=1. ‘The Koran or the Sword.’=――Another change was impending. Persians and Romans both were soon to be put on their defence against a common enemy. By the beginning of the seventh century it was clear that boundaries were again to be altered, and faiths to be again unsettled. A new and mysterious movement had begun, with Mahomed, half soldier and half prophet, at its head. The end Mahomed had in view was conversion; the means he employed was conquest. Across the deserts of Arabia came his cry of ‘the Koran or the sword.’ It sounded a fierce and fanatic cry enough, but at least there was a suggestion of choice about it, and that may have been part of the secret of its success. People by this time were so used to the threat of the ‘sword,’ that many were more than half willing to accept, without any inquiry, the ‘Koran,’ which was offered as an alternative. And those who did inquire were, for the most part, all the more ready to accept. For the Koran, or sacred book of Mahomed, was a simple book. The unity of God was its one dogma. It promised much in the way of reward, and demanded little in the way of belief. Its acceptance was the main point, and to the ‘faithful,’ things were to be made pleasant in both worlds. The Koran was a formidable rival to the books of Zoroaster, and to the Gospels of the Christian Church. The fire-worshippers in the East, beset by civilising influences, were ready for a new creed, and the Christ-worshippers in the West, possessed as they were by the persecuting spirit, and materialised as they had become by pagan influences, were making their religion dishonoured and unacceptable. So the victorious cry of ‘the Koran or the sword’ swept onward like a trumpet call, and the man who raised it, before he died――and he died in 632――found half the inhabited world ready to cry with him that ‘Allah was God, and Mahomed was His prophet.’