The same thing is proved by his open vice and profligacy after his success. A man conscious that he is playing a part, that he has a character to sustain, that he is acting the prophet, would have been more circumspect, more wary in the indulgence of his lusts, and affected a life of more rigid asceticism. He would have been on his guard against scandalizing his followers, and would never have dared insert in his Koran those scandalous provisions which specially exempt him from obedience to the laws which he professed, by Divine authority, to impose upon his followers. Imposture can never afford to abandon itself openly to the empire of the passions. Heretics are usually more careful than the orthodox in regard to appearances. They usually affect great purity of life, a decorous exterior, and a grave and sanctimonious face and tone. Hypocrisy is austere, maintains in its look and tone an awful gravity, and never relaxes in public. It is only innocence that dares be light and frolicsome, and yield to its varying impulses. Nobody is so shocked with the imaginary impurities of Convents and Nunneries as your debauched old sinners, steeped in corruption, and the miserable slaves of their own morbid passions and prurient imagination. What deceives the excellent and gifted author of the Tragedy, is the fact that so far as Mahomet asserted the unity of God against the polytheism of the unconverted Arabs, and opposed idolatry, he was on the side of truth and religion, and consequently was so far opposed to Satan. He thinks that thus far he could not have been under the influence of an evil spirit. Has he forgotten the demon of Socrates? Has he forgotten that the devil can disguise himself as an angel of light? Paganism, in its old form, was doomed. Christianity had silenced the oracles and driven the devils back to hell. How was the devil to reëstablish his worship on earth, and carry on his war against the son of God? Evidently only by changing his tactics, and turning the truth into a lie. There is nothing to hinder us from believing that Satan himself taught Mahomet the unity of God, and inspired him with horror of the prevailing forms of idolatry. The strong keeps the house, as our Lord says, till a stronger binds him and enters into possession. The devil would expel polytheism and the grosser forms of idolatry, no longer in harmony with the spirit of the times, that he might make the last state worse than the first; and whoever has studied history knows that Mahometanism has proved a far more formidable enemy to Christianity than was the paganism braved by the Apostles. The truths of the Koran are introduced only to sanction its errors, and its moral precepts, many of which are good, only to give countenance to its immorality, to its Satanic abominations.