that story of the pigeon, trained to pick peas from Mohammed’s ear, and pass for an angel dictating to him, Grotius answered that there was no proof!  It is really time to dismiss all that.  The word this man spoke has been the life-guidance now of a hundred-and-eighty millions of men these twelve-hundred years.  These hundred-and-eighty millions were made by God as well as we.  A greater number of God’s creatures believe in Mohammed’s word at this hour than in any other word whatever.  Are we to suppose that it was a miserable piece of spiritual legerdemain, this which so many creatures of the Almighty have lived by and died by?  I, for my part, cannot form any such supposition.  I will believe most things sooner than that.  One would be entirely at a loss what to think of this world at all, if quackery so grew and were sanctioned here.

Alas, such theories are very lamentable.  If we would attain to knowledge of anything in God’s true Creation, let us disbelieve them wholly!  They are the product of an Age of Scepticism; they indicate the saddest spiritual paralysis, and mere death-life of the souls of men:  more godless theory, I think, was never promulgated in this Earth.  A false man found a religion?  Why, a false man cannot build a brick house!  If he do not know and follow truly the properties of mortar, burnt clay and what else he works in, it is no house that he makes, but a rubbish-heap.  It will not stand for twelve centuries, to lodge a hundred-and-eighty millions; it will fall straightway.  A man must conform himself to Nature’s laws, be verily in communion with Nature and the truth of things, or Nature will answer him, No, not at all!  Speciosities are specious—­ah me!—­a Cagliostro, many Cagliostros, prominent world-leaders, do prosper by their quackery, for a day.  It is like a forged bank-note; they get it passed out of their worthless hands:  others, not they, have to smart for it.  Nature bursts-up in fire-flames, French Revolutions and suchlike, proclaiming with terrible veracity that forged notes are forged.

But of a Great Man especially, of him I will venture to assert that it is incredible he should have been other than true.  It seems to me the primary foundation of him, and of all that can lie in him, this.  No Mirabeau, Napoleon, Burns, Cromwell, no man adequate to do anything, but is first of all in right earnest about it; what I call a sincere man.  I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic.  Not the sincerity that calls itself sincere; ah no, that is a very poor matter indeed;—­a shallow braggart conscious sincerity; oftenest self-conceit mainly.  The Great Man’s sincerity is of the kind he cannot speak of, is not conscious of; nay, I suppose, he is conscious rather of insincerity; for what man can walk accurately by the law of truth for one day?  No, the Great Man does not boast himself sincere, far from that; perhaps does not ask