, wanting. Mohammed makes no apology for the one, no
boast of the other. They were each the free dictate of his heart; each
called-for, there and then. Not a mealy-mouthed man! A candid ferocity,
if the case call for it, is in him; he does not mince matters! The War
of Tabuc is a thing he often speaks of: his men refused, many of them,
to march on that occasion; pleaded the heat of the weather, the harvest,
and so forth; he can never forget that. Your harvest? It lasts for a
day. What will become of your harvest through all Eternity? Hot weather?
Yes, it was hot; "but Hell will be hotter!" Sometimes a rough sarcasm
turns-up: He says to the unbelievers, Ye shall have the just measure of
your deeds at that Great Day. They will be weighed-out to you; ye shall
not have short weight!--Everywhere he fixes the matter in his eye; he
_sees_ it: his heart, now and then, is as if struck dumb by the
greatness of it. "Assuredly," he says; that word, in the Koran, is
written-down sometimes as a sentence by itself: "Assuredly."

No _Dilettanteism_ in this Mohammed; it is a business of Reprobation and
Salvation with him, of Time and Eternity: he is in deadly earnest about
it! Dilettanteism, hypothesis, speculation, a kind of amateur-search for
Truth, toying and coquetting with Truth: this is the sorest sin. The
root of all other imaginable sins. It consists in the heart and soul of
the man never having been _open_ to Truth;--"living in a vain show."
Such a man not only utters and produces falsehoods, but _is_ himself a
falsehood. The rational moral principle, spark of the Divinity, is sunk
deep in him, in quiet paralysis of life-death. The very falsehoods of
Mohammed are truer than the truths of such a man. He is the insincere
man: smooth-polished, respectable in some times and places; inoffensive,
says nothing harsh to anybody; most _cleanly_,--just as carbonic acid
is, which is death and poison.

We will not praise Mohammed's moral precepts as always of the
superfinest sort; yet it can be said that there is always a tendency to
good in them; that they are the true dictates of a heart aiming towards
what is just and true. The sublime forgiveness of Christianity, turning
of the other cheek when the one has been smitten, is not here: you _are_
to revenge yourself, but it is to be in measure, not overmuch, or beyond
justice. On the other hand, Islam, like any great Faith, and insight
into the essence of man, is a perfect equalizer of men