Withal I like Mohammed for his total freedom from cant.  He is a rough self-helping son of the wilderness; does not pretend to be what he is not.  There is no ostentatious pride in him; but neither does he go much upon humility:  he is there as he can be, in cloak and shoes of his own clouting; speaks plainly to all manner of Persian Kings, Greek Emperors, what it is they are bound to do; knows well enough, about himself, “the respect due unto thee.”  In a life-and-death war with Bedouins, cruel things could not fail; but neither are acts of mercy, of noble natural pity and generosity, wanting.  Mohammed makes no apology for the one, no boast of the other.  They were each the free dictate of his heart; each called-for, there and then.  Not a mealy-mouthed man!  A candid ferocity, if the case call for it, is in him; he does not mince matters!  The War of Tabuc is a thing he often speaks of:  his men refused, many of them, to march on that occasion; pleaded the heat of the weather, the harvest, and so forth; he can never forget that.  Your harvest?  It lasts for a day.  What will become of your harvest through all Eternity?  Hot weather?  Yes, it was hot; “but Hell will be hotter!” Sometimes a rough sarcasm turns-up:  He says to the unbelievers, Ye shall have the just measure of your deeds at that Great Day.  They will be weighed-out to you; ye shall not have short weight!—­Everywhere he fixes the matter in his eye; he sees it:  his heart, now and then, is as if struck dumb by the greatness of it.  “Assuredly,” he says; that word, in the Koran, is written-down sometimes as a sentence by itself:  “Assuredly.”

No Dilettanteism in this Mohammed; it is a business of Reprobation and Salvation with him, of Time and Eternity:  he is in deadly earnest about it!  Dilettanteism, hypothesis, speculation, a kind of amateur-search for Truth, toying and coquetting with Truth:  this is the sorest sin.  The root of all other imaginable sins.  It consists in the heart and soul of the man never having been open to Truth;—­“living in a vain show.”  Such a man not only utters and produces falsehoods, but is himself a falsehood.  The rational moral principle, spark of the Divinity, is sunk deep in him, in quiet paralysis of life-death.  The very falsehoods of Mohammed are truer than the truths of such a man.  He is the insincere man:  smooth-polished, respectable in some times and places; inoffensive, says nothing harsh to anybody; most cleanly,—­just as carbonic acid is, which is death and poison.

We will not praise Mohammed’s moral precepts as always of the superfinest sort; yet it can be said that there is always a tendency to good in them; that they are the true dictates of a heart aiming towards what is just and true.  The sublime forgiveness of Christianity, turning of the other cheek when the one has been smitten, is not here:  you are to revenge yourself, but it is to be in measure, not overmuch, or beyond justice.  On the other hand,