But, after all, is it explaining the spiritual life of a man, who was
certainly unique, if we put a label upon him, and thus class him with
others, who at the most shared with him certain abnormalities? A normal man
Mohammed certainly was not. But as soon as we try to give a positive name
to this negative quality, then we do the same as the heathens of Mecca, who
were violently awakened by his thundering prophecies: "He is nothing but
one possessed, a poet, a soothsayer, a sorcerer," they said. Whether we say
with the old European biographers "impostor," or with the modern ones put
"epileptic," or "hysteric" in its place, makes little difference. The
Meccans ended by submitting to him, and conquering a world under the banner
of his faith. We, with the diffidence which true science implies, feel
obliged merely to call him Mohammed, and to seek in the Qorân, and with
great cautiousness in the Tradition, a few principal points of his life and
work, in order to see how in his mind the intense feeling of discontent
during the misery of his youth, together with a great self-reliance, a
feeling of spiritual superiority to his surroundings, developed into
a call, the form of which was largely decided by Jewish and Christian
influence.

While being struck by various weaknesses which disfigured this great
personality and which he himself freely confessed, we must admire the
perseverance with which he retained his faith in his divine mission, not
discouraged by twelve years of humiliation, nor by the repudiation of the
"People of Scripture," upon whom he had relied as his principal witnesses,
nor yet by numbers of temporary rebuffs during his struggle for the
dominion of Allah and His Messenger, which he carried on through the whole
of Arabia.

Was Mohammed conscious of the universality of his mission? In the beginning
he certainly conceived his work as merely the Arabian part of a universal