but
faint opposition. Mecca fell into his hands. He used his victory
nobly: only four persons were put to death. It was at once shown that
no injury was to be done to the city. The old worship and its various
ceremonies were preserved. All idols, of course, were destroyed, both
those about the Caaba, of which there are said to have been one for
each day in the year, and those in private houses.

Mecca made the Capital of Islam.--In fact Mecca gained new importance
from this conquest. It was constituted by the irresistible power of
Mahomet the central sanctuary of the true religion. A year after the
victory Mahomet again visited Mecca, and performed the pilgrimage
with all its rites in his own person, setting the correct pattern in
every detail, which all pilgrims were to observe in all time coming.
Those who wish to know what the rites of Mecca are, will find them
graphically and minutely described in Captain Burton's _Pilgrimage to
El-Medinah and Mecca_; that gallant officer was one of the three
Europeans who, during the nineteenth century, assumed the disguise of
pilgrims and took part in the observances. The kissing of the sacred
black stone in the wall of the Caaba, the sevenfold circuit of the
building, the drinking of the water of the well Zem-zem, the race
from one hill-top to another in the neighbourhood of Mecca, the
throwing of seven stones at a certain spot, and the sacrifice of an
animal in a certain valley--these form a collection of rites each of
which had probably a separate origin, and of some of which the
original meaning can scarcely be made out.[4] This "block of
heathenism" Mahomet made part of his religion. He could not have
abolished it, and by adopting it in an improved form as a part of his
own system he served himself heir to the national religious
traditions, and acquired for his own religion the authority of a
national faith. "This day have I appointed your religion unto you,"
are his words after fixing the forms of the pilgrimage, "and applied
Islam for you to be your religion." Islam adopts the Mecca rites, and
thereby becomes the national religion of Arabia. Hubal, the chief god
of the Caaba, disappears; Allah becomes the sole god of the shrine.
The legend that Abraham founded it is put in circulation, and it is
thus connected with the supposed earliest Arabian religion, the
religion before idolatry, the Islam before Islam. As Paul appeals to
the faith of Abraham as being a Christianity b