ness and beauty of its dialect, is it wonderful that among the prophet's own kinsmen were men whose verses were familiar over all Arabia. Lebid and Hareth, two of the seven poets of "The Moallakat," were Koreishites, and contemporaries of Mahomet; and at the time when the prophet was ready to announce his mission to the people of Mecca, there were poets enough in the place to criticise and lampoon him. however, which were by no means unknown | reputation it enjoyed on account of the richamong his contemporary Meccans. Expertness in horsemanship and in the use of arms; skill in the management of cattle; shrewdness in buying and selling and in judging of wares, together with such general ingenuity and manual dexterity as were necessary to supply one's personal wants in so primitive a state of society-these were, doubtless, the most conspicuous of the early acquisitions of the future prophet. But even in such a rude way of life, literary sensations and impulses were not wholly wanting. To that passion for song and legend, in which no race of any promise has ever been found deficient, and which the peculiar conditions of Arabian life were so well calculated to foster, the wild Arabs of Mahomet's days joined a degree of literary taste and fastidiousness almost amounting to dilettantism. To hear a fine story well told, to sit at sunset at the door of a tent, listening to the tinkling syllables or rythmic cadences of a practiced speaker, as he wove forth some gorgeous prose-fancy of the wonderful, or declaimed some earnest ode of war-was a recreation of all most suitable to the constitution of the Arab, with his craving for mental stimulus, and his oriental love of repose. Hence, among the ancient Arabs, an æsthetic susceptibility to the pleasure of sound for its own sake, and a conceit in the structure and wealth of their own language, such as we hardly find among any other people at the same stage of its history. To be able to express himself fluently and with elegance on any given occasion, was an accomplishment which, as it was easy by nature to the Arab, so it was his study to acquire and improve. And when this power flashed out at all conspicuously, when a poet was born in any tribe or family, the event was celebrated with all honor; neighboring tribes sent their recognition in gifts, or assembled to hear the new star of Arabian song. At a great fair, too, that was annually held at Ocadh, in Yemen, poets from all parts of Arabia met to recite their compositions, and to compete for prizes; and such poems as then pleased most were afterward written in letters of gold on flags of Egyptian silk, and sent to be hung up on the walls of the Kaaba, at Mecca. Seven of these ancient Arabian prize-poems have been preserved to us, in a collected form, under the name of " The Moallakat," that is, "The Suspended." To such poems Mahomet must have often listened in his youth; nor, considering the preeminence of the tribe of Koreish, and the From the recitations of the poets, as well as from the daily conversations that he must have listened to in the streets and houses of Mecca, Mahomet, doubtless, acquired such knowledge as he afterward exhibited of the legendary lore of his countrymen. Of the matter thus accumulated in his mind, much would necessarily consist of traditions relating to the history of his own tribe, especially in its connection with Mecca. Much, however, would be of wider import-traditions relating to such great events of primeval times as the Creation, the Flood, the dispersion of races, the peopling of Arabia, and its early relations with the adjoining countries of Persia, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt; traditions also of specially Arabic significance, respecting such notable men of those old times, as Adam, Seth, Enoch, Noah, Nimrod, Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Jacob, Moses, David, Solomon, and the other Biblical heroes. What proportion of this mass of legendary matter had come down to the Arabs by an independent stream of tradition from the great Shemitic foreworld, and what proportion, on the other hand, sisted of real Biblical history, originally diffused among the Arabs by the Hebrews, and subsequently corrupted to Arabic use, it is altogether impossible to determine. Among the purely Arabic legends, without doubt, are to be reckoned those that related to the extinct tribes of Ad, Thamud, Tasm, Jadis, the first Jorham, and Amalek, to which tribes, it was alleged, the Arabian peninsula had belonged before it was occupied by the posterity of Joktan. The age of these primitive Arabians lay behind the historic period of their successors like a dark and gloomy background; and one of the most favorite exercises of the Arab muse was to open up this background, by fictitious descriptions, revealing, as it were, in lurid glimpses, the splendors of its buried cities, the banners of its vanished tents, and the once defiant energy of its now dead populations. One legend of this ideal Arabic foreworld appears