Thus thirteen years passed away in reproach, in persecution, in fear.  At last forty picked men swore to assassinate him.  Should he remain at Mecca and die, before his mission was accomplished, or should he fly?  He concluded to fly to Medina, where there were Jews, and some nominal converts to Christianity,—­a new ground.  This was in the year 622, and the flight is called the Hegira,—­from which the East dates its era, in the fifty-third year of the Prophet’s life.  In this city he was cordially welcomed, and he soon found himself surrounded with enthusiastic followers.  He built a mosque, and openly performed the rites of the new religion.

At this era a new phase appears in the Prophet’s life and teachings.  Thus far, until his flight, it would seem that he propagated his doctrines by moral force alone, and that these doctrines, in the main, were elevated.  He had earnestly declared his great idea of the unity of God.  He had pronounced the worship of images to be idolatrous.  He held idolatry of all kinds in supreme abhorrence.  He enjoined charity, justice, and forbearance.  He denounced all falsehood and all deception, especially in trade.  He declared that humility, benevolence, and self-abnegation were the greatest virtues.  He commanded his disciples to return good for evil, to restrain the passions, to bridle the tongue, to be patient under injuries, to be submissive to God.  He enjoined prayer, fastings, and meditation as a means of grace.  He laid down the necessity of rest on the seventh day.  He copied the precepts of the Bible in many of their essential features, and recognized its greatest teachers as inspired prophets.

It was during these thirteen years at Mecca, amid persecution and ridicule, and with few outward successes, that he probably wrote the Koran,—­a book without beginning and without end, disjecta membra, regardless of all rules of art, full of repetitions, and yet full of lofty precepts and noble truths of morality evidently borrowed from the Jewish Scriptures,—­in which his great ideas stand out with singular eloquence and impressiveness:  the unity of God, His divine sovereignty, the necessity of prayer, the soul’s immortality, future rewards and punishments.  His own private life had been blameless.  It was plain and simple.  For a whole month he did not light a fire to cook his food.  He swept his chamber himself and mended his own clothes.  His life was that of an ascetic enthusiast, profoundly impressed with the greatness and dignity of his mission.  Thus far his greatest error and fault was in the supposition that he was inspired in the same sense as the ancient Jewish prophets were inspired,—­to declare the will and the truth of God.  Any man leading such a life of contemplative asceticism and retirement is prone to fall into the belief of special divine illumination.  It characterized George Fox, the Anabaptists, Ignatius Loyola, Saint Theresa, and even, to some extent, Oliver Cromwell himself.  Mohammed’s