declared, to those sensual and degraded slaves whom he led out of
Egypt,--yea, the doctrines of David and of Job. "Though He slay
me, yet will I trust in Him." What a grand and all-important truth
it is to impress upon people sunk in forgetfulness and sensuality
and pleasure-seeking and idle schemes of vanity and ambition, that
there is a supreme Intelligence who overrules, and whose laws
cannot be violated with impunity; from whom no one can escape, even
though he "take the wings of the morning and fly to the uttermost
parts of the sea." This is the one truth that Moses sought to
plant in the minds of the Jews,--a truth always forgotten when
there is slavery to epicurean pleasures or a false philosophy.

Now I maintain that Mohammed, in seeking to impress his degenerate
countrymen with the idea of the one supreme God, amid a most
degrading and almost universal polytheism, was a great reformer.
In preaching this he was neither fanatic nor hypocrite; he was a
very great man, and thus far a good man. He does not make an
original revelation; he reproduces an old truth,--as old as the
patriarchs, as old as Job, as old as the primitive religions,--but
an exceedingly important one, lost sight of by his countrymen,
gradually lost sight of by all peoples when divine grace is
withheld; indeed practically by people in Christian lands in times
of great degeneracy. "The fool has said in his heart there is no
God;" or, Let there be no God, that we may eat and drink before we
die. Epicureanism, in its pleasures or in its speculations, is
virtually atheism. It was so in Greece. It is so with us.

Mohammed was now at the mature age of forty, in the fulness of his
powers, in the prime of his life; and he began to preach everywhere
that there is but one God. Few, however, believed in him. Why not