to have been in special repute-the legend, con namely, of Hud, the prophet sent by God to reclaim the idolatrous Addites. Long and wearily, said the legend, had the good Hud preached the Word of God to the Addites, but they would not listen to him; so that God at last grew wroth against them, and sent a blast of suffocating wind across their country, which destroyed them all. Similar, also, according to another legend, had been the fate of the men of Thamud. To them was sent the prophet Saleh, as Hud had been sent to the Addites; nay, to cure their unbelief, God had, at their request, wrought a miracle by His servant, and caused a she camel, big with young, to issue from a hard rock; but, in their wantonness, they killed this camel, and God, to punish them, sent an earthquake, which strewed the ground with their corpses. These and other legends of the same kind appear to have made a profound impression on the mind of the young Mahomet of Mecca. But it was not merely in the legendary lore of his countrymen, and their Arabicised versions of Hebrew narratives, that the nephew of Abu Thaleb had matter of thought supplied to him. Looking abroad over the field of Arabia from his stand-point at Mecca, he could command a view of a whole sea of intermixed and confused speculation. In the "Age of Ignorance," as the Arabs call the period prior to Mahomet, Arabia was a kind of waste area of the East, upon which had been accumulated the rubbish and debris of various religious systems. In the first place, and forming, as it were, the lowest stratum of Arabian thought, there was the native religion of the Arabs, a kind of medley of Fetichism and Polytheism, exhibiting precisely such a degeneracy from the pure Monotheistic Faith of the days of Job, as would have been presented by the Hebrews, if they had been permitted without interruption, for a series of ages, to follow their idolatrous tendencies. That there were still gleams of belief, particularly among the men of Koreish, in one only living and true God, nay, that speculatively the unity of God was always present to the thoughtful Arab as a tenet of faith, is sufficiently clear to all who study the language of the time. But, escaping from underneath this grand doctrine, the Arabic mind at large had provided itself with something lower and more palpable, in the shape of a Pantheon of local gods and goddesses, conceived according to the Arabic, as the Greek pantheon was according to the Greek mode of thinking. Thus the tribe of Koreish, it is said, worshiped an idol called | Al Uzza; the idol of the tribes of Hodhail and Khozah, between Mecca and Medina, was a large stone, named Manah; the tribe of Thakif worshiped a goddess named Allat; and other local deities of note were Wadd, Jawa, Yaguth, Yauk, and Nasr. In one part of Arabia, the chief idol was a lump of dough; in others, stones were worshiped, that had been originally brought, it was said, from the holy valley of Mecca. And, as it was a principle of the Greek Polytheism, that every locality should tolerate the gods of every other, so among the Arabs, the multitudinous local gods that existed over the surface of the country, were by no means supposed to exclude or interfere with each other. On the contrary, in token of their purely local efficacy, and of the subordination or their worship to catholic Arabic feeling, no fewer than three hundred and sixty such idols, collected from the Arabic area, and even from districts lying beyond it, within the boundaries of Syria and Persia, were ranged in niches round the Kaaba at Mecca, so as to attract, as it were, to that holy centre, all the possible rays of Arabic devotion. In encircling the Kaaba, therefore, during the holy months, the pilgrims virtually did homage to all the gods of Arabia, while, in the more special acts of kissing the black stone, drinking the waters of Zem-zem, and gazing on the tomb of Ishmael, they merged, as it were, all their local idolatries in burning reverence for their ancestry, and reverted to the purer memories of olden days. Superinduced upon this native Arabic Polytheism were elements borrowed from two extra-Arabian systems-the Sabæanism of the Chaldees, or Assyrians, on the one side; and the Magian or Zoroastrian religion of the Persians on the other. The peculiar feature of the Sabæan religion was its open and systematic worship of the celestial luminaries. Nowhere on the earth, not even in its native Chaldæa, was this form of idolatry, if once recognized, so likely to prevail, as in that vast peninsula of rock and desert, on which by day the sun looks down like a great bloodshot eye, and over which, by night, there roll such sapphire stars. Not a few of the Arab tribes of Mahomet's days, therefore, were professed Sabæans, making pilgrimages at stated times to Haran in Mesopotamia, but still respecting Mecca as the Kebla of their race. Less considerable, perhaps, but still appreciable, had been the influence exerted on the Arabians, especially those of the East, by the doctrine