Much has been said of Mohammed’s propagating his Religion by the sword.  It is no doubt far nobler what we have to boast of the Christian Religion, that it propagated itself peaceably in the way of preaching and conviction.  Yet withal, if we take this for an argument of the truth or falsehood of a religion, there is a radical mistake in it.  The sword indeed:  but where will you get your sword!  Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.  In one man’s head alone, there it dwells as yet.  One man alone of the whole world believes it; there is one man against all men.  That he take a sword, and try to propagate with that, will do little for him.  You must first get your sword!  On the whole, a thing will propagate itself as it can.  We do not find, of the Christian Religion either, that it always disdained the sword, when once it had got one.  Charlemagne’s conversion of the Saxons was not by preaching.  I care little about the sword:  I will allow a thing to struggle for itself in this world, with any sword or tongue or implement it has, or can lay hold of.  We will let it preach, and pamphleteer, and fight, and to the uttermost bestir itself, and do, beak and claws, whatsoever is in it; very sure that it will, in the long-run, conquer nothing which does not deserve to be conquered.  What is better than itself, it cannot put away, but only what is worse.  In this great Duel, Nature herself is umpire, and can do no wrong:  the thing which is deepest-rooted in Nature, what we call truest, that thing and not the other will be found growing at last.

Here however, in reference to much that there is in Mohammed and his success, we are to remember what an umpire Nature is; what a greatness, composure of depth and tolerance there is in her.  You take wheat to cast into the Earth’s bosom:  your wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish; no matter:  you cast it into the kind just Earth; she grows the wheat,—­the whole rubbish she silently absorbs, shrouds it in, says nothing of the rubbish.  The yellow wheat is growing there; the good Earth is silent about all the rest,—­has silently turned all the rest to some benefit too, and makes no complaint about it!  So everywhere in Nature!  She is true and not a lie; and yet so great, and just, and motherly in her truth.  She requires of a thing only that it be genuine of heart; she will protect it if so; will not, if not so.  There is a soul of truth in all the things she ever gave harbor to.  Alas, is not this the history of all highest Truth that comes or ever came into the world?  The body of them all is imperfection, an element of light in darkness:  to us they have to come embodied in mere Logic, in some merely scientific Theorem of the Universe; which cannot be complete; which cannot but be found, one day, incomplete, erroneous, and so die and disappear.  The body of all Truth