medina, in the year 622, the beginning of the Moslem era.
The number of his followers increasing, he had recourse to arms. He
conquered Mecca in 630, and made the Kaaba, after destroying the idols
in it, the sanctuary of the new religion.

The doctrine of Mohammed (Islam, submission to God, whence his followers
take the name of Moslems), is contained in the Koran. The various
Suras, or divisions, originally the revelations received by the prophet
at different periods of his life reduced to writing, were, soon after
his death, united by Abu Bekr into one holy book, under the name of the
Koran (al Kitab, the book), which, like the Bible among the later Jews
and Christians, was clothed with divine authority. The central doctrine
of Mohammed is the belief in one God, Allah, who, as the Creator and
Lord of all things, in strictest isolation from the world, is throned in
heaven. All that takes place upon the earth befalls according to the
eternal decree of God, a conception in which, at least among the
Orthodox Moslems, the Sunnites, who are distinguished in this respect,
as in others, from the dissenting Shiites, there is no place left for
human freedom. This God has from the earliest times revealed himself to
some privileged men, Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus (Isa). To the
last is due the honor of having been the reformer of degenerate Judaism.
He is not, as the Christians of Mohammed's time taught, the Son of God
in a metaphysical sense, much less God himself,--Allah is one, he
neither begets nor is begotten,--but a prophet of human descent. The
greatest and last prophet is Mohammed himself, in whom prophetism
reached its fulfillment. Along with the doctrine regarding God and his
relation to the world, prayer, hospitality, and benevolence occupy a
prominent place in the teaching of Mohammed, looked at from its
practical side, and also the belief in a future life, in the
Jewish-Parsee form of the resurrection of the dead, the judgment of the
world, future reward and punishment, paradise and hell. The truth of
this divine revelation rests upon the very fact of its having been
revealed, and, according to Mohammed, it no more needs scientific proof
than confirmation by miracles, to which Islamism did not appeal until
later.

The opinion which formerly prevailed among Christians that Mohammed was
an impostor, a false prophet, was bound up with the conception th