and Christians
was a miracle to him, the only miracle upon which he relied for the support
of his mission.

In the course of the twenty-three years of Mohammed's work as God's
messenger, the over-excited state, or inspiration, or whatever we may
call the peculiar spiritual condition in which his revelation was born,
gradually gave place to quiet reflection. Especially after the Hijrah, when
the prophet had to provide the state established by him at Medina with
inspired regulations, the words of God became in almost every respect
different from what they had been at first. Only the form was retained. In
connection with this evolution, some of our biographers of Mohammed, even
where they do not deny the obvious honesty of his first visions, represent
him in the second half of his work, as a sort of actor, who played with
that which had been most sacred to him. This accusation is, in my opinion,
unjust.

Mohammed, who twelve years long, in spite of derision and contempt,
continued to inveigh in the name of Allah against the frivolous
conservatism of the heathens in Mecca, to preach Allah's omnipotence to
them, to hold up to them Allah's commands and His promises and threats
regarding the future life, "without asking any reward" for such exhausting
work, is really not another man than the acknowledged "Messenger of
Allah" in Medina, who saw his power gradually increase, who was taught by
experience the value and the use of the material means of extending it,
and who finally, by the force of arms compelled all Arabs to "obedience to
Allah and His messenger."

In our own society, real enthusiasm in the propagation of an idea generally
considered as absurd, if crowned by success may, in the course of time, end
in cold, prosaic calculation without a trace of hypocrisy. Nowhere in
the life of Mohammed can a point of turning be shown; there is a gradual
changing of aims and a readjustment of the means of attaining them. From
the first the outcast felt himself superior to the well-to-do people who
looked down upon him; and with all his power he sought for a position from
which he could force them to acknowledge his superiority. This he found in
the next and better world, of which the Jews and Christians knew. After a
crisis, which some consider as psychopathologic, he knew himself to be sent
by Allah to call the materialistic community, which he hated and despised,
to the alternative, either in following him to find eternal ble