really think the man they _saw_
there standing beside them a god, the maker of this world? Perhaps
not: it was usually some man they remembered, or _had_ seen. But
neither can this any more be. The Great Man is not recognised
henceforth as a god any more.

It was a rude gross error, that of counting the Great Man a god. Yet
let us say that it is at all times difficult to know _what_ he is, or
how to account of him and receive him! The most significant feature in
the history of an epoch is the manner it has of welcoming a Great Man.
Ever, to the true instincts of men, there is something godlike in him.
Whether they shall take him to be a god, to be a prophet, or what they
shall take him to be? that is ever a grand question; by their way of
answering that, we shall see, as through a little window, into the
very heart of these men's spiritual condition. For at bottom the Great
Man, as he comes from the hand of nature, is ever the same kind of
thing: Odin, Luther, Johnson, Burns; I hope to make it appear that
these are all originally of one stuff; that only by the world's
reception of them, and the shapes they assume, are they so
immeasurably diverse. The worship of Odin astonishes us--to fall
prostrate before the Great Man, into _deliquium_ of love and wonder
over him, and feel in their hearts that he was a denizen of the skies,
a god! This was imperfect enough: but to welcome, for example, a Burns
as we did, was that what we can call perfect? The most precious gift
that Heaven can give to the Earth; a man of 'genius' as we call it:
the Soul of a Man actually sent down from the skies with a
God's-message to us--this we waste away as an idle artificial
firework, sent to amuse us a little, and sink it into ashes, wreck and
ineffectuality: _such_ reception of a Great Man I do not call very
perfect either! Looking into the heart of the thing, one may perhaps
call that of Burns a still uglier phenomenon, betokening still sadder
imperfections in mankind's ways, than the Scandinavian method itself!
To fall into mere unreasoning _deliquium_ of love and admiration, was
not good; but such unreasoning, nay irrational supercilious no-love at
all is perhaps still worse!--It is a thing forever changing, this of
Hero-worship: different in each age, difficult to do well in any age.
Indeed, the heart of the whole business of the age, one may say, is to
do it well.

We have chosen Mahomet not as the most eminent Prophet, but as the one
w