The examination and criticism of a religion whose canons have been honored with the implicit and reverent obedience of millions of men; whose dogmas have been recognized by the devout of many diverse races as inspirations of the wisdom of Almighty God; a religion which, by the weapons of argument or by the resistless force of enthusiasm, subverted the power and absorbed the leading principles of other creeds whose traditions had hitherto enthralled the world, and which, despite the degeneracy of its practice, the divisions and consequent antagonism of its sectaries, the vicissitudes of many centuries, and the inevitable accidents of war, persecution, and treason, still manifests an astonishing and, to all appearances, an inexhaustible vitality, is a great and arduous undertaking. The story of Islam, by whose influence the natives of the East and West, heretofore hostile, were joined in a bond of fraternal union and guided through a marvellous career of prosperity and glory, is the realization of what would have ordinarily appeared a most extravagant dream of conquest and dominion, and is without parallel in the annals of humanity. In the moral as in the material world, the most perfect and durable forms and systems usually arrive slowly, and by almost imperceptible gradations, at ultimate maturity. But to this rule Islam was a striking exception. It attained the summit of its greatness, and raised the Arabians to an exalted rank in the family of nations, in a shorter period of time than is generally occupied by a people in passing through the primitive stages of their intellectual development. It refuted the familiar maxim of the Romans, whose foreign policy was based upon the fomenting of dissensions and the subsequent discomfiture of their enemies, and, assailing its adversaries simultaneously on every side, won its way by a series of victories surpassing, in momentous results, the most renowned triumphs of the consuls and the Cæsars. In the traditions relating to the genealogy and history of its Prophet there is much that is enigmatical and much that is romantic. The latter deduced his origin from Ishmael, whom, with his unfortunate mother, Abraham, the acknowledged head of God’s chosen people, had inhumanly abandoned in the Desert to starve.