doctrines which would revolutionize Arabia. And why not? They
are the same substantially which Moses declared to those sensual and
degraded slaves whom he led out of Egypt,--yea, the doctrines of David
and of Job. "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him." What a grand
and all-important truth it is to impress upon people sunk in
forgetfulness and sensuality and pleasure-seeking and idle schemes of
vanity and ambition, that there is a supreme Intelligence who overrules,
and whose laws cannot be violated with impunity; from whom no one can
escape, even though he "take the wings of the morning and fly to the
uttermost parts of the sea." This is the one truth that Moses sought to
plant in the minds of the Jews,--a truth always forgotten when there is
slavery to epicurean pleasures or a false philosophy.

Now I maintain that Mohammed, in seeking to impress his degenerate
countrymen with the idea of the one supreme God, amid a most degrading
and almost universal polytheism, was a great reformer. In preaching this
he was neither fanatic nor hypocrite; he was a very great man, and thus
far a good man. He does not make an original revelation; he reproduces
an old truth,--as old as the patriarchs, as old as Job, as old as the
primitive religions,--but an exceedingly important one, lost sight of by
his countrymen, gradually lost sight of by all peoples when divine grace
is withheld; indeed practically by people in Christian lands in times of
great degeneracy. "The fool has said in his heart there is no God;" or,
Let there be no God, that we may eat and drink before we die.
Epicureanism, in its pleasures or in its speculations, is virtually
atheism. It was so in Greece. It is so with us.

Mohammed was now at the mature age of forty, in the fulness of his
powers, in the prime of his life; and he began to preach everywhere
that there is but one God. Few, however, believed in him. Why not
acknowledge such a fundamental truth, appealing to the intellect as well
as the moral sense? But to confess there is a supreme God, who rewards
and punishes, and to whom all are responsible both for words and
actions, is to imply a confession of sinfulness and the justice of
retribution. Those degraded Arabians would not receive willingly such a
truth as this, even as the Israelites ever sought to banish it from
their hearts and minds, in spite of their deliverance from slavery. The
uncles and friends of Mohammed treated his mission with scorn and