execution of seven or eight hundred Jewish prisoners, who had surrendered at discretion, and the sale of their wives and children into slavery.  Mohammed selected from among these women one more beautiful than the rest, for his concubine.  Whether M. Saint-Hilaire considers all this as “yielding to the political necessities of his position,” we do not know.  But this man, who could stand by and see hundreds of captives slaughtered in cold blood, and then retire to solace himself with the widow of one of his victims, seems to us to have retained little of his early purity of soul.

About this time Mohammed began to multiply wives, and to receive revelations allowing him to do so beyond the usual limit of his law.  He added one after another to his harem, until he had ten wives, besides his slaves.  His views on such subjects are illustrated by his presenting three beautiful female slaves, taken in war, one to his father-in-law, and the others to his two sons-in-law.

So, in a series of battles, with the Jewish tribes, the Koreish, the Syrians, passed the stormy and triumphant years of the Pontiff King.  Mecca was conquered, and the Koreish submitted in A.D. 630.  The tribes throughout Arabia acquiesced, one by one, in the prophet’s authority.  All paid tribute, or accepted Islam.  His enemies were all under his feet; his doctrines accepted; the rival prophets, Aswad and Museilama, overcome.  Then, in the sixty-third year of his age, death drew near.  On the last day of his life, he went into the mosque to attend morning prayer, then back to the room of his favorite wife, Ayesha, and died in her arms.  Wild with grief, Omar declared he was not dead, but in a trance.  The grave Abu Bakr composed the excited multitude, and was chosen caliph, or successor to the prophet.  Mohammed died on June 8, A.D. 632, and was buried the next day, amid the grief of his followers.  Abu Bakr and Omar offered the prayer:  “Peace be unto thee, O prophet of God; and the mercy of the Lord, and his blessing!  We bear testimony that the prophet of God hath delivered the message revealed to him; hath fought in the ways of the Lord until God crowned his religion with victory; hath fulfilled his words commanding that he alone is to be worshipped in unity; hath drawn us to himself, and been kind and tender-hearted to believers; hath sought no recompense for delivering to us the faith, neither hath sold it for a price at any time.”  And all the people said, “Amen!  Amen!”

Concerning the character of Mohammed, enough has been already said.  He was a great man, one of the greatest ever sent upon earth.  He was a man of the deepest convictions, and for many years of the purest purposes, and was only drawn down at last by using low means for a good end.  Of his visions and revelations, the same explanation is to be given as of those received by Joan of Arc, and other seers of that order.  How far they had an objective basis in reality, and how far they were the result of some abnormal activity of the imagination, it is difficult with our present knowledge to decide.  But that these visionaries fully believed in their own inspiration, there can be little doubt.