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 such being in the nature of any objection to Faith, the idea thus thrown out, well-mused upon, will be seen to lend Faith an aid in the way of previous likelihood.

“There is one God, and Mahomet is his prophet!” How admirably calculated such a war-cry would be for the circumstances of the seventh century.  The simple sublimity of Oneness, as opposed to school-theology and catholic demons:  the glitter of barbaric pomp, instead of tame observances:  the flashing scimetar of ambition to supersede the cross:  a turban aigretted with jewels for the twisted wreath of thorns.  As human nature is, and especially in that time was, nothing was more expectable (even if prophetic records had not taught it), than the rise and progress of that great False Prophet, whose waving crescent even now blights the third part of earth.

ROMANISM.

We all know how easy it is to prophesy after the event:  but it would be uncandid and untrue to confound this remark with another, cousin-germane to it; to wit:  how easy it is to discern of any event, after it has happened, whether or not it were antecedently likely.  When the race is over, and the best horse has won (or by clever jockey-management, the worst), how obviously could any gentleman on the turf, now in possession of particulars, have seen the event to have been so probable, that he would have staked all upon its issue.