ir cruel and perfidious details by Mahomet
himself leaves a dark and indelible blot upon his character."--Muir's
Life of Mahomet, Vol. IV, pp. 307-9.

"The reader will observe that simultaneously with the anxious desire to
extinguish idolatry, and to promote religion and virtue in the world,
there was nurtured by the Prophet in his own heart a licentious
self-indulgence; till in the end, assuming to be the favourite of
Heaven, he justified himself by 'revelations' from God in the most
flagrant breaches of morality. He will remark that while Mahomet
cherished a kind and tender disposition, 'weeping with them that wept,'
and binding to his person the hearts of his followers by the ready and
self-denying offices of love and friendship, he could yet take pleasure
in cruel and perfidious assassination, could gloat over the massacre of
an entire tribe, and savagely consign the innocent babe to the fires of
hell."--Muir's Life of Mahomet, Vol. IV, pp. 322-3.]

[Footnote 140: "In domestic life the conduct of Mahomet with one grave
exception was exemplary. As a husband his fondness and devotion was
entire, bordering, however, at times upon jealousy. As a father he was
loving and tender. In his youth he is said to have lived a virtuous
life. At the age of twenty-five he married a widow forty years old; and
for five and twenty years he was a faithful husband to her alone. Yet it
is remarkable that during this period was composed most of those
passages of the Coran in which the black-eyed Houris, reserved for
believers in Paradise, are depicted in such glowing colours. Shortly
after the death of Khadija the Prophet married again; but it was not
till the mature age of fifty-four that he made the dangerous trial of
polygamy, by taking Ayesha, yet a child, as the rival of Sauda. Once the
natural limits of restraint were overpassed, Mahomet fell an easy prey
to his strong passion for the sex. In his fifty-sixth year he married
Haphsa; and the following year, in two succeeding months, Zeinab bint
Khozeima and Omm Salma. But his desires were not to be satisfied by the
range of a harem already greater than was permitted to any of his
followers; rather as age advanced, they were stimulated to seek for new
and varied indulgence. A few months after his nuptials with Zeinab and
Omm Salma, the charms of a second Zeinab were by accident discovered too
fully before the Prophet's admiring gaze. She was the wife of Zeid, his
adopted son and bosom