the scoffer set his foot in it; since when its retaliations, enraged into fiercer reprisals at every turn, have arrested in rivers of kindred blood an increase which, but for this, would of itself, in its own native outworkings, have proved fatal to Eastern civilization.

Thus, in a thirsty and boundless waste, swept by fiery winds, traversed by sharp and naked mountains, the hold of superstition, deceit, and murder, the patrimony of outcast generations, John saw a master-spirit rise, open its pandemonial gates, and let loose its hitherto pent-up furies upon erring Christendom.

D

CHAPTER VII.

THE SECRET OF MOHAMMED'S SUCCESS.

"To him was given the key of the bottomless pit."-ST. JOHN. "The sword is the key of heaven and of hell.”—MOHAMMED.

A GREAT idea, clearly brought out by a master-mind, possesses often a volcanic power. Of this kind was that which Moses presented in the court of the Pharaohs. It asserted the supremacy of God over all kings, kingdoms, and laws, and demanded, on that single ground, the immediate and unconditional liberation of his people. "Thus saith the Lord God of Israel: Let my people go." Thus was asserted God's unbounded and righteous dominion. It was a lost truth. Its reproduction convulsed the world: proud kings were awed, and idolatrous kingdoms toppled and fell before it. In that great idea God "beheld and drove asunder the nations. He uttered his voice; the earth melted."

A great idea gained distinct utterance in the commencement of the Christian era. It an

nounced the righteousness of faith,— a lost though a vital truth. It agitated the commonwealth of Rome to its political and moral centres as though it had been the voice of God, and changed the religions and habits of all its provinces. The reproduction of the same idea in the sixteenth century produced the greatest and the most desirable revolution of modern times.

When Mohammed gave himself up to the devices or the rhapsodies of Hara, his countrymen were the worshippers of the luminaries of heaven, and of numerous other deities. Three hundred and sixty idols, of every conceivable variety of form and ritual known to the Orientals, filled the niches and adorned the pedestals of the temple of Mecca. And throughout all the world, in the East and in the West, wherever the visible church had spread her faith, with limited exceptions, there had sprung up a disguised paganism. Retaining the names of things divine, the church had changed their meaning. Her images, the objects of her adoration, were not called idols, but saints; not named Jupiter and Minerva, but Peter and Mary, and after the canonized worthies of her communion. True religion had fled to the mountains. Idolatry had been restored. That

we may understand the providential reasons for the elevation of the hierophant of the Kaaba and of the cavern, at this juncture, to his throne, we should not forget or overlook the concomitant universal prevalence of idolatry, nor the coincident revelation of the man of sin, who had just then become unmasked by being proclaimed universal bishop, and had commenced openly to exercise his spiritual lordship by enforcing the worship of pieces of wood, wafer gods, and dead men's bones, provoking by his idolatries and oppressions the retributions of Heaven.

The creed of the wily Arab was not the offspring of chance, but one in the formation of which his sagacity had been providentially instructed, and which was destined, in working out its own hidden life, to develop and fulfil the mission to which he and his race had been so wonderfully reserved. That creed contained a grand and an eternal truth,-a truth simple, sublime, and in harmony with the teachings of Abraham, Moses, and Messias, and yet a truth that put him in debate with the world. "There is no God but one!" was the short but sententious utterance that shook on their polluted thrones the idols of Arabia and of Christendom; that originated in the

desert that fierce civil war which ended in the triumph of Mohammed, and in the union of its segregated tribes under the government of a single chief. Persuasion and miracles, he maintained, had been the abortive alternatives in the gentler mission of Jesus; but more effective measures were now demanded, and Heaven had committed to his hand the sword. With it he was required to chastise and reform the worlds idolatrous kingdoms.

Truth is often essential to success,-even when error mars and defaces it. The great truth that headed the creed of Mohammed turned a daring fiction into a probable verity. Both were necessary to create an army of fanatics and to found the Saracenic empire. He began his mission, like Moses, with the professed sentences of inspiration: but no signs attended him; no sea opened at the exodus of a nation; no mountain, wrapped in fire and darkness, became for a whole year his mighty oracle. His fables about Gabriel's midnight visits to his cavern, bringing with him the chapters of the Koran, and of his ride on his mysterious Borak from Mecca to Jerusalem, and thence through the seven heavens, where he passed the veil of unity, approached within two bowshots of the throne, and felt a cold that pierced his