lecture, yet that I am convinced, from my own acquaintance with the
original facts and documents, that the picture there drawn of Mohammed
is a true and a just description of a much-calumniated man.

Now, what was the strength of Islam? The common answer is, fanaticism
and enthusiasm. To such answers I can only rejoin: Such terms must be
defined before they are used, and we must be told what fanaticism and
enthusiasm are. Till then I have no more e priori respect for a long
word ending in -ism or -asm than I have for one ending in -ation or -
ality. But while fanaticism and enthusiasm are being defined--a work
more difficult than is commonly fancied--we will go on to consider
another answer. We are told that the strength of Islam lay in the hope
of their sensuous Paradise and fear of their sensuous Gehenna. If so,
this is the first and last time in the world's history that the strength
of any large body of people--perhaps of any single man--lay in such a
hope. History gives us innumerable proofs that such merely selfish
motives are the parents of slavish impotence, of pedantry and conceit,
of pious frauds, often of the most devilish cruelty: but, as far as my
reading extends, of nothing better. Moreover, the Christian Greeks had
much the same hopes on those points as the Mussulmans; and similar
causes should produce similar effects: but those hopes gave them no
strength. Besides, according to the Mussulmans' own account, this was
not their great inspiring idea; and it is absurd to consider the wild
battle-cries of a few imaginative youths, about black-eyed and green-
kerchiefed Houris calling to them from the skies, as representing the
average feelings of a generation of sober and self-restraining men, who
showed themselves actuated by far higher motives.

Another answer, and one very popular now, is that the Mussulmans were
strong, because they believed what they said; and the Greeks weak,