of things;--he lives, and has to live, in daily communion
with that. Hearsays cannot hide it from him; he is blind, homeless,
miserable, following hearsays; _it_ glares in upon him. Really his
utterances, are they not a kind of "revelation;"--what we must call such
for want of some other name? It is from the heart of the world that he
comes; he is portion of the primal reality of things. God has made many
revelations: but this man too, has not God made him, the latest
and newest of all? The "inspiration of the Almighty giveth him
understanding:" we must listen before all to him.

This Mahomet, then, we will in no wise consider as an Inanity and
Theatricality, a poor conscious ambitious schemer; we cannot conceive
him so. The rude message he delivered was a real one withal; an earnest
confused voice from the unknown Deep. The man's words were not false,
nor his workings here below; no Inanity and Simulacrum; a fiery mass
of Life cast up from the great bosom of Nature herself. To _kindle_
the world; the world's Maker had ordered it so. Neither can the faults,
imperfections, insincerities even, of Mahomet, if such were never so
well proved against him, shake this primary fact about him.

On the whole, we make too much of faults; the details of the business
hide the real centre of it. Faults? The greatest of faults, I should
say, is to be conscious of none. Readers of the Bible above all, one
would think, might know better. Who is called there "the man according
to God's own heart"? David, the Hebrew King, had fallen into sins
enough; blackest crimes; there was no want of sins. And thereupon the
unbelievers sneer and ask, Is this your man according to God's heart?
The sneer, I must say, seems to me but a shallow one. What are faults,
what are the outward details of a life; if the inner secret of it, the
remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled, never-ended struggle of it,
be forgotten? "It is not in man that walketh to direct his steps." Of
all acts, is not, for a man, _repentance_ the most divine? The deadliest
sin, I say, were that same supercilious consciousness of no sin;--that
is death; the heart so conscious is divorced from sincerity, humility
and fact; is dead: it is "pure" as dead dry sand is pure. David's life
and history, as written for us in those Psalms of his, I consider to be
the truest emblem ever given of a man's moral progress and warfare here
below. All earnest souls will ever discern in it the faithfu