or swearing soldier, hired to be shot, has his 'honour of a
soldier,' different from drill-regulations and the shilling a day. It
is not to taste sweet things, but to do noble and true things, and
vindicate himself under God's Heaven as a god-made Man, that the
poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that, the
dullest daydrudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly who say
he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death
are the _allurements_ that act on the heart of man. Kindle the inner
genial life of him, you have a flame that burns-up all lower
considerations. Not happiness, but something higher: one sees this
even in the frivolous classes, with their 'point of honour' and the
like. Not by flattering our appetites; no, by awakening the Heroic
that slumbers in every heart, can any Religion gain followers.

Mahomet himself, after all that can be said about him, was not a
sensual man. We shall err widely if we consider this man as a common
voluptuary, intent mainly on base enjoyments,--nay on enjoyments of
any kind. His household was of the frugalest; his common diet
barley-bread and water: sometimes for months there was not a fire once
lighted on his hearth. They record with just pride that he would mend
his own shoes, patch his own cloak. A poor, hard-toiling, ill-provided
man; careless of what vulgar men toil for. Not a bad man, I should
say; something better in him than _hunger_ of any sort,--or these wild
Arab men, fighting and jostling three-and-twenty years at his hand, in
close contact with him always, would not have reverenced him so! They
were wild men, bursting ever and anon into quarrel, into all kinds of
fierce sincerity; without right worth and manhood, no man could have
commanded them. They called him Prophet, you say? Why, he stood there
face to face with them; bare, not enshrined in any mystery; visibly
clouting his own cloak, cobbling his own shoes; fighting, counselling,
ordering in the midst of them: they must have seen what kind of a man
he _was_, let him be _called_ what you like! No emperor with his
tiaras was obeyed as this man in a cloak of his own clouting. During
three-and-twenty years of rough actual trial. I find something of a
veritable Hero necessary for that, of itself.

His last words are a prayer; broken ejaculations of a heart
struggling-up, in trembling hope, towards its Maker. We cannot say
that his religion made him _worse_; it made hi