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him!" at the same time declaring that the heavenly visitants were visible to her mortal eyes, as they spread their wings to shield the youthful supercargo from the sun. Eyes which are thus endowed at times are not, perhaps, very uncommon, for love deals in the supernatural. The next day a faithful slave of Kadijah waited on Mahomet with a proposition of marriage on the part of his mistress. No nosegay of speaking flowers, no silken bag containing a pebble, a nutmeg, or a bud of cassia opened the negotiation. Mahomet," said the messenger, "why dost thou not marry?"

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The pride of the young man spoke. "I have not the means," said he, for success and approbation had made him aspiring. "But if a wealthy dame should offer thee her handone who is handsome and of high birth-" "Who is she?" said the youth, breathlessly enough, we may suppose, for who believes that Mahomet had had, up to this hour, no secret suspicion of his favour in the eyes of his mistress? Kadijah!"

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The wedding was not long in coming off, and on the occasion Mahomet sent to the desert for his dear nurse Halêma, who had supplied the place of a mother to him, and presented her with a flock of forty sheep, which she took back to her native valley-one of many proofs of his native goodness of heart. The marriage, strange as it may seem, proved happy, in spite of wise prognostics, and Mahomet never ceased to bless the day that gave him to Kadijah. Some kinds of nobleness in both may hence be supposed; and one is tempted to make some sage reflections for the benefit of the young and giddy, touching the uses of respect and esteem in love. If not the essential foundations, they at least make most substantial buttresses for an edifice not a little apt to get out of the perpendicular under certain variations of atmosphere.

The view given of Mahomet's character by his historians is remarkable as differing very much from the accounts put forth by enthusiastic followers of common heroes. Nothing is so much dwelt on as his moral worth, his good Judgment, his remarkable prudence and steadiness, and his great skill in affairs. "Allah," says the historian Abulfeda, "had endowed him with every gift necessary to accomplish and endow an honest man; he was so pure and sincere, so free from every evil thought, that he was commonly known by the name of Al Amin, or "The Faithful."

The wealth of Kadijah having placed her husband above the necessity of toil, his active and enthusiastic mind had leisure to indulge its natural taste for religious speculations. The Caaba was now filled with idols, the gross superstition and ignorance of the age and

country having turned even Abraham and Moses into objects of stupid idolatry, as "givers of rain," etc., although the Jews, who possessed the Hebrew Scriptures, were still numerous in Arabia, with a record or tradition for every valley and mountain. Out of the fragments of Judaism and Paganism had grown up an empty and debasing worship, which was odious to the superior mind of Mahomet; and his thoughts were gradually turned, and at last irrevocably fixed, on the idea of a great religious reform. The recognition and worship of one only God, creator and governor of the universe, delighting in goodness and purity, and severely averse to evil in all forms, he perceived to lie at the base of whatever religion could do for the human heart; and he considered Noah and Abraham, Moses and Jesus Christ, to have been divinely appointed messengers, sent from time to time by God's fatherly love to recall the world to a knowledge of this great truth. He especially venerated Abraham, as the father of Ishmael, from whom his people, the Arabs, drew their origin. The corruption and idolatry about him seemed to intimate that the time for another prophet had arrived, and the operation of this thought, which he dwelt upon incessantly, in his daily walks, and in the mountain solitude near Mecca to which he was fond of retiring, resulted in the belief that he himself was this prophet.

Intense meditation on this great theme affected his whole being. He withdrew himself more and more from society, and at times endured no companionship but that of Kadijah, whose anxieties for him were incessant, and who never willingly quitted his side. Dreams, ecstasies, and trances ensued, and he would at times fall on the ground and remain unconscious of all around him. In short his health suffered from the highly excited state of his mind, and epilepsy or some disease akin to it appears to have been the result. This is of course denied by his followers, who hold the suggestion impious, and believe his paroxysms to have been evidences of heavenly possession. At length a decisive vision confirmed his belief in his own mission, and caused his wife and her cousin Waraka, a translator of part of both the Old and New Testaments into Arabic, to acknowledge him a prophet. After a month of fasting and prayer on Mount Hara, as Mahomet lay wrapped in his mantle, he heard a voice calling to him. Uncovering his head, he found himself surrounded by such splendour of light that he fell into a swoon, on recovering from which an angel appeared to him, bearing a silken cloth covered with writing, which he commanded the shrinking prophet to read. "I know not how to read," was the reply, but the angel reiterated the command, with a promise of di

