Such were the truths which Mohammed, with preternatural earnestness, now declared,—­doctrines which would revolutionize Arabia.  And why not?  They are the same substantially which Moses declared, to those sensual and degraded slaves whom he led out of Egypt,—­yea, the doctrines of David and of Job.  “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.”  What a grand and all-important truth it is to impress upon people sunk in forgetfulness and sensuality and pleasure-seeking and idle schemes of vanity and ambition, that there is a supreme Intelligence who overrules, and whose laws cannot be violated with impunity; from whom no one can escape, even though he “take the wings of the morning and fly to the uttermost parts of the sea.”  This is the one truth that Moses sought to plant in the minds of the Jews,—­a truth always forgotten when there is slavery to epicurean pleasures or a false philosophy.

Now I maintain that Mohammed, in seeking to impress his degenerate countrymen with the idea of the one supreme God, amid a most degrading and almost universal polytheism, was a great reformer.  In preaching this he was neither fanatic nor hypocrite; he was a very great man, and thus far a good man.  He does not make an original revelation; he reproduces an old truth,—­as old as the patriarchs, as old as Job, as old as the primitive religions,—­but an exceedingly important one, lost sight of by his countrymen, gradually lost sight of by all peoples when divine grace is withheld; indeed practically by people in Christian lands in times of great degeneracy.  “The fool has said in his heart there is no God;” or, Let there be no God, that we may eat and drink before we die.  Epicureanism, in its pleasures or in its speculations, is virtually atheism.  It was so in Greece.  It is so with us.

Mohammed was now at the mature age of forty, in the fulness of his powers, in the prime of his life; and he began to preach everywhere that there is but one God.  Few, however, believed in him.  Why not acknowledge such a fundamental truth, appealing to the intellect as well as the moral sense?  But to confess there is a supreme God, who rewards and punishes, and to whom all are responsible both for words and actions, is to imply a confession of sinfulness and the justice of retribution.  Those degraded Arabians would not receive willingly such a truth as this, even as the Israelites ever sought to banish it from their hearts and minds, in spite of their deliverance from slavery.  The uncles and friends of Mohammed treated his mission with scorn and derision.  Nor do I read that the common people heard him gladly, as they listened to the teachings of Christ.  Zealously he labored for three years with all classes; and yet in three years of exalted labor, with all his eloquence and fervor and sincerity, he converted only about thirteen persons, one of whom was his slave.  Think of such a man declaring such a truth, and only gaining thirteen followers in