Mohammed, who twelve years long, in spite of derision and contempt,
continued to inveigh in the name of Allah against the frivolous
conservatism of the heathens in Mecca, to preach Allah's omnipotence to
them, to hold up to them Allah's commands and His promises and threats
regarding the future life, "without asking any reward" for such exhausting
work, is really not another man than the acknowledged "Messenger of
Allah" in Medina, who saw his power gradually increase, who was taught by
experience the value and the use of the material means of extending it,
and who finally, by the force of arms compelled all Arabs to "obedience to
Allah and His messenger."

In our own society, real enthusiasm in the propagation of an idea generally
considered as absurd, if crowned by success may, in the course of time, end
in cold, prosaic calculation without a trace of hypocrisy. Nowhere in
the life of Mohammed can a point of turning be shown; there is a gradual
changing of aims and a readjustment of the means of attaining them. From
the first the outcast felt himself superior to the well-to-do people who
looked down upon him; and with all his power he sought for a position from
which he could force them to acknowledge his superiority. This he found in
the next and better world, of which the Jews and Christians knew. After a
crisis, which some consider as psychopathologic, he knew himself to be sent
by Allah to call the materialistic community, which he hated and despised,
to the alternative, either in following him to find eternal blessedness, or
in denying him to be doomed to eternal fire.

Powerless against the scepticism of his hearers, after twelve years of
preaching followed only by a few dozen, most of them outcasts like himself,
he hoped now and then that Allah would strike the recalcitrant multitude
with an earthly doom, as he knew from revelations had happened before. This
hope was also unfulfilled. As other messengers of God had done in similar