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revelations of the different portions of the Koran, which, being repeated to his secretaries or disciples, were by them taken down on parchment, on palm-leaves, or on the shoulder-blades of sheep; thrown promiscuously into a chest, and there left at the mercy of accident, and with no attempt at order or arrangement. These revelations bear trace of the instruction Mahomet had gathered from the Christian scriptures. They are in general of a pure and elevated character, and if they are in some respects wild and even corrupt, it must be recollected that the channel through which they came to the young enthusiast during his sojourn in the Nestorian convent, was none of the clearest or most direct, and that the digest he made of the ideas then imbibed was perhaps quite as near the purity of Christian law as the precepts and practices of so-called Christians about him. He inculcated in various forms the rule which lies at the foundation of Christian ethics. "He who is not affectionate to God's creatures and to his own children, God will not be affectionate to him. Every Moslem who clothes the naked of his faith, will be clothed by Allah in the green robes of Paradise." "Every good act," he would say, "is charity. Your smiling in your brother's face is charity; an exhortation of your fellow-man to virtuous deeds is equal to alms-giving; your putting a wanderer in the right road is charity; your assisting the blind is charity; your removing stones and thorns and other obstructions from the road is charity; your giving water to the thirsty is charity." "A man's true wealth hereafter is the good he does in this world to his fellow-man. When he dies, people will say, how much property has he left behind him? But the angels who examine him in the grave will ask, 'What good deeds hast thou sent before thee?" "

vine assistance. Thus emboldened, Mahomet | temperament of the prophet may account for, found himself able to read what appeared on without suspecting intentional deception on his the sacred cloth,-the decrees of God, as after-part. During all this time he was receiving wards promulgated in the Koran. In the coolness of the morning he doubted the correctness of his own impressions, and went trembling to Kadijah to seek her counsel. "Joyful tidings dost thou bring," said the true wife and enthusiastic woman; "by him in whose hand is the soul of Kadijah, I will henceforth regard thee as the prophet of our nation. Rejoice! Allah will not suffer thee to fall to shame; hast thou not been loving to thy kinsfolk, kind to thy neighbours, charitable to the poor, hospitable to the stranger, faithful to thy word, and ever a defender of the truth?" This enumeration of the grounds of her own belief in the supernatural distinction vouchsafed to her husband speaks volumes for them both. Indeed there is abundant reason to believe that throughout this early and difficult stage of his career, while his claims brought him nothing better than losses, injury and insult, he was most sincere and earnest in his pretensions, bent on the extermination of the debasing idolatries of his nation, and on establishing the worship of the God whom he had learned from Jews and Christians to revere. Spite of the acknowledged excellence of his character up to this period, his friends deserted him, he was the butt of poets and jesters, and his own tribe, the Koreishites, stung by the disgrace which they conceived to have been brought upon them by the defection of one of their heads, after seeking in vain to silence him, threatened his life. His uncle, Abu Taleb, hastened to inform Mahomet of these deadly menaces. "O my uncle!" exclaimed the enthusiast, "though they should array the sun against me on my right hand, and the moon on my left, yet, until God should command me, or should take me hence, I will not relinquish my purpose." Personal violence soon ensued; Mahomet's family and the few converts he had yet been able to make fled into Abyssinia, and a law was passed banishing all who should embrace the new faith. Mahomet himself took hiding in Mount Safa with one of his converts, but was drawn thence by the conversion of Omar, a powerful warrior, once his fiercest enemy, ever after his most faithful and powerful champion.

