At last, one day, in his fortieth year, after he had been shut up a whole month in solitude, so that his soul was filled with ecstasy and enthusiasm, he declared to Cadijeh that the night before, while wrapped in his mantle, absorbed in reverie, a form of divine beauty, in a flood of light, appeared to him, and, in the name of the Almighty who created the heavens and the earth, thus spake:  “O, Mohammed! of a truth thou art the Prophet of God, and I am his angel Gabriel.”  “This,” says Carlyle, “is the soul of Islam.  This is what Mohammed felt and now declared to be of infinite moment, that idols and formulas were nothing; that the jargon of argumentative Greek sects, the vague traditions of Jews, the stupid routine of Arab idolatry were a mockery and a delusion; that there is but one God; that we must let idols alone and look to Him.  He alone is reality; He made us and sustains us.  Our whole strength lies in submission to Him.  The thing He sends us, be it death even, is good, is the best.  We resign ourselves to Him.”

Such were the truths which Mohammed, with preternatural earnestness, now declared,—­doctrines which would revolutionize Arabia.  And why not?  They are the same substantially which Moses declared to those sensual and degraded slaves whom he led out of Egypt,—­yea, the doctrines of David and of Job.  “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.”  What a grand and all-important truth it is to impress upon people sunk in forgetfulness and sensuality and pleasure-seeking and idle schemes of vanity and ambition, that there is a supreme Intelligence who overrules, and whose laws cannot be violated with impunity; from whom no one can escape, even though he “take the wings of the morning and fly to the uttermost parts of the sea.”  This is the one truth that Moses sought to plant in the minds of the Jews,—­a truth always forgotten when there is slavery to epicurean pleasures or a false philosophy.

Now I maintain that Mohammed, in seeking to impress his degenerate countrymen with the idea of the one supreme God, amid a most degrading and almost universal polytheism, was a great reformer.  In preaching this he was neither fanatic nor hypocrite; he was a very great man, and thus far a good man.  He does not make an original revelation; he reproduces an old truth,—­as old as the patriarchs, as old as Job, as old as the primitive religions,—­but an exceedingly important one, lost sight of by his countrymen, gradually lost sight of by all peoples when divine grace is withheld; indeed practically by people in Christian lands in times of great degeneracy.  “The fool has said in his heart there is no God;” or, Let there be no God, that we may eat and drink before we die.  Epicureanism, in its pleasures or in its speculations, is virtually atheism.  It was so in Greece.  It is so with us.