His Religious Impressions.--Mahomet at this part of his life began also to withdraw himself, and to go apart to lonely spots for meditation. What he meditated we see from his sayings and doings afterwards. The contrast between the pure religion of Allah, as held by the Hanyfs, and the popular religion of Mecca with which his birth connected him, with its trade associations, its idols, its unintelligible rites, was certainly a tremendous one; and if a judgment was impending over all but the believers in Allah, it was a terrible prospect. For many years, however, Mahomet was simply a Hanyf. He was one who had surrendered himself, with a tender and impressionable soul, to the divine will and guidance, and was filled with the sense of Allah's presence and power, and of his own accountability to him in the great and tremendous realities of life. In addition to this, however, we have to mention a circumstance which is generally thought to have had a determining influence in Mahomet's production of Islam. He had a peculiar temperament; mental excitement led in him to inner catastrophes which, whether they are classed under epilepsy or hysteria, caused him to see visions and to believe that certain words had been addressed to him by heavenly visitants. The new religious movement in Arabia had secured an adherent in whom its teachings would be felt with tremendous intensity, and would possibly break forth with irresistible force. The Revelations.--Mahomet was forty years of age when the thoughts which had long been working within him burst into open expression. This took place by means of a vision. An angel appeared to him as he slept on Mount Hira on one of his nightly wanderings, and held a scroll before him which he bade him read. He had not learned to read, but the angel insisted, and so he read; and what he read was the earliest revealed piece of the Koran (sura 96):-- Read,[3] in the name of thy Lord who created, created man from a drop. Read, for thy Lord is the Most High, who hath taught by the pen, hath taught to man what he knew not. Nay, truly man walketh in delusion when he deemeth that he sufficeth for himself; to thy Lord they must all return.