when they should become notable to all the world. Their Idolatries appear
to have been in a tottering state; much was getting into confusion and
fermentation among them. Obscure tidings of the most important Event ever
transacted in this world, the Life and Death of the Divine Man in Judea, at
once the symptom and cause of immeasurable change to all people in the
world, had in the course of centuries reached into Arabia too; and could
not but, of itself, have produced fermentation there.


It was among this Arab people, so circumstanced, in the year 570 of our
Era, that the man Mahomet was born. He was of the family of Hashem, of the
Koreish tribe as we said; though poor, connected with the chief persons of
his country. Almost at his birth he lost his Father; at the age of six
years his Mother too, a woman noted for her beauty, her worth and sense:
he fell to the charge of his Grandfather, an old man, a hundred years old.
A good old man: Mahomet's Father, Abdallah, had been his youngest favorite
son. He saw in Mahomet, with his old life-worn eyes, a century old, the
lost Abdallah come back again, all that was left of Abdallah. He loved the
little orphan Boy greatly; used to say, They must take care of that
beautiful little Boy, nothing in their kindred was more precious than he.
At his death, while the boy was still but two years old, he left him in
charge to Abu Thaleb the eldest of the Uncles, as to him that now was head
of the house. By this Uncle, a just and rational man as everything
betokens, Mahomet was brought up in the best Arab way.

Mahomet, as he grew up, accompanied his Uncle on trading journeys and such
like; in his eighteenth year one finds him a fighter following his Uncle in
war. But perhaps the most significant of all his journeys is one we find
noted as of some years' earlier date: a journey to the Fairs of Syria.
The young man here first came in contact with a quite foreign world,--with