of the Persian Magi. The effect of this doctrine on the Arabic mind seems to have been to tincture it with something of the Manichæan sentiment, intensifying the native Shemitic sense of the eternal antagonism existing in the world between the principle of light or goodness, and the principle of darkness or evil. Into this chaos of native Polytheism, Assyrian Sabæanism, and Persian Magianism, there have been introduced a stream of corrupt Judaism, and a stream of still more corrupt Christianity. Independently of the intercouse that had from time immemorial been more or less vigorously kept up between the Jews and the Arabs, and the effect of which had been, as we have already seen, to diffuse some notions of the Jewish religion and history among the Arabs, and even to introduce among them fragments of the Pentateuch, the Psalms, and other books of the Jewish Scripture, various positive attempts had from time to time been made to Judaize portions of the Arabian peninsula. Thus, about two centuries before the Chrisitan era, an Arabian king of Yemen is said to have introduced Judaism among his idolatrous people, and to have endeavored to establish it by force. Later still, the crowds of Jewish fugitives that had dispersed themselves through Arabia, after the destruction of their own country by the Romans, had been the means of spreading a knowledge of Jewish beliefs and customs among the native Arabs. In addition to the pure Scripture and its contents, these Hebrew settlers, not a few of whom must have resided in Mecca, brought with them the multitudinous legends, comments and ceremonial addenda of the Mishnu, the Talmud and the Rabbinical schoo's It was precisely in the same manner, and almost exactly to the same extent, that Christianity found its way into Arabia. Since the visit of the Apostle Paul to the Peninsula, not a few missionaries had doubtless tried to add this outlying portion of the East to the field of Christendom. It was reserved for those Christian exiles, however whom the persecutions of the early centuries drove into the desert, really to spread the the knowledge of Christianity among the Arabs But as these exiles belonged almost exclusively to the Eastern or Greek Church, the Christianity that they carried with them into Arabia was of that lifeless and barren kind that had been manufactured in the Synods of the East. Relic-worship, incenseburning, monotonous chantings, and minute ceremonial observances were its outward characteristics; and the single point of Christian theology on the elaboration of which it seemed to have concentrated all its intellec | tual energy and acumen was the theory of the Trinity. Heresies innumerable had sprung up in the Eastern empire, in connection with this doctrine, almost all having taken their rise in the great Arian controversy, by which in the fourth and fifth centuries, the Universal Church had been distracted. Now, it was precisely these cast-off heresies of the Eastern Church that Arabia imbibed. The Christians of, that peninsula, whether native. converts or settlers from Syria and Asia Minor, were almost exclusively sectaries of the following denominations:-Nestorians, so called from their founder, Nestorius, Bishop of Constantinople, and whose heresy consisted in a recondite distinction between Jesus the man, and Christ the God-man Jacobites, so called from Jacobus, Bishop of Edessa in Syria, and whose doctrine, directly contrary to that of the Nestorians in one point, denied the double nature of Chirst in his state of incarnation: Mariamites, so called because they worshiped the Virgin Mary, and regarded her as, along with the Father and the Son, one of the persons of the Divine Trinity and Collyridians, a sect guilty of a similar heresy, and deriving their name from their practice of offering to the Virgin Mary a particular kind of cake, called Colly ris. Of these four sects the Jacobites seem to have had most disciples in Arabia; and they and the Nestorians together were numerous enough to sustain several bishops, who regarded themselves as attached to the Eastern Church. Heretical as the Arabic Christians were, they were still (the Nestorians particularly) depositaries of precious seeds; and through all the wranglings of their creeds, and the formalities of their worship, certain glimpses must have reached the Arabs at large, of the great light that had been kindled for men, six centuries before, at Jerusalem. As the Jews had brought the Old, so the Christians brought the New Testament into the Arabian territory; and hence both were known to the Pagan Arabs as the "People of the Book." There were doubtless copies of the Scriptures in Mecca, and Mahomet may have heard passages of them read. There remains yet to be mentioned another important ingredient of that fermenting mass of thought with which Arabia was laboring about the period of the birth of Mahomet. This was the ingredient of positive and dogmatic Atheism, of Sadduceeism, of open incredulity in the supernatural under any