e are freest to speak of. He is by no means the truest of Prophets;
but I do esteem him a true one. Farther, as there is no danger of our
becoming, any of us, Mahometans, I mean to say all the good of him I
justly can. It is the way to get at his secret: let us try to
understand what _he_ meant with the world; what the world meant and
means with him, will then be a more answerable question. Our current
hypotheses about Mahomet, that he was a scheming Impostor, a Falsehood
incarnate, that his religion is a mere mass of quackery and fatuity,
begins really to be now untenable to any one. The lies, which
well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man, are disgraceful to
ourselves only. When Pococke inquired of Grotius, Where the proof was
of that story of the pigeon, trained to pick peas from Mahomet's ear,
and pass for an angel dictating to him? Grotius answered that there
was no proof! It is really time to dismiss all that. The word this man
spoke has been the life-guidance now of a hundred-and-eighty millions
of men these twelve-hundred years. These hundred-and-eighty millions
were made by God as well as we. A greater number of God's creatures
believe in Mahomet's word at this hour than in any other word
whatever. Are we to suppose that it was a miserable piece of spiritual
legerdemain, this which so many creatures of the Almighty have lived
by and died by? I, for my part, cannot form any such supposition. I
will believe most things sooner than that. One would be entirely at a
loss what to think of this world at all, if quackery so grew and were
sanctioned here.

Alas, such theories are very lamentable. If we would attain to
knowledge of anything in God's true Creation, let us disbelieve them
wholly! They are the product of an Age of Scepticism; they indicate
the saddest spiritual paralysis, and mere death-life of the souls of
men: more godless theory, I think, was never promulgated in this
Earth. A false man found a religion? Why, a false man cannot build a
brick house! If he do not know and follow _truly_ the properties of
mortar, burnt clay and what else he works in, it is no house that he
makes, but a rubbish-heap. It will not stand for twelve centuries, to
lodge a hundred-and-eighty millions; it will fall straightway. A man
must conform himself to Nature's laws, _be_ verily in communion with
Nature and the truth of things, or Nature will answer him, No, not at
all! Speciosities are specious--ah, me!--a Cagliostro, many