he could find no solace; the highly developed Arabian art of words, poetry with its fictitious amourettes, its polished descriptions of portions of Arabian nature, its venal vain praise and satire, might serve as dessert to a well-filled dish; they were unable to compensate for the lack of material prosperity.  Mohammed felt his misery as a pain too great to be endured; in some way or other he must be delivered from it.  He desired to be more than the greatest in his surroundings, and he knew that in that which they counted for happiness he could never even equal them.  Rather than envy them regretfully, he preferred to despise their values of life, but on that very account he had to oppose these values with better ones.

It was not unknown in Mecca that elsewhere communities existed acquainted with such high ideals of life, spiritual goods accessible to the poor, even to them in particular.  Apart from commerce, which brought the inhabitants of Mecca into contact with Abyssinians, Syrians, and others, there were far to the south and less far to the north and north-east of Mecca, Arabian tribes who had embraced the Jewish or the Christian religion.  Perhaps this circumstance had helped to make the inhabitants of Mecca familiar with the idea of a creator, Allah, but this had little significance in their lives, as in the Maker of the Universe they did not see their Lawgiver and judge, but held themselves dependent for their good and evil fortune upon all manner of beings, which they rendered favourable or harmless by animistic practices.  Thoroughly conservative, they did not take great interest in the conceptions of the “People of the Scripture,” as they called the Jews, Christians, and perhaps some other sects arisen from these communities.

But Mohammed’s deeply felt misery awakened his interest in them.  Whether this had been the case with a few others before him in the milieu of Mecca, we need not consider, as it does not help to explain his actions.  If wide circles had been anxious to know more about the contents of the “Scripture” Mohammed would not have felt in the dark in the way that he did.  We shall probably never know, by intercourse with whom it really was that Mohammed at last gained some knowledge of the contents of the sacred books of Judaism and Christianity; probably through various people, and over a considerable length of time.  It was not lettered men who satisfied his awakened curiosity; otherwise the quite confused ideas, especially in the beginning of the revelation, concerning the mutual relations between Jews and Christians could not be explained.  Confusions between Miryam, the sister of Moses, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, between Saul and Gideon, mistakes about the relationship of Abraham to Isaac, Ishmael, and Jacob, might be put down to misconceptions of Mohammed himself, who could not all at once master the strange material.  But his representation of Judaism and Christianity and a number of other forms of revelation, as almost