expression whatever. We do not think that sufficient notice has been taken of this fact by those that have written on the history of Mahomet. We have even a suspicion that to many the fact will appear incredible. Atheism, we are told by some of our modern theorists the spirit, in other words, that prescribes the resolute non-recognition of the supernatural as the highest effort of rational excellence, and that, chalking on the doors of the grand questions of God and Immortality, the peremptory phrase "No data," would drag back the soul to earthly taskwork and earthly pleasures-this spirit, we are told, is the latest result of human experience; the calm and equable state of mind into which the human race, long harrassed by infinite problems, is only now beginning to work itself in some favored spots of Western Europe. But it is not so-it is not So. This occidental and nineteenth century thing called Atheism has, in its essence, existed in all ages. Even among the so-called Shemitic races, the characteristic of whose very speech is, and always has been, a surcharge of "the religious idea," the spirit of unbelief and Sadduceeism prevailed like a venom. "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God," said the Hebrew psalmist; that is to say, there were Hebrew Atheists in the days of David. And that there were ancient Arabic Atheists too-men who, amid all the Kaaba-worship of Mecca and its neighborhood, cherished the cold theory, that behind the grass, and the earth, and the clouds, and all the apparent show and paraphernalia of life, there was actually and literally Nothing, and that all was but a chance-spun cob-web over the pit of dissolution: this every page of the Koran ought to make clear. 66 They say, After we shall have become bones and dust, shall we surely be raised new creatures?" "They will say, Who will restore us to life?" They swear most solemnly by God, saying, God will not raise the dead." Such are the incessant allusions of Mahomet in his book; proving, at least, that many of his countrymen, even while talking the language of Theism, swearing the oaths of Arabia, and trembling to all the Arabic superstitions regarding the present life, were infected with a speculative Sadduceesism, equivalent, in fact, to a total rejection of the supernatural. Mahomet in his youth, must have listened to such Sadducees discussing their theory of No data with regard to the Resurrection, and may have shuddered at the daring wit with which they announced their Epicurean conclusion, that it would be best to make sure of Paradise in this life. 64 Such, so far as they can now be enume rated, were the speculative elements and tendencies that were diffused through the Arabian atmosphere at the time when Mahomet began to breathe it. These were the influences to which, till his manhood, he was necessarily subjected. Nothing is more clear than that the forces which operated on the future Prophet were exclusively those that the soil of Arabia supplied. There is, indeed, a story, that in his boyhood he accompanied his uncle, Abu Thaleb, in a caravanexpedition from Mecca, along the borders of the Red Sea, as far as Bostra in Syria; and that at Bostra a Nestorian monk, or priest called Sergius, took great interest in him, and gave him lessons in the principles of the Christian religion. And certainly, if there was any country besides Arabia from which Mahomet derived hints and impressions, it was Syria; a country more closely connected with Arabia than any other, and which his mercantile persuits must have led him even frequently to visit. But the fact is, that in returning from such visits Mahomet could bring very little with him in the shape of intellectual material that Arabia might not itself have furnished. During his journeys to and from Syria, however, as well as during his journeys southward and eastward across the peninsula, he necessarily picked up much that Mecca could hardly have given him. Scenes, for example, seen during such journeys, would haunt his memory afterward, and legends first heard amid such scenes would not be easily forgotten. Mahomet had doubtless crossed the very track of the Israelites on their return from Egypt; had gazed across the Red Sea at the spot pointed out by tradition as the place of their passage; and, walking perchance by the watchfire amid his sleeping camels in the valley of Sinai, had seen the stars rise and set behind the mount of thunders. But all this was Arabic. Arabia bounded his views. That Syria formed part of a large monarchy called the Greek or Eastern Empire, the capital of which was Constantinople, and that beyond Arabia, on the other side, was a great Persian Monarchy, were facts which he could not but know; but of the great Mediterranean world that lay beyond Syria, and of all that under the name of Greek and Roman history had been transacted there, as well as of the vast Asiatic regions that Persia commanded, he can hardly have had even the faintest conception. The Shemitic area was the only part of the