From this time the number of converts increased, though not very rapidly, the certain loss of worldly position and all else that worldly men most prize being the only prospect of those who embraced the doctrines of Islamism. Mahomet's visions grew more and more frequent and astonishing, appearing always when they were most needed for the encouragement of followers or the discomfiture of enemies-a peculiarity which perhaps the highly excitable

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After the death of Kadijah and other of his devoted adherents, the fortunes of Mahomet at Mecca assumed a still darker hue, and after many escapes and deliverances he resolved upon his flight to Medina, a movement so momentous in its consequences that his followers date from it as we from the Christian era. left Mecca before the dawn in company with Abu Beker, who, though a brave man, quaked with fear as the sound of fierce pursuit reached their ears. "Our pursuers," said he, "are many, while we are but two." "Nay," replied Mahomet, "there is a third; GoD is with us!" A beautiful legend says that at this moment of peril, when the fugitives reached a cave in which they sought shelter, an acacia tree had sprung up before the entrance, a pigeon made

her nest in the branches and had laid her eggs, and a spider had spread his web over the whole. When the pursuers beheld these signs of undisturbed quiet, they turned away and continued the chase in another direction. Escaping all perils, Mahomet entered Medina in safety, and with the air rather of triumph than of flight, so great was the number of proselytes who greeted his arrival. The time of his hegira or flight corresponds with the year 622 of the Christian era.

It was at Medina that the first mosque was erected, Mahomet assisting with his own hands. Here, when the exhortation, cried aloud by the muezzin, "God is great! There is none other! | Mahomet is his prophet!" had drawn the people together for worship, did he who was afterwards to become one of the great powers of the earth, preach, by the light of splinters of palm, and leaning with his back against one of the date-trees which served as pillars to support the roof of the primitive edifice. Here too was his tomb erected in after days, at first sight of which, to this day, pilgrims approaching Medina bow themselves to the earth and pray to the one only and true God whose worship it was the object of Mahomet's life to establish. The thatch of palm-leaves has been replaced by a gilded dome, and the unhewn date-trees by shapely pillars. But its chief glory and distinction is still that the prophet of the faithful was its founder and first ministrant, and that within its sacred bounds, he delivered his last solemn charge. "I return to him who sent me; and my last command to you is that ye remain united, that ye love, honour and uphold each other, that ye exhort each other to faith and constancy in belief, and to the performance of pious deeds. By these things alone men prosper; all else leads to destruction. I do but go before you; you will soon follow me. Death awaits us all; let no one, then, seek to turn it aside from me. My life has been for your good; so will be my death.”

These are not the words of a willing impostor, nor is there more reason to suspect self-seeking fraud in the testimony of his entire life. There was a period of some ten years, during which, in the intoxication of success, he lost sight of his own principles, and forsook the law of love which had so long commended itself to his better reason; but as the dazzle of earthly affairs subsided, he seems to have returned to his first great ideas, and to have been anxious for nothing so much as to preserve his people from a return to shameful idolatry and the degradations which follow in its train.

The change in his views with regard to the propagation of the faith took place after he was established in Medina, encircled by powerful and enthusiastic followers. He by some pro

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cess arrived at the conclusion that the power thus placed within his reach was intended as a means of effecting his great purpose; and it was in these terms that he made known his convic

tion to his disciples. "Different prophets," said he, "have been sent by God to illustrate his different attributes: Moses, his clemency and providence; Solomon, his wisdom, majesty and glory; Jesus Christ, his righteousness, omniscience and power,-righteousness by purity of conduct, omniscience by the knowledge he displayed of the secrets of all hearts,-power by the miracles he wrought. None of these attributes, however, proved sufficient to enforce conviction; even the miracles of Moses and Jesus have been treated with unbelief. I, therefore, the last of the prophets, am sent with the Sword! Let those who promulgate my faith enter into no argument or discussion, but SLAY all who refuse obedience to the law. Whoever fights for the true faith, whether he fall or conquer, will assuredly receive a glorious reward."

