Indeed, the heart of the whole business of the
age, one may say, is to do it well.
We have chosen Mohammed not as the most eminent Prophet; but as the one
we are freest to speak of. He is by no means the truest of Prophets; but
I do esteem him a true one. Further, as there is no danger of our
becoming, any of us, Mohammedans, I mean to say all the good of him I
justly can. It is the way to get at his secret: let us try to understand
what _he_ meant with the world; what the world meant and means with him,
will then be a more answerable question. Our current hypothesis about
Mohammed, that he was a scheming Impostor, a Falsehood incarnate, that
his religion is a mere mass of quackery and fatuity, begins really to be
now untenable to any one. The lies, which well-meaning zeal has heaped
round this man, are disgraceful to ourselves only. When Pococke inquired
of Grotius where the proof was of that story of the pigeon, trained to
pick peas from Mohammed's ear, and pass for an angel dictating to him,
Grotius answered that there was no proof! It is really time to dismiss
all that. The word this man spoke has been the life-guidance now of a
hundred-and-eighty millions of men these twelve-hundred years. These
hundred-and-eighty millions were made by God as well as we. A greater
number of God's creatures believe in Mohammed's word at this hour than
in any other word whatever.
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