earth that he distinctly recognized as existing; and the events that had occurred on that area were all his A vast peninsula of peopled rock, turf, and desert, shut in somehow from 'the shadowy regions that begirt it, and over this peninsula a familiar canopy of changing sky-such was the world of Mahomet, such the universe of his thoughts and impressions, such the limits within which his soul could expatiate. In his twenty-fifth year, Mahomet exchanged the service of his uncle for that of a rich widow of Mecca, named Kadijah. For three years he conducted her affairs as her steward or factor, making several journeys in her behalf to Syria, to Yemen, and to other parts of Arabia. Grateful to him for the skill and faithfulness with which he discharged his trust, as well as touched more tenderly by his other merits, she at length made her wealth his own by marrying him. At the date of their marriage Mahomet was twenty-eight years of age; Kadijah, who had had two husbands before, was forty. During the twelve years that followed his marriage with Kadijah, we are to imagine Mahomet a wealthy Arab, living chiefly in Mecca, one of the most influential men of the tribe of Koreish, and the proprietor of numerous camels and herds of cattle. He was likewise the father of a family; four daughters, besides a son that died when an infant, having been born to him by Kadijah. The Meccans, recognizing him as a man of his word, always upright in his dealings, named him Al Amin, or The Faithful, and used to consult him in their disputes; and when the Kaaba, having been injured by fire, was repaired, it was a matter of course that he should take part in the ceremony of replacing the black stone. In short, if we conceive distinctly any of the best Arabs described by Mr. Layard in his book on Nineveh, we shall have a reduced type before us of the kind of man that Mahomet must have been among his contemporary Meccans. But during these twelve years a process was going on in the heart of the Arab that his countrymen knew nothing of. From the first he must have been a man of great sagacity, vehemence, and determination-an Arabic man of genius, seeing more deeply, and feeling more intensely, after the Arabic method, than any other of the Meccans. Up to his fortieth year, however, it was not noticed that in his character there was anything decidedly abnormal; any craze, eccentricity, or madness, that carried him, strictly speaking, out of the common circle of Arabic ways and customs; anything that Meccan | critics would have pronounced absolutely heretical and irrational. Like the other men of Koreish, his relatives, he regularly attended the ceremonies and festivals of the Kaaba, and complied with all the other practices of the established Polytheism. Nevertheless, under all this a struggle was going on as terrible and as protracted, we doubt not, in the mind of Mahomet, as any that even these days of ours, so different in all other respects, would be able to exhibit. Looking back as we do upon the men and events of the past from a distance, and viewing each life and each transaction therein contained as a small completed whole, which we can neither approve or condemn at a glance, we are apt to forget that in its actual march and evolution, the past was as slow and heavy as the present; that each minute then fell as deliberately from Time's hammer on the bowl of brass, and was as full of pain or joy as minutes are now; and that the lives, therefore, that we examine so lightly as perfected historic results, were all produced and put together by the very process we ourselves are now pursuing, namely, by an infinite series of small advances through a medium of circumstances. In the life of Mahomet, for example, there must have been some minute of first deviation from the polytheistic mode of thinking in which he had been educatedsome minute when, walking round the Kaaba in a clear and critical mood, the assiduous genuflexions of some fat and too prominent Arab may have shot ridicule to his heart, and brought contempt to his lip; some minute, again, when a powerful word from a Nestorian monk may have roused and startled him; or, finally, some minute when, under the stars of the desert, nature may have talked to him with a new and thrilling voice. But whencesoever the impulse came, it must have required months and years of ever added stimulus and speculative distraction to produce the result. The sharp end of the wedge may be easily inserted, but it requires many blows and much violent wrenching afterward to split the tree. Although it is impossible to trace, with any degree of exactness, the process that must have been secretly going on in Mahomet's mind long before he announced himself to the people of Mecca as a prophet, a diligent reader of the Koran would be able, we think, to divide the mental change, as it actually happened, into several parts or stages. For, although the Koran was all written after the change was complete, yet the particular mood or state of conviction in |