One thing more. To thoroughly comprehend the spirit of Mohammed or the soul of Islam, the student himself must be thoroughly in earnest and sincere. He must in addition possess that moral, mental and intellectual sympathy which gives the ego an insight into human subtleties as well as simplicities. He must take Mohammed and Islam as he finds them--in the same intensely sincere spirit that constituted the one and inculcated the other. He must at the outset recognize that Mohammed was no mere spiritual pedlar, no vulgar time-serving vagrant, but one of the most profoundly sincere and earnest spirits of any age or epoch. A man not only great, but one of the greatest--i.e. truest--men that Humanity has ever produced. Great, i.e. not simply as a prophet, but as a patriot and a statesman: a material as well as a spiritual builder who constructed a great nation, a greater empire, and more even than all these, a still greater Faith. True, moreover, because he was true to himself, to his people, and above all to his God. Recognizing this, he will thus acknowledge that Islam is a profound and true cult, which strives to uplift its votaries from the depths of human darkness upwards into the higher realm of Light and Truth. It is in this deep sense of earnestness, and in this tense but even-minded spirit of equity, that I have endeavoured to make my study both rational and psychological: in other words, reasonable and true to the spirit. Naturally, therefore, I have avoided those narrow and devilish pitfalls of racial, creedal and colour prejudices--that awful curse of Humanity, that insuperable barrier to the cult of Humanitarianism--which leads to the deadly cancer of _Misconception_. Finally--making due allowance for space limitations--I have endeavoured to the best of my ability to get to the root of all that is good and great in the immortal work of this leader of men who was so good and so great in every sense. In this way only is it possible to get at the truth. Shallow, superficial and paradoxical inquiries are mere empty vanities as utterly useless, from a human standpoint, as those which are biassed and one-sided. To reach the depths, to touch the bottom, to get to the root of any true man’s motives, sincerity and thoroughness are as essential as intellectual acumen and profundity. In this short study my one idea all through has been to delineate Mohammed as he was and Islam as she is. For this reason I have neither painted them with my own colouring, nor introduced into their natural complexion any outside flesh tints. In plain English, I have not placed upon their beliefs and principles a construction that, being ethnically foreign to the entire sociological system upon which they are based, would have been a fundamental error, at complete variance with them. CHAPTER II AN OUTLINE OF MOHAMMED’S TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTERISTICS