camel, so as to attend on them during the journey; and they started forthwith. To avoid capture, the guide whom they had hired did not take the usual route, but one of his own choosing, and thus brought them safely to the place of their destination.

'They arrived in the neighbourhood of the city, on a Monday, the 13th day of the month Rabia-l-ewwel (A.D. 622), when it was already very hot, the sun standing nearly in mid-heaven. He had been anxiously awaited by his people in Medina; and one of them narrates the event of his coming thus: "When we had heard that Mohammed had left Mecca, and we could expect his arrival, we daily went out, after morning prayer, to the stony field, waiting for him, till we found no more shadow. Then we returned, for the days were hot. Thus we also acted on the day of his actual coming; and we had already returned home, when he arrived. It was a Jew who discerned him first; and as he had noticed how we had been waiting for him, he called out in a loud voice, 'O ye sons of Keilah, your fortune has come.' We went out and found Mohammed in the shade of a date-tree, together with Abu Bekr."' Thus far Ibn Ishak's narrative.

The emigration of Mohammed and his partisans to Medina, which in Arabic is called Hetchra, i.e. a 'Flight,' because it had to be accomplished by stealth, amounts in itself to a virtual proof of his utter failure to convince the people of Mecca that he was a prophet sent by God. He had persevered for ten or thirteen years in trying to persuade his countrymen, but met only with determined opposition and contemptuous slight. His flight to Medina openly set the seal to his complete fiasco in Mecca. The Koreish were acute enough to look through his professions and to perceive that their realisation would lead to an intolerable civil despotism, exercised by him in the name of religion. But they, having been accustomed to bear rule themselves, showed no inclination to become the pedestal for Mohammed's elevation. Of all the well-to-do men in Mecca, only a very few joined him; and they, probably, entertained the hope that, by their influence on him, they might secure for themselves a full share in his contemplated power, should he ever be able, with their assistance, to establish it.

The state of affairs in Medina offered a much more favourable prospect, and presented a far greater chance of success. There the Jews had already awakened the expectation of a heaven-commissioned Messiah, destined to become a universal Monarch, and had popularised the idea that the profession of religion may be turned into a means of secular power and military conquest. Whereas in Mecca, Mohammed was merely a distrusted reformer of religion, not yet able to stretch out his hands after earthly dominion, and even trying in vain to obtain the recognition of his deistic teaching: in Medina he could set out, from the first, as the acknowledged head of a popular party which expected to be made dominant by his help, and therefore encouraged rather than checked, his ulterior political aspirations. Such aims as these required no repentance of sin, no regeneration by the Holy Spirit, but merely implicit obedience, daring courage, and physical force. It was in Medina that Islam found the ground prepared for it freely and fully to develop its true nature, and to attain to that completeness and maturity from which it had been hopelessly debarred in Mecca. The historical fact stands out in bold relief that Mohammed's failure in Mecca was properly that of the Prophet, and his triumph in Medina that of the Chieftain and Conqueror.

II.- MOHAMMED'S COMPLETE SUCCESS IN SECURING RECOGNITION AS A PROPHET, AND IN RENDERING ISLAM THE DOMINANT POWER OF ARABIA, OR, HIS MEDINAN PERIOD, COMPRISING THE LAST TEN YEARS OF HIS LIFE.

(1.) Mohammed settles in Medina, and seeks to unite around him the different sections of the population, as a first step in the realisation of his plan.

When on a Friday in June (or, according to other accounts, in, September) A.D. 622, Mohammed, after warily resting for several days in one of the suburbs, held his public entrance into the city of Medina, he was welcomed by a considerable number of adherents who came forth, well armed, to meet him.