Abolishing all belief in a local or personal God, he announced to his Arabs the One Supreme, now in terms as terrible as man could bear, then in words so lofty and majestic that they sank for ever into the heart-core of his followers. He broke to pieces with his own hand the images of the Kaabah, and he witnessed the total extinction of a gigantic idolatry--a work of itself sufficient to immortalize the memory of one reformer. He said of the Deity, “He is not enclosed by the bonds of space or by the limits of time; he hath no form which requireth a former from whom he is free; and whatever concerning him entereth thy mind to that he is the contrary.” He preached Allah, the God unapprehensible, incomprehensible, omnipotent, all-beneficent, spiritual, and eternal. He revived the earliest scheme of Mosaicism and the pristine simplicity of Christianity by making every man priest and patriarch of his own household. Preceding faiths had attempted to elevate human nature above itself, and had, as might be expected, degraded the object of their endeavours. He inculcated the dignity of man instead of perpetually preaching human degradation, he respected mortal nature, and therefore he made his scheme eminently practical with something of a higher flight. He did away with the incestuous marriage with a father’s widow; he abolished the Wad el Banat, or the murderous inhumation of female children. He corrected the laxity and immorality of the age by making drinking and gambling penal offences, and by forbidding modest women to appear in public unveiled. Finally, to mention no other great and good works, by the enunciation of a modified Fatalism--they greatly err who confound it with an absolute Predestination--he attempted to check that tendency of self-mortification which he could not wholly expel from the affections of his countrymen. He died, not like an enthusiast or an impostor, but as one true to the tenets and practices of his life; and he bequeathed to the world a Law and a Faith than which none has been more firmly or more fervently believed in by mankind, whose wide prevalence--wider indeed than that of any other creed--alone suffices to prove its extrinsic value to the human family. This much did Muhammad for his fellow-creatures.