We will not follow Mahomet through the stormy career to which this manifesto is the key. Various fortune attended his arms; a victory at Beder, a defeat at Ohod; now an attempt on his life, now a miraculous conversion to his religion. Through all is evident the corrupting effect of great power upon a mind naturally noble. We see, as Mr. Irving well observes, "how immediately and widely he went wrong the moment he departed from the benevolent spirit of Christianity which at first he endeavoured to emulate." Yet instances of forbearance and generosity are everywhere to be found, leaving it impossible to doubt that goodness was the natural habit of his life, and the bloody propagandism to which he gave himself for a time, only a foul excrescence, such as the sting of an insect will sometimes cause to grow on a thriving and beautiful tree, leaving the greater part of its branches and foliage in their full health and beauty. The personal influence of the Prophet was immense. His relatives, his wives, his children, his disciples, had all, evidently, a love for him which went far beyond the mere reverence which might have been excited by a belief in his mission.

The affectionateness of his nature was so deep and true that no success or disappointment ever for a moment made him unkind to those he loved. His first wife, Kadijah, had his whole heart, and never while she lived would he wound her devoted attachment by taking another. Even after her death, when he married many wives, some from policy, some from affection, he retained a grateful and fond recollection of the worth of her who had been his first friend. When the beautiful Ayesha, who ruled his heart so long, betrayed a jeal

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ousy at the mention of her predecessor, and | invocation opened the march, uttered by Maasked, "Has not Allah given thee a better in her homet, and repeated by all; "Here I am in thy stead?" "Never!" exclaimed Mahomet, with service, oh God! Thou hast no companion-to a burst of honest feeling;-" Never did God give thee alone belongeth worship! From thee me a better! When I was poor, she enriched cometh all good! Thine alone is dominionme; when I was pronounced a liar, she believed there is none to share it with thee!" When in me; when I was opposed by all the world, we consider that this man was brought up in a she remained true to me." And in this mind hideous idolatry, we cannot but be struck with he lived and died, kind and gentle as he was the reverential attitude of his mind, ever obto the various elderly as well as youthful com- vious, even in times of saddest aberration. panions who shared his lot, after success had made it a high honour to be called his wife. Not less striking than his habitual domestic affection was the reverential love he cherished for the memory or rather the idea of his mother, who died when he was but six years old. He was nearly sixty, when, passing near the place where she was buried, he longed to pay a tribute of respect to her grave, though according to his own law this was not permissible, seeing she had died in unbelief. In an agony of tears he implored of Heaven a relaxation of this law. “I asked leave of God," he said, mournfully, "to visit my mother's grave, and it was gratified; but when I asked leave to pray for her it was denied me!" Who can fail to perceive here the yearning of a deeply tender and susceptible as well as highly imaginative nature?

Domestic sorrows marked his life; several of his daughters died, and the only son heaven ever vouchsafed him lived but fifteen months. The father suffered agony as he watched the departure of this darling of his hopes; but his religious faith proved effectual in sustaining him, even here. "We are of God! from him we came, and to him we must return!" And as he laid the body in the tomb, he cried, "My son! my son! say God is my Lord! the prophet of God was my father, and Islamism is my faith!" intending these for the instruction of the child when he should be questioned by the examining angels on the other side the grave. Some of his followers interpreting an eclipse of the sun which happened just then, into a sign of heavenly sympathy with his sorrows, he said, "The sun and moon are among the wonders of God, through which, at times, he signifies his will to his servants; but their eclipse has nothing to do with the birth or death of any mortal." The grief which he suffered on this occasion ripened the deathseeds in his own constitution. His extraordinary exercises of mind, his night-watches, his military exposures, with the effects of a subtle poison which was administered to him some years before by treachery, combined to induce premature old age. He felt that his end was approaching, and he resolved to use the remains of his strength in a pilgrimage to Mecca. He was accompanied by an immense train of pilgrims, and by all his own family. A solemn

Carefully fulfilling every minutest rite of pilgrim duty, that his disciples might not be without a model in this great point of their faith, Mahomet reached Mecca, and there preached, either in the Caaba, or from the back of his camel, to assembled multitudes, who saw with grief his growing feebleness. "Listen to my words," he would say, "for I know not whether, after this year, we shall ever meet here again. O! my hearers, I am but a man like yourselves; the angel of death may at any time appear, and I must obey his

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It was not very long after this that he was attacked with violent pain in the head, accompanied with the vertigo and delirium which had marked all his former seizures. In the night he insisted upon rising and going forth, attended only by a slave, to the public burialplace of Medina, where, in the midst of the tombs, he lifted up his voice and cried to the dead, " Rejoice, ye dwellers in the grave! More peaceful is the morning to which ye shall awaken, than that which attends the living. Happier is your condition than theirs. God has delivered you from the storms with which they are threatened, and which shall follow each other like the watches of a stormy night, each one darker than that which went before."

