very fears were instrumental to his purpose; but, if they looked forward to results with a prophetic vision, they only taught him to be more wary and more vigilant, without being less determined or less bold. Every thing was converted by his courage or his sagacity, into the means of immediate or ultimate success. He wielded the powers of heaven and earth with equal address. The ministry of Gabriel, the hope of celestial favour, the terror of divine wrath, the contingencies of time and chance, the fanaticism, the madness, and the credulity of the people, were rendered alike subservient to his will. With the most unbounded pretensions to universal charity, and to holiness and truth, he could slay without remorse, and utter the most pernicious falsehoods without hesitation. As a conqueror he was what, perhaps, all conquerors have been, cruel, unjust, reckless of human blood, and careless of the cost which produced the advantages of victory. As a legislator, he was sagacious, artful, and subtle; skilful to adapt his code to times and circumstances, to tempers and wills; local, partial, and circumscribed in his laws; a flatterer, for his own interests, of the vices and prejudices of his countrymen; and a promoter of public order and welfare, in subserviency only to that dominant selfishness which constituted the sole motive and rule of his life.

Like the founders of the Greek and Hindu mythology, this singular man also pretended to celestial inspiration. Feeble would have been his own strength, if he had not clothed himself with divine authority; and ineffectual would have been his precepts, if he had not deduced them from the infallibility of heaven. He was too wise in his generation not to secure that obedience by the assumption of superhuman wisdom,

which would have been denied to the weakness of human command. He, therefore, at once, proclaimed himself the missionary of the Almighty, who was to communicate to man the last and most perfect of the Revelations of God; and the ignorance, and fraud, and corruption, of the impostor, were veiled by a garb borrowed from heaven.

During the infancy of his design, he proceeded with cautious and deliberate prudence, and was able, in the course of twelve years, to gather around him only a few wavering and doubtful disciples. But nothing could subdue or repress his perseverance. As his influence and power advanced, he became proportionally confident and decisive. His mission was announced with a bolder tone, and to more distant tribes. The visitation of Gabriel, the divine intercourse with which he was honoured, the miraculous transmission of the Koran, the immaculate and celestial perfection of the revelation which he was to announce, were more openly, more pompously, and more presumptuously detailed; till, at length, the audacity and skill of the impostor accomplished the design, which had been planned by his selfishness and his ambition; and the altar was raised and perfected by his hand, in the deserts of Arabia, before which, even in his lifetime, so many people were to bow down in faith, and to tender their oblations.

When he shook off his early timidity and reserve, he gradually, but with equal policy, assumed the most opposite character. Diffidence and humility would have been unwise, when the increasing faith of the multitude had surrounded him with obedient and ardent followers. For the language of exhorta

With the sword in one hand, and the Koran in the other, he called down the vengeance of heaven on the obstinacy of the unbeliever, or proclaimed the holy war of persecution against the devoted and contumacious infidel. The manner in which he was heard afforded him a proof of the efficacy of his preaching; and the superstructure, of which the foundations had been laid by fraud, was to be perfected by force.

Inconsistency and contradiction were to him as particles of dust; and they did not for a moment impede his course, though they disgraced his character. He proclaimed, in very lofty terms, the justice, the goodness and the mercy of God; yet that God, so just, so merciful and so good, was to be averted from the Mussulman who "wore silk, the excrement of a worm;" who forgot to turn to a certain point in the heavens at a certain hour of the day; who refused to abandon his social and religious duties, for the useless trials and formalities of the pilgrimage; or who was not prepared to sustain the creed of Islem by the persecution of the infidel. In the same manner, chastity, temperence, charity and humility were, at one moment, announced by the prophet as the most indispensable of virtues; yet, at another, he legalized not only for himself but for his followers, the scandals of libertinism, and the licence of the Harem; and, restricting the mercies of God to the children of the Koran, consigned the rest of men to the tuition of the sword. But these inconsistencies were not undesigned. They may be perpetually traced to the sensuality of his passions, or the selfishness of his policy; and if, when his policy and his passions were silent, he was a moralist and a sage, he became, as they impelled him, a

preceptor of licentiousness, of intolerance, and of persecution.

Among the tribes which he addressed were various sects of various religions; and Jews, and Christians, and Idolators, divided and subdivided into a diversity of holy factions, were blended in the same mass of discordant population. Of these, the last were sunk in the grossness of the most perverse superstition; and the Christian and the Jew had corrupted or forgotten the pure doctrines of Moses and of Christ. Did the Prophet of Mecca go forth among a people thus various and erroneous in their creed, to reclaim and to enlighten them? And was he affectionately and zealously employed in promoting among them a sounder faith, and a more perfect morality? If so, where are the fruits? But if, on the contrary, he formed his religion "to become a point of union or compromise to the divided opinions of the sects "around him, and so to embrace the principles "common to them all, that each party might discover "in it an honourable admission of the fundamental "doctrines of its own faith †;" we may easily determine the motives of the Impostor in these vile and unreluctant concessions; and we may detect in the lawgiver whose pretended object was the good of mankind, the selfishness of the ambitious and libertine Impostor who knew no good beyond his own.

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Every motive that can operate on feeble or carnal minds, was impressed for the same purpose, and with similar success. Fear was awed, and hope kindled, by views of celestial wrath, or assurances of celestial

*The language of Paley (Evidences of Christianity, chap. ix. sect. 2), is not more emphatic on this subject, than that of Sale in

recompence. In this world the infidel, if refractory, was to perish by the sword*; in the next, to endure, without end or diminution, whatever hell contains of anguish and horror; and the language in which he was thus menaced, was well calculated to accelerate his submission to the Prophet and the law. But the faithful exulted in a different allotment. They were, in this life, to repudiate their wives at will, to replace them with others as appetite or caprice might direct, and to supply the deficiency which was yet thought to exist, by selecting as many concubines as they pleased from the number of their captives. In the next life they were to enjoy a more lavish felicity. They were not told, indeed, of intellectual delights, of progressive wisdom, of advancing holiness, of celestial contemplations, of angelic society. It was their earthly passions which were to be addressed; and the promise of a Paradise unspeakably voluptuous, with its robes of silk, its palaces of gems, its rivers, its shades, its groves, its couches, its delicious wines, its interminable feasts, and its seventy-two virgins, of resplendent beauty and eternal youth, was designed and calculated to intoxicate the imagination, to inflame the desires, and to provoke and perpetuate the zeal, of the followers of Mahomet.

Yet the Prophet did not hold out an equal allotment to all the faithful. His business was war and conquest, and war and conquest required soldiers and heroes. He was, therefore, to excite a spirit

* "Strike off their heads, strike off all the ends of their fingers, kill the idolators wherever you shall find them." Koran, ch. viii. vol. 2. p. 140, and vol. ii. ch. ix. p. 149. The vengeance of the menace was often executed to the letter.