Thus, and then, was likely to arise a bold and self-confiding hero,
leaning on his own sword: a man of dark sentences, who, by judiciously
pilfering from this quarter and from that shreds of truth to jewel his
black vestments of error, and by openly proclaiming that Oneness of the
object of all worship which besotted Christendom had then, from undue
reverence to saints and martyrs, virgins and archangels, well nigh
forgotten; a man who, by pandering to human passions and setting wide as
virtue's avenue the flower-tricked gates of vice; should thus, like
Lucifer before him, in a comet-like career of victory, sweep the
startled firmament of earth, and drag to his erratic orbit the stars of
heaven from their courses.

Mahomet; his humble beginnings; his iron perseverance under early
probable checks; his blind, yet not all unsublime, dependence on
fatality; his ruthless, yet not all undeserved, infliction of fire and
sword upon the cowering coward race that filled the western
world;--these, and all whatever else besides attended his train of
triumphs, and all whatever besides has lasted among Moors, and Arabs,
and Turks, and Asiatics, even to this our day--constitute to a thinking
mind (and it seems not without cause) another antecedent probability.
Let the scoffer about Mahomet's success, and the admirer of his hotchpot
Koran; let him to whom it is a stumbling-block that error (if indeed,
quoth he, it be more erroneous than what Christendom counts truth)
should have had such free course and been glorified, while so-called
Truth, _pede claudo_, has limped on even as now cautiously and
ingloriously through the well-suspicious world; let him who thinks he
sees in Mahomet's success an answer to the foolish argument of some, who
test the truth of Christianity by its Gentile triumphs; let him ponder
these things. Reason, the God of his idolatry, might, with an
archangel's ken, have prophesied some Mahomet's career: and, so far from