After this beginning of converse with the supernatural, or whatever we prefer to term it, the course of Mohammad’s revelations--the speeches which make up the Korān--flowed unbroken for twenty years and more. They fall naturally into two great divisions--the period of struggle at Mekka, and the period of triumph at Medina; and the characteristics of the two are diverse as the circumstances which called them forth. For whatever Mohammad himself thought of his revelations, to modern criticism they are speeches or sermons strictly connected with the religious and political circumstances of the speaker’s time. In the first period we see a man possessed of a strong religious idea, an idea dominating his life, and his one aim is to impress that idea on his people, the inhabitants of Mekka. He preached to them in season and out of season; whenever the spirit moved him he poured forth his burning eloquence into the ears of a suspicious and incredulous audience. Three years of unwearied effort produced the pitiful result of a score or so of converts, mainly from the poorest classes. In the fifth year even these were compelled by the persecutions of the Koreysh to take refuge in Abyssinia--“a land of righteousness, wherein no man is wronged.” Mohammad had by this time advanced from a mere inculcation of the doctrine of one all-powerful God to a plain attack upon the idolatry of the Mekkans; and the Koreysh, as guardians of the Kaaba and receivers of the pilgrims’ tolls, were keenly alive to the consequences which the overthrow of the sacred temple would entail upon its keepers. The result of Mohammad’s bold denunciations was a cruel persecution of his humbler followers, and their consequent flight to Abyssinia; he himself was too nearly allied to powerful chiefs to be lightly injured in a land where the blood-revenge held sway. Presently the devotion of the prophet, his manly bearing under obloquy and reproach, and above all, the winged words of his eloquence, brought several men of influence and wealth into his faith, and in the sixth year of his mission Mohammad found himself surrounded no longer by a crowd of slaves and beggars, but by tried swordsmen, chiefs of great families, leaders in the councils of Mekka; and the new sect performed their rites no more in secret, but publicly at the Kaaba, in the face of the whole city. The Koreysh resolved on stronger measures. After trying vainly to isolate him from his family--the true Arab spirit of kindred was not so easily shaken--they put the whole clan under a ban, and swore they would not marry with them, nor buy nor sell with them, nor hold with them any intercourse soever. To the credit of Mohammad and of his clan, only one man of them refused to share his fate, though most of them did not hold with his doctrines. Sooner than give up their kinsman, they went, every man of them, save that one, into their own quarter of the city, and there abode in banishment for two years. Starvation was busy with the