One great eternal truth alone stood out before him, 'Lâ ilāha illâ 'llâhu.' 'There is no God but God.' Surely the discovering of this great truth raised him high above all Arabia. 'There is no God but God'--he had discovered it, it had been revealed to him--surely, surely he was the favoured one, the Prophet of God; yes, _The Prophet of God_. It all seemed to stand together, and he set it in one sentence, Lâ ilāha illâ 'llâhu; Muhammadur rasûlu 'llâh.' '_There is no God but God: Mohammed is the Apostle of God_,' and so it stood for his creed, and the creed he taught, and it stands to-day as the creed of 200,000,000 of our fellow-men. [Sidenote: Early Followers of Mohammed.] There was another, too, besides Khadîjah who from the first followed Mohammed's fortunes with unwavering faith, a man who is truly said to have saved Islam twice. He was a personal friend of {40} Mohammed's, a popular but unimportant fellow-citizen of Mecca, by name Abu Bakr. Through these early trying years he was the propagandist of the new creed, and won to his friend's side the first little circle of Islam's converts. Years afterwards it was he who, as the first Caliph, took the white banner from his dying master's hands, raised it aloft again, and rallied fortunes that seemed shattered by the master's death. With these two we must group another--a man of different type and a very different story--Zaid, a slave whom Khadîjah had bought some years before and presented to Mohammed,--this man proved himself a faithful friend in darker days. The little group was but a poor token of the mighty armies Mohammed would ere long lead. Yet unquestionably a conviction grows infinitely the moment another believes in it; and these three did believe with all their hearts. Progress was slow at first; Mohammed wished to keep the matter as dark as possible, and those who knew of this teacher and his little band of disciples regarded them as a small secret society, more or less {41} harmless--after all, there were other secret societies in Arabia at that time. In the first three years there were not more than forty converts, won chiefly by Abu Bakr's assiduous work. It is much easier to persuade people to believe in someone else than to persuade them to believe in yourself. Abu Bakr saw this, and right loyally did he play his part. These forty were mostly from the lower ranks of society, including slaves and outcasts, who found here something of a brotherhood and a fraternal generosity, if not a community of goods. As in another small society in a Grecian city five hundred years before, 'not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble' were called in those days. [Sidenote: Mohammed's 'Revelations.']