get this confused coil of a Koran fairly off your
hands, and have it behind you at a distance, the essential type of it
begins to disclose itself; and in this there is a merit quite other than
the literary one. If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to
reach other hearts; all art and authorcraft are of small amount to that.
One would say the primary character of the Koran is this of its
_genuineness_, of its being a _bona-fide_ book. Prideaux, I know, and
others, have represented it as a mere bundle of juggleries; chapter
after chapter got-up to excuse and varnish the author's successive sins,
forward his ambitions and quackeries: but really it is time to dismiss
all that. I do not assert Mohammed's continual sincerity: who is
continually sincere? But I confess I can make nothing of the critic, in
these times, who would accuse him of deceit _prepense_; of conscious
deceit generally, or perhaps at all;--still more, of living in a mere
element of conscious deceit, and writing this Koran as a forger and
juggler would have done! Every candid eye, I think, will read the Koran
far otherwise than so. It is the confused ferment of a great rude human
soul; rude, untutored, that cannot even read; but fervent, earnest,
struggling vehemently to utter itself in words. With a kind of
breathless intensity he strives to utter himself; the thoughts crowd on
him pell-mell: for very multitude of things to say, he can get nothing
said. The meaning that is in him shapes itself into no form of
composition, is stated in no sequence, method, or coherence;--they are
not _shaped_ at all, these thoughts of his; flung-out unshaped, as they
struggle and tumble there, in their chaotic inarticulate state. We said
"stupid": yet natural stupidity is by no means the character of
Mohammed's Book; it is natural un-cultivation rather. The man has not
studied speaking; in the haste and pressure of continual fighting, has
not time to mature himself into fit speech. The panting breathless haste
and vehemence of a man struggling in the thick of battle for life and
salvation; this is the mood he is in! A headlong haste; for very
magnitude of meaning, he cannot get himself articulated into words. The
successive utterances of a soul in that mood, colored by the various
vicissitudes of three-and-twenty years; now well uttered, now worse:
this is the Koran.

For we are to consider Mohammed, through these three-and-twenty years,
as the centre of a world who