to Mohammed, accompanied by an express rejection of the Son of God and of the Trinity, has become one of the principal dogmas of Islam.  But in Mohammed’s first preaching, the announcement of the Day of judgment is much more prominent than the Unity of God; and it was against his revelations concerning Doomsday that his opponents directed their satire during the first twelve years.  It was not love of their half-dead gods but anger at the wretch who was never tired of telling them, in the name of Allah, that all their life was idle and despicable, that in the other world they would be the outcasts, which opened the floodgates of irony and scorn against Mohammed.  And it was Mohammed’s anxiety for his own lot and that of those who were dear to him in that future life, that forced him to seek a solution of the question:  who shall bring my people out of the darkness of antithesis into the light of obedience to Allah?

We should, a posteriori, be inclined to imagine a simpler answer to the question than that which Mohammed found; he might have become a missionary of Judaism or of Christianity to the Meccans.  However natural such a conclusion may appear to us, from the premises with which we are acquainted, it did not occur to Mohammed.  He began—­the Qoran tells us expressly—­by regarding the Arabs, or at all events his Arabs, as heretofore destitute of divine message[1]:  “to whom We have sent no warner before you.”  Moses and Jesus—­not to mention any others—­had not been sent for the Arabs; and as Allah would not leave any section of mankind without a revelation, their prophet must still be to come.  Apparently Mohammed regarded the Jewish and Christian tribes in Arabia as exceptions to the rule that an ethnical group (ummah) was at the same time a religious unity.  He did not imagine that it could be in Allah’s plan that the Arabs were to conform to a revelation given in a foreign language.  No; God must speak to them in Arabic.[2] Through whose mouth?

[Footnote 1:  Qoran, xxxii., 2; xxxiv., 43; xxxvi., 5, etc.]

[Footnote 2:  Ibid., xii., 2; xiii., 37; XX., 112; XXVI., 195; xli., 44, etc.]

A long and severe crisis preceded Mohammed’s call.  He was convinced that, if he were the man, mighty signs from Heaven must be revealed to him, for his conception of revelation was mechanical; Allah Himself, or at least angels, must speak to him.  The time of waiting, the process of objectifying the subjective, lived through by the help of an overstrained imagination, all this laid great demands upon the psychical and physical constitution of Mohammed.  At length he saw and heard that which he thought he ought to hear and see.  In feverish dreams he found the form for the revelation, and he did not in the least realize that the contents of his inspiration from Heaven were nothing but the result of what he had himself absorbed.  He realized it so little, that the identity of what was revealed to him with what he held to be the contents of the Scriptures of Jews and Christians was a miracle to him, the only miracle upon which he relied for the support of his mission.