Mohammed’s sincerity and fixity of purpose is a fact we cannot get away from. It is this which has chained his followers as with the sure cord of God to the Faith. Islam, in a word, is a creed of practice not theory. By practice it was formed. On practice it has lived. It was because Mohammed practised what he preached, that the small seed of his original idea blossomed at last into the mighty “Igdrasil” of the East--the great banyan tree of existence. Verily this sun-burnt son of Arabia Petræa was a tangible reality and no desert simulacrum. A reality that lives in the soul of Islam. A reality that will endure until the end of all things human. It is not manners that maketh the man. It is man that makes the manners. It is the nature that is around him, the nature that is in him, and that comes out of him as mental and moral energies, that makes the man. Town bred as he was, it was the desert in all its naked and silent grandeur that made Mohammed, that inspired him with all the might and majesty of God, and turned him into a prophet. Yet it was his career as a trader and the inherent tribal instinct that developed the political element in him. As Longfellow says: “Glorious indeed is the world of God around us; but more glorious is the world of God within us. There lies the land of song, there lies the poet’s native land.” But in Mohammed’s case, as in the case of all great workers and thinkers, the world that is around us, is the world of our inner consciousness. The two are synonymous if not one. Only with him the native earth was religion, and he was the Prophet, not the Poet of it. “It is Nature’s highest reward to a true, simple, great soul, that he gets thus to be _a part of herself_.” It was thus with Mohammed. Thought, though changeable, is eternal. It never dies. So the one idea that possessed Mohammed now possesses (differing only in merely superficial degrees) some two hundred and fifty millions. Carlyle is mistaken, certainly much too premature, when he says: “Even in Arabia, as I compute, Mahommet will have exhausted himself and become obsolete, while this Shakespeare, this Dante may still be young; while this Shakespeare may still pretend to be a priest of mankind, of Arabia as of other places, for unlimited periods to come.” Religion is entirely an universal matter, Thought a question of environment. Roughly speaking, the world of Thought is divided into two camps of east and west. To the former belongs Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam; to the latter Christianity and the growing cult of Rationalism. It is impossible to predict or in any way to foreshadow any fusion of these hostile elements. The day when humanism--i.e. the religion of humanity, as the natural product of her highest intellectual effort--shall have fused and humanized all the nations of the Earth into one great civilized family, is too far distant and beyond the present scope of human speculation.