Mohammed uplifted a race. Where, in this, is his equal? At his hand an anarchy of tribes filling the desert with internecine blood: and from this anarchy he prepared the force which mastered half Africa, half Asia, Spain--which bound with great houses and great culture Bagdad to Toledo. The religious energy of the Arabs had for ages straggled and fumed in loss; creating but a variety of impotence. The religious energy of the Jews had thrown forth light in the world, and left the Jewish body desolate. Rome? The immense creature, camped about the Latin Sea, accepted Christ in its senility. Its principle of growth had not been Christ; Christ was to help to rot and to transform it. Mohammed studied Rome. He observed this one live element in that immense decay. The religious element. He took it, as the modern pragmatist takes the idea of progress and of science, to express himself and to advance his people. He lived in a religious age. God for seven hundred years had made a wrangling and a shambles of the marts of the east. God alone, in all Rome, seemed alive. God served to energize Mohammed’s act. In the Koran, Allah is a voice bearing no fresh body of eternity or love, bearing no experience of Nature or of a spirit that transcends it: Allah is at best the charged echo of past holy voices, here applied to spur the Arab on. The quantity that gave Islam weight was the force of its leader and the latent might of his race: God was the _n_ by which the Prophet raised this quantity to the pitch of action. And Mohammed is the full rich presence in the Koran. Though God speaks, Mohammed has the eye, the answer, the blessing and the curse for all the ambient world. Mohammed tells the Arab about God chiefly that God is telling the Arab about Mohammed. What else he says is not the crux of the matter. Mohammed is Prophet, to obey him is good, to disobey him is hell, the Jews are a bad lot, Allah is ruthless but to the believer kind--such degradations from the old rationales of faith are not dissonant from religion. Mohammed proceeds, after Moses, to instruct the faithful in diet, in justice, in commerce, marriage, war. His plan of success generates its power shrewdly from the normal appetites: man’s dream of heaven, his fear of hell, his love of woman, his thirst for water, his need of forgiveness whenever he has burned his fingers. Here, too, there is no divergence from the usual theocratic Code. But the Koran is distinguished by the relative place of God and of man’s experience of God within the system.