When Fatima, his only remaining child, came to his tent, "Welcome, my child," he said, and made her sit beside him. He then whispered something in her ear, at which she wept. Perceiving her affliction, he whispered her again -a consolation for the prediction which had distressed her. He now made a last effort to go to the mosque, where all were deeply affected by his exhortations, and one man met them by a full and public confession of his sins. "Out upon thee!" said the impetuous Omar; "why dost thou make known what God had suffered to remain concealed?" But Mahomet rebuked him, saying, "O son of Khattab; better is it to blush in this world than to suffer in the next." Then lifting his eyes to heaven, he prayed for the self-accused,-"O God, give him rectitude and faith, and take from him all weakness in fulfilling thy commands."

As his pains increased, his anxiety as to the future life was more and more evident. He ordered that his slaves should be restored to

freedom, and that all the money in the house should be distributed to the poor; then, raising his eyes to heaven, "God be with me in the death-struggle," was his fervent prayer. In this frame he departed; and no mourning was ever more sincere than that which accompanied his honoured remains to their last restingplace.

In person, Mahomet is described as being of the middle height, and stoutly built; spare in his youth, but more corpulent as he advanced in life. His face was oval, his features were marked and expressive, particularly his mouth; which is said to have promised the peculiar eloquence which was so potent an instrument in his career. In character, he was grave but social; his smile was sweet and captivating, but unfrequent; the respect of his associates was always commanded by the dignity of his manner, but their hearts were none the less won by its fascination. His intellect was beyond question extraordinary; he had the soul of a poet, with the stern zeal of a religious reformer; his glowing imagination gave all its power to the one only object of his life, that object to which he turned all his powers of

"Better dead Is the bride, Falsely led To confide

every kind, with a perfect unity of devotion which insures success in all things, good or bad. His voice was of the quality which charms the ear,- -a quality invaluable to the preacher. All the legendary and aphoristic lore of his nation gave richness and point to his teachings, and many instances are recorded in which his words had an effect which it was not at all surprising that his followers ascribed to inspiration.

As to the moral character of Mahomet we must in all candour allow that, with some gross faults, it had a high general tone of excellence, when contemplated in reference to his age and country; and while we cannot deny that his enthusiasm degenerated into imposture, we must reckon him among his own victims, and give him the praise which is due to one who desired to do good, though sometimes by unjustifiable means. High authority ranks him as the Moses of the Ishmaelitish branch of the descendants of Abraham, and considers the immense success of his doctrines as the fulfilment of the divine promise of temporal prosperity to the line of Ishmael.

THE TEST RING.*

BY MARY SPENSER PEASE.

In the truth

Of truthless man, This her ruth, This her ban.

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I had no power, I had no thought,

I only strove to die;

Like circles of flame all things became,
Reeling before my eye!

Like rings of flame all things became-
Hot flames by whirlwind fanned!
The sacred gold I had worn so well
Dropped molten from my hand.

I saw my happy, happy home
Licked up by the tongue of fire,
My household gods torn from my grasp,
And flung on the funeral pyre.

I felt the cold, blind world, mother,
Come atween me and my name;

The world of night, with its voice of might,

As my senses went and came.
Yet God and you believed me true
Those weary, weary days;

My brain was fire, my heart was ice,
And thought a wildering maze.

And now I've only thee, mother,
Of all the sunny past;

Thy love my first, sweet heaven of rest,
And thy sweet love my last.
Then clasp me to thy heart, mother,
Close, closer to thy breast;

For since from thee and home I strayed,
I've had little, little rest.

* Suggested by a Norse legend.

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