His marriage with Chadizah placed him in circumstances of ease, and gave him an opportunity of indulging his inclination to religious meditation.  It so happened that her cousin Waraka, who was a Jew, had turned Christian.  He was the first to translate the Bible into Arabic.  By his conversation Mohammed’s detestation of idolatry was confirmed.

After the example of the Christian anchorites in their hermitages in the desert, Mohammed retired to a grotto in Mount Hera, a few miles from Mecca, giving himself up to meditation and prayer.  In this seclusion, contemplating the awful attributes of the Omnipotent and Eternal God, he addressed to his conscience the solemn inquiry, whether he could adopt the dogmas then held in Asiatic Christendom respecting the Trinity, the sonship of Jesus as begotten by the Almighty, the character of Mary as at once a virgin, a mother, and the queen of heaven, without incurring the guilt and the peril of blasphemy.

By his solitary meditations in the grotto Mohammed was drawn to the conclusion that, through the cloud of dogmas and disputations around him, one great truth might be discerned—­the unity of God.  Leaning against the stem of a palm-tree, he unfolded his views on this subject to his neighbors and friends, and announced to them that he should dedicate his life to the preaching of that truth.  Again and again, in his sermons and in the Koran, he declared:  “I am nothing but a public preacher....  I preach the oneness of God.”  Such was his own conception of his so-called apostleship.  Henceforth, to the day of his death, he wore on his finger a seal-ring on which was engraved, “Mohammed, the messenger of God.”

Victories of Mohammed. It is well known among physicians that prolonged fasting and mental anxiety inevitably give rise to hallucination.  Perhaps there never has been any religious system introduced by self-denying, earnest men that did not offer examples of supernatural temptations and supernatural commands.  Mysterious voices encouraged the Arabian preacher to persist in his determination; shadows of strange forms passed before him.  He heard sounds in the air like those of a distant bell.  In a nocturnal dream he was carried by Gabriel from Mecca to Jerusalem, and thence in succession through the six heavens.  Into the seventh the angel feared to intrude and Mohammed alone passed into the dread cloud that forever enshrouds the Almighty.  “A shiver thrilled his heart as he felt upon his shoulder the touch of the cold hand of God.”

His public ministrations met with much resistance and little success at first.  Expelled from Mecca by the upholders of the prevalent idolatry, he sought refuge in Medina, a town in which there were many Jews and Nestorians; the latter at once became proselytes to his faith.  He had already been compelled to send his daughter and others of his disciples to Abyssinia, the king of which was a Nestorian Christian.