374 MOHAMMED A PARODY OF CHRIST. [BK. II.

am come to thee as a confounded, bewildered sinner, that thou mayest ask pardon for me of the Most High." Then there came forth a voice from that Excellency's tomb, saying three times, "Thou hast been pardoned, thou hast been pardoned."

'All the Ulemas are agreed that to visit the tomb of the Apostle of God is a solemn duty and an acceptable virtue; and that it is very meritorious. It is recorded that his Excellency said, "Whoever visits my tomb, to him my intercession is due on the day of the resurrection;" or, according to another account, "Whoever visits my tomb, his advocate and witness I shall be on the day of the resurrection." He also said, "Whoever visits my tomb after my death, it shall be all the same to him as if he had visited me in my lifetime."'1 (Rawzat.)

1 The attentive reader will probably have found the apparent parallels between the lives of Christ and Mohammed, which this chapter has brought before his eyes, far too close and numerous to be considered accidental. It seems really difficult to avoid arriving at the conviction that, where there appears a sameness or rivalry between both these extraordinary characters of history, and seeing that the antecedent cannot imitate the subsequent: the later biography can only be a designed, though more or less disguised, copy of the earlier. Such a conclusion must appear all the more justified, by the traces we have discovered of Mohammed expressly referring to Christian precedents, as the cause and model for his own institutions, see e.g. p. 332. Now if this fact is duly pondered, that Mohammed is represented as having dared, directly or indirectly, to usurp to himself the known position of Jesus Christ, the God-man Saviour, the avowed Mediator between God and man: then he appears in the full light of an Antichrist. It can also no longer surprise us, but must appear quite natural, if we find that Islam, the system he initiated, ruthlessly destroyed every vestige of Christianity in Arabia, and that, in the course of its foreign conquests, it speedily invaded Palestine, the land of its birth; Asia Minor, the field of St. Paul's labours; Egypt, the early seat of Christian anchorites and learned divines; North Africa, where St. Augustin had long been a burning and a shining light; and even Constantinople, the capital of the first Christian monarch, and the locality of the earliest Councils of the Church. As Mohammed tried to usurp the place of Christ, in a religious sense, so the Mohammedan world has laboured, during successive centuries, to displace Christendom, as a dominant Factor of History.

CHAPTER II.

SUNDRY SKETCHES OF MOHAMMED, UNDER VARIOUS ASPECTS, DRAWN BY MOSLEM HANDS.

REMARK: If the place assigned to these sketches suggests their strong mythical colouring by Tradition, this is not meant to affirm that they may not comprise much which is really historical. Free scope is left to the reader's own tact and taste to discriminate between the historical and the mythical. All the sketches and their headings are translated from the popular Biography, Rawzat-ul-Ahbab (i.e. the Flower-garden of Friends), which is an elaborate collection of the records and traditions concerning the Life of Mohammed, for the edification and enjoyment of the Mussulman believers. The reader will bear in mind, that, as in the preceding Chapter, so also in this, he reads the statements of Moslem writers.

I. — PHYSICAL QUALITIES AND MORAL VIRTUES OF THE LORD OF THE WORLD.

(1.) Mohammed's Bodily or Physical Qualities.

Respecting that prince's stature, appearance, and limbs, the biographers and traditionists communicate that his body, like the bodies of his successors, was of a middle size, whose perfect limbs and members were indications of the complete moderation of his dispositions. Although his blessed stature was of middle height, yet, whenever he was walking with tall people, he appeared taller than they; and whenever he sat in an assembly, he was the greatest of those present. That blessed prince's head was large, and yet was he not big-headed. His head-hair was black, yet it was not very frizzled or very dangling, but just right; and his musk-scented curls were hanging down sometimes to the middle