Surely the character of Moḥammad has been misjudged. He was not the ambitious schemer some would have him, still less the hypocrite and sham prophet others have imagined. He was an enthusiast in that noblest sense when enthusiasm becomes the salt of the earth, the one thing that keeps men from rotting whilst they live. Enthusiasm is often used despitefully, because it is joined to an unworthy cause, or falls upon barren ground and bears no fruit. So was it not with Moḥammad. He was an enthusiast when enthusiasm was the one thing needed to set the world aflame, and his enthusiasm was noble for a noble cause. He was one of those happy few who have attained the supreme joy of making one great truth their very life-spring. He was the messenger of the One God, and never to his life’s end did he forget who he was, or the message which was the marrow of his being. He brought his tidings to his people with a grand dignity, sprung from the consciousness of his high office, together with a most sweet humility, whose roots lay in the knowledge of his own weakness. Well did Carlyle choose him for his prophet-hero! There have been purer lives and higher aspirations than Moḥammad’s; but no man was ever more thoroughly filled with the sense of his mission or carried out that mission more heroically. III.—ISLAM. ‘Your turning your faces in prayer towards the east and the west is not piety; but the pious is he who believeth in God and the Last Day, and in the Angels, and the Scripture, and who giveth money, notwithstanding his love thereof, to relations and orphans, and to the needy and the son of the road, and to the askers, and for the freeing of slaves, and who performeth prayer and giveth the appointed alms; and those who perform their covenant when they covenant, and the patient in adversity and affliction and in the time of violence. These are they who have been true: and these are they who fear God.’—_Ḳur-án_, ii. 172. When it was noised abroad that the Prophet was dead, ´Omar, the fiery-hearted, the Simon Peter of Islám, rushed among the people, and fiercely told them they lied, it could not be true, Moḥammad was not dead. And Aboo-Bekr came and said, ‘Ye people! he that hath worshipped Moḥammad, let him know that Moḥammad is dead; but he that hath worshipped God,—that the Lord liveth, and doth not die.’