Idolatries never so gilded waited on by heads of the Koreish, will do nothing for this man.  Though all men walk by them, what good is it?  The great Reality stands glaring there upon him.  He there has to answer it, or perish miserably.  Now, even now, or else through all Eternity never!  Answer it; thou must find an answer.—­Ambition?  What could all Arabia do for this man; with the crown of Greek Heraclius, of Persian Chosroes, and all crowns in the Earth;—­what could they all do for him?  It was not of the Earth he wanted to hear tell; it was of the Heaven above and of the Hell beneath.  All crowns and sovereignties whatsoever, where would they in a few brief years be?  To be Sheik of Mecca or Arabia, and have a bit of gilt wood put into your hand,—­will that be one’s salvation?  I decidedly think, not.  We will leave it altogether, this impostor hypothesis, as not credible; not very tolerable even, worthy chiefly of dismissal by us.

Mohammed had been wont to retire yearly, during the month Ramadhan, into solitude and silence; as indeed was the Arab custom; a praiseworthy custom, which such a man, above all, would find natural and useful.  Communing with his own heart, in the silence of the mountains; himself silent; open to the “small still voices”:  it was a right natural custom!  Mohammed was in his fortieth year, when having withdrawn to a cavern in Mount Hara, near Mecca, during this Ramadhan, to pass the month in prayer, and meditation on those great questions, he one day told his wife Kadijah, who with his household was with him or near him this year, that by the unspeakable special favor of Heaven he had now found it all out; was in doubt and darkness no longer, but saw it all.  That all these Idols and Formulas were nothing, miserable bits of wood; that there was One God in and over all; and we must leave all idols, and look to Him.  That God is great; and that there is nothing else great!  He is the Reality.  Wooden Idols are not real; He is real.  He made us at first, sustains us yet; we and all things are but the shadow of Him; a transitory garment veiling the Eternal Splendor. “Allah akbar,” God is great;—­and then also “Islam,” that we must submit to God.  That our whole strength lies in resigned submission to Him, whatsoever He do to us.  For this world, and for the other!  The thing He sends to us, were it death and worse than death, shall be good, shall be best; we resign ourselves to God.—­“If this be Islam,” says Goethe, “do we not all live in Islam?” Yes, all of us that have any moral life; we all live so.  It has ever been held the highest wisdom for a man not merely to submit to Necessity,—­Necessity will make him submit,—­but to know and believe well that the stern thing which Necessity had ordered was the wisest, the best, the thing wanted there.  To cease his frantic pretension of scanning this great God’s-World in his small fraction of a brain; to know that it had verily, though deep beyond his soundings, a Just Law, that the soul of it was Good;—­that his part in it was to conform to the Law of the Whole, and in devout silence follow that; not questioning it, obeying it as unquestionable.