himself if he is so:  I would say rather, his sincerity does not depend on himself; he cannot help being sincere!  The great Fact of Existence is great to him.  Fly as he will, he cannot get out of the awful presence of this Reality.  His mind is so made; he is great by that, first of all.  Fearful and wonderful, real as Life, real as Death, is this Universe to him.  Though all men should forget its truth, and walk in a vain show, he cannot.  At all moments the Flame-image glares-in upon him; undeniable, there, there!—­I wish you to take this as my primary definition of a Great Man.  A little man may have this, it is competent to all men that God has made:  but a Great Man cannot be without it.

Such a man is what we call an original man; he comes to us at first-hand.  A messenger he, sent from the Infinite Unknown with tidings to us.  We may call him Poet, Prophet, God;—­in one way or other, we all feel that the words he utters are as no other man’s words.  Direct from the Inner Fact of things:—­he lives, and has to live, in daily communion with that.  Hearsays cannot hide it from him; he is blind, homeless, miserable, following hearsays; it glares-in upon him.  Really his utterances, are they not a kind of “revelation";—­what we must call such for want of other name?  It is from the heart of the world that he comes; he is portion of the primal reality of things.  God has made many revelations:  but this man too, has not God made him, the latest and newest of all?  The “inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding”:  we must listen before all to him.

This Mohammed, then, we will in no wise consider as an Inanity and Theatricality, a poor conscious ambitious schemer; we cannot conceive him so.  The rude message he delivered was a real one withal; an earnest confused voice from the unknown Deep.  The man’s words were not false, nor his workings here below; no Inanity and Simulacrum; a fiery mass of Life cast-up from the great bosom of Nature herself.  To kindle the world; the world’s Maker had ordered it so.  Neither can the faults, imperfections, insincerities even, of Mohammed, if such were never so well proved against him, shake this primary fact about him.

On the whole, we make too much of faults; the details of the business hide the real centre of it.  Faults?  The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.  Readers of the Bible above all, one would think, might know better.  Who is called there “the man according to God’s own heart”?  David, the Hebrew King, had fallen into sins enough; blackest crimes; there was no want of sins.  And thereupon the unbelievers sneer and ask, Is this your man according to God’s heart?  The sneer, I must say, seems to me but a shallow one.  What are faults, what are the outward details of a life; if the inner secret of it, the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled, never-ended struggle of it, be forgotten?  “It is not