Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 5 (1897).djvu/359

OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 337 panions ; some seeds of knowledge might be cast upon a fruitful soil ; but his ignorance of the Syriac language must have checked his curiosity ; " and I cannot perceive, in the life or writings of Mahomet, that his prospect was far extended beyond the limits of the Arabian world. From every region of that solitary world, the pilgrims of Mecca were annually assembled by the calls of devotion and commerce : in the free concourse of multitudes, a simple citizen, in his native tongue, might study the political state and character of the tribes, the theory and practice of the Jews and Christians. Some useful strangers might be tempted, or forced, to implore the rights of hospitality ; and the enemies of Mahomet have named the Jew, the Persian, and the Syrian monk, whom they accuse of lending their secret aid to the com- position of the Koran."** Conversation enriches the understand- ing, but solitude is the school of genius ; and the uniformity of a work denotes the hand of a single artist. From his earliest youth Mahomet was addicted to religious contemplation ; "" each year, during the month of Ramadan, he withdrew from the world and from the arms of Cadijah ; in the cave of Hera, three miles from Mecca,'^^ he consulted the spirit of fraud or enthusiasm, whose abode is not in the heavens, but in the mind of the prophet. The faith which, under the name of LslumP^ he preached to his family and nation is compounded of an eternal truth, and a ne- cessary fiction. That there is only one God, and that Mahomet IS the apostle of God. It is the boast of the Jewish apologists that, while the learned one sod nations of antiquity were deluded by the fables of polytheism, their simple ancestors of Palestine preserved the knowledge and worship of the true God. The moral attributes of Jehovah may 7* [Mohammad occasionally borrows Aramaic words, where his native tongue failed him, but is apt to use these borrowed words in a wrong sense.] •' I am not at leisure to pursue the fables or conjectures which name the strangers accused or suspected by the infidels of Mecca (Koran, c. i6, p. 223, c. 35, p. 297, with Sale's Remarks. Prideaux's Life of Mahomet, p. 22-27. Gagnier, Not. ad Abulfed. p. II, 74. Maracci, torn. ii. p. 400). Even Prideau.x has observed that the transaction must have been secret, and that the scene lay in the heart of Arabia. '■[Mohammad had come into contact with a religious movement which had re- cently begun in Arabia, — the movement of the Hanifs, men who were seeking for a religion, stimulated perhaps (as Wellhausen holds) by primitive forms of Christianity surviving among hermits in the Syro- Babylonian desert.] '" Abulfeda in Vit. c. 7, p. 15. Gagnier, torn. i. p. 133, 135. The situation of Mount Hera is remarked by Abulfeda (Geograph. Arab. p. 4). Yet Mahomet had never read of the cave of Egeria ubi nocturnag Numa constituebat amicse, oi tlie Idaean Mount where Minos conversed with Jove, &c. [A late tradition asserted that an interval of two or three years elapsed between ht first and the second revela- tion at Hira. This was called the doctrine of the/fl/r(z.] Sa _/s/dm and Muslim (= Moslem, Musulman) are the infinitive and participle VOL. V. 22