sea, verily a chastisement from thy Lord is imminent." In every natural
manifestation that struck Mahomet's imagination in these early days, God
appeared to him as the sovereign of power, as terrible and as remote as
He was in the lightnings on Sinai. What wonder, then, that when the call
came to him to take up his mission it became a command to "arise and
warn"?

The chroniclers would have us believe that his contact with Christianity
was more important than his communion with Nature. Most of the legends
surrounding his relations with Christian Syria may be safely accepted as
later additions, but it is certain that he paid some attention to the
religion of those people through whose country he passed. A Syrian monk
is said to have seen Mahomet sitting beneath a tree, and to have hailed
him as a prophet; there is even a traditional account of an interview
with Nestorius, but this must be set aside at once as pure fiction.

The kernel of these legends seems to be the desire to show that Mahomet
had studied Christianity, and was not imposing a new religion without
having considered the potentialities of those already existing. However
that may be, Christianity certainly interested Mahomet, and must have
influenced him towards the monotheistic idea. The Arabians themselves
were not entirely ignorant of it; they witnessed the worship of one God
by the Jews and Christians on the borders of their territory, and
although it is a very debatable point how far the idea of one God had
progressed in Arabia when Mahomet began his mission, it may fairly be
accepted that dissatisfaction with the old tribal gods was not wanting.
Mahomet saw the countries through which he passed in a state of religious
flux, and heard around him diverse creeds, detecting doubtless an
undercurrent of unrest and a desire for some religion of more compelling
power.