Christ, His atoning Death, and the final character of the Gospel as God's highest and fullest revelation. The very essence, therefore, of the character of Mohammed, as the author of Islam, must have implied an uncompromising hostility to Christianity and its advocates.

Besides, Mohammed must submit, like every one else, to being judged, not by his words and teaching only, but especially also by his acts and living. We have already seen how overbearingly he acted towards the Christians with whom he came in contact, and how he inflicted on them and their religion the stigma of inferiority and contempt (p. 138). As everything about Christ testified to the truth of His declaration, 'My kingdom is not of this world' (John xviii. 36), so Mohammed's whole life and conduct showed him to be earthly-minded, and to aim at worldly power. By some of his acts he shocked the moral sense even of his heathen countrymen. The first armed expedition which he undertook with his followers was to rob and plunder. So eagerly bent was he on the acquisition and exercise of secular domination, that he can hardly be said to have waited till he had sufficiently established himself as Prophet, before he turned warrior and conqueror. He had not secured more than a few hundred adherents, and was, as it were, still offering his pretended revelations to an unsympathetic nation with one hand, when he took up the sword of violence with the other, and thus put a sudden sinister life into his movement. Both, this haste with which he seized the sword of conquest, and the unscrupulous harshness with which he wielded it, show unmistakably what kind of ideal floated, with more or less distinctness, in his mind from the first. The clank of arms and bustle of war were so incessant with this fighting prophet, that they must have absorbed most of his time and attention, leaving very little for the care of religion. During the ten years between his Flight to Medina and his death he organised no less than thirty-eight military expeditions, twenty-seven of which he accompanied in person; and it is easy to conjecture how all-absorbing they must have been in their preparation, execution, and results, to the time, labour, and thoughts, of the Prophet-Emir, with whom rested the responsibility for them all. With feverish

restlessness he was pushed on, as if by an unseen hand, from one enterprise to another; and the same precipitate haste, with which he rushed from the pulpit and the mosque to the sword and the sceptre, in his adopted home, he also betrayed in seeking to extend his power beyond its borders.

Scarcely had the majority of the Arab tribes been subjugated to his rule by the force of arms, the enticement of worldly advantages, and the promise of a sensual Paradise, when he took the notorious step of despatching formal embassies to the surrounding rulers, summoning them to accept Islam. Five of these letters were addressed to Christian potentates, including the Roman Emperor. These arrogant, though harmless, missives failing to accomplish their object, as previously his preaching had remained inefficacious to convince and convert his Arab countrymen, he was not long in resorting to the more effectual argument of the sword. After several more or less successful incursions into the border districts of the Roman empire, a large and well-appointed army was collected to invade Syria. Mohammed instructed the commander to make the utmost haste, so as to fall upon the inhabitants before the tidings of his approach could reach them, and to set fire to their dwellings, fields, and palm-plantations. This characteristically turned out the last public act in which the whole policy of the warrior-prophet, as it were, culminated. The hand of death was already upon him; and before the army could start on its sanguinary mission, he had breathed his last. But Abu Bekr, his like-minded successor, carried out the plan bequeathed to him, and opened his Califate by the despatch of the still-assembled host. Thus it is unmistakable that the deeds of war and conquest, which filled up the lives of the Califs, were nothing but the continuation and further expansion of the work begun by Mohammed himself.

Nor can it be less undoubted that the man who arrogated to himself secular authority and military command, as soon as his altered circumstances in Medina offered him the slightest chance, would have done the very same thing in Mecca, had he found it equally practicable there. If he did not persecute and fight in Mecca, this was not because he was morally elevated above doing so, but because he lacked