The better to achieve my object, I have consulted no works on either Mohammed or Islam, but have gone straight to the source or fountain head--to Mohammed himself, the Koran, and to Moslems of various nationalities with whom I have been brought into close and personal touch during a wide and a varied experience. It is here in the man and his work that the true soul of Islam is to be found. Just as in its founders and foundations lies the heart and essence of Christianity, it is in and out of the merits as well as demerits of Mohammed’s work, that we shall form the true estimate of Islamic utility. By their fruits ye shall know them. Men do not gather figs of thorns, or grapes of thistles. Mohammed most certainly did not. As he sowed, so he has reaped! So he is still reaping. The Koran was the immediate consequence of his concentration and communion with Nature and Nature’s God: Islam the natural result. In other words, Islam is the devotion of Moslems to Mohammed and the Koran--his work, plus their patient resignation and entire submission to God, His will and His service! The man of fixed and unchanging purpose has a supreme contempt for obstacles. But when, as in Mohammed’s case, that purpose is the glorification of God, he has at hand a lever that can move the world. In this peculiar sense the great Prophet of Arabia was self-contained. He had everything within himself: that everything centred in God and Arabian unity. He sought only what he needed. This was to unify God and his country. How he succeeded is a matter of history. D’Aubigné in his history of the Reformation, speaking of Luther, says: “Men, when designed by God to influence their contemporaries, are first seized and drawn along by the peculiar tendencies of their age.” Undoubtedly this, in a great measure, is so. It is quite evident that Mohammed was influenced in this way. Yet it is also obvious that he was not so much seized by the peculiar tendencies of his age (for in many ways he was far in advance of it), as that he was obsessed and dominated by the energy or spirit of God, and utilized these special features with the design of disseminating this overmastering God possession to others. “There are but three sorts of persons,” Pascal used to say: “those who serve God, having found Him; those who employ themselves in seeking Him, not having found Him; and those who live without seeking Him or having found Him. The first are reasonable and happy; the last are mad and miserable; the intermediate are miserable and reasonable.”