About this time he began to have his visions of angels, especially of Gabriel.  He saw a light, and heard a voice, and had sentences like the above put into his mind.  These communications were accompanied by strong convulsions (epilepsy, says Weil), in which he would fall to the ground and foam at the mouth.  Sprenger considers it to have been a form of hysteria, with a mental origin, perhaps accompanied with catalepsy.  The prophet himself said:  “Inspiration descends on me in two ways.  Sometimes Gabriel cometh and communicateth the revelation, as one man to another.  This is easy.  But sometimes it is as the ringing of a bell, which rends me in pieces, and grievously afflicts me.”  One day, when Abu Bakr and Omar sat in the Mosque at Medina, Mohammed came suddenly upon them, lifting up his beard and looking at it; and Abu Bakr said, “Ah thou, for whom I would sacrifice father and mother; white hairs are hastening upon thee!” “Yes,” said the prophet, “Hud” (Sura 11) “and its sisters have hastened my white hairs.”  “And who,” asked Abu Bakr, “are its sisters?” “The Inevitable” (Sura 56) “and the Striking” (Sura 101), replied Mohammed.  These three are called the “terrific Suras.”

But these last Suras came later than the period now referred to.  At this time his visions and revelations possessed him; he did not possess nor control them.  In later years the spirit of the prophet was more subject to the prophet.  But the Koran is an unintelligible book unless we can connect it with the biography of its writer.  All the incidents of his life took shape in some revelation.  A separate revelation was given to encourage or to rebuke him; and in his later years the too subservient inspiration came to appease the jealousy of his wives when a new one was added to their number.  But, however it may have been afterward, in the beginning his visions were as much a surprise to him as to others.  A careful distribution of the Suras, according to the events which befell him, would make the Koran the best biography of the prophet.  As we said of David and his Psalms, so it may be said of Mohammed, that his life hangs suspended in these hymns, as in votive pictures, each the record of some grave experience.[389]

Now, it is impossible to read the detailed accounts of this part of the life of Mohammed, and have any doubt of his profound sincerity.  His earliest converts were his bosom-friends and the people of his household, who were intimately acquainted with his private life.  Nor does a man easily begin an ambitious course of deception at the age of forty; having lived till that time as a quiet, peaceful, and unobtrusive citizen,[390] what was he to gain by this career?  Long years passed before he could make more than a handful of converts.  During these weary years he was the object of contumely and hatred to the ruling tribe in Mecca.  His life was hardly safe from them.  Nothing could be more hopeless than his position during the first twelve years of his public preaching.  Only a strong conviction of the reality of his mission could have supported him through this long period of failure, loneliness, and contempt.  During all these years the wildest imagination could not have pictured the success which was to come.  Here is a Sura in which he finds comfort in God and his promises.—­