of images to be idolatrous. He held idolatry of all kinds in
supreme abhorrence. He enjoined charity, justice, and forbearance.
He denounced all falsehood and all deception, especially in trade.
He declared that humility, benevolence, and self-abnegation were
the greatest virtues. He commanded his disciples to return good
for evil, to restrain the passions, to bridle the tongue, to be
patient under injuries, to be submissive to God. He enjoined
prayer, fastings, and meditation as a means of grace. He laid down
the necessity of rest on the seventh day. He copied the precepts
of the Bible in many of their essential features, and recognized
its greatest teachers as inspired prophets.

It was during these thirteen years at Mecca, amid persecution and
ridicule, and with few outward successes, that he probably wrote
the Koran,--a book without beginning and without end, disjecta
membra, regardless of all rules of art, full of repetitions, and
yet full of lofty precepts and noble truths of morality evidently
borrowed from the Jewish Scriptures,--in which his great ideas
stand out with singular eloquence and impressiveness: the unity of
God, His divine sovereignty, the necessity of prayer, the soul's
immortality, future rewards and punishments. His own private life
had been blameless. It was plain and simple. For a whole month he
did not light a fire to cook his food. He swept his chamber
himself and mended his own clothes. His life was that of an
ascetic enthusiast, profoundly impressed with the greatness and
dignity of his mission. Thus far his greatest error and fault was
in the supposition that he was inspired in the same sense as the
ancient Jewish prophets were inspired,--to declare the will and the
truth of God. Any man leading such a life of contemplative
asceticism and retirement is prone to fall into the belief of