him live if he kept speaking it,--the wild Son of the Desert resolved to
defend himself, like a man and Arab. If the Koreish will have it so, they
shall have it. Tidings, felt to be of infinite moment to them and all men,
they would not listen to these; would trample them down by sheer violence,
steel and murder: well, let steel try it then! Ten years more this
Mahomet had; all of fighting of breathless impetuous toil and struggle;
with what result we know.

Much has been said of Mahomet's propagating his Religion by the sword. It
is no doubt far nobler what we have to boast of the Christian Religion,
that it propagated itself peaceably in the way of preaching and conviction.
Yet withal, if we take this for an argument of the truth or falsehood of a
religion, there is a radical mistake in it. The sword indeed: but where
will you get your sword! Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely
in a _minority of one_. In one man's head alone, there it dwells as yet.
One man alone of the whole world believes it; there is one man against all
men. That _he_ take a sword, and try to propagate with that, will do
little for him. You must first get your sword! On the whole, a thing will
propagate itself as it can. We do not find, of the Christian Religion
either, that it always disdained the sword, when once it had got one.
Charlemagne's conversion of the Saxons was not by preaching. I care little
about the sword: I will allow a thing to struggle for itself in this
world, with any sword or tongue or implement it has, or can lay hold of.
We will let it preach, and pamphleteer, and fight, and to the uttermost
bestir itself, and do, beak and claws, whatsoever is in it; very sure that
it will, in the long-run, conquer nothing which does not deserve to be
conquered. What is better than itself, it cannot put away, but only what
is worse. In this great Duel, Nature herself is umpire, and can do no
wrong: the thing which is deepest-rooted in Nature, what we call _truest_,
that thing and not the other will be found growing at last.