But the enthusiasm kindled by Carlyle for the prophet of Mecca has been considerably
checked by fuller information from the original sources as brought out in the learned biographies
of Weil, Nöldeke, Sprenger and Muir. They furnish the authentic material for a calm, discriminating
and impartial judgment, which, however, is modified more or less by the religious standpoint and
sympathies of the historian. Sprenger represents Mohammed as the child of his age, and mixes
praise and censure, without aiming at a psychological analysis or philosophical view. Sir William
Muir concedes his original honesty and zeal as a reformer and warner, but assumes a gradual
deterioration to the judicial blindness of a self-deceived heart, and even a kind of Satanic inspiration
in his later revelations. "We may readily admit," he says, "that at the first Mahomet did believe, or
persuaded himself to believe, that his revelations were dictated by a divine agency. In the Meccan
period of his life, there certainly can be traced no personal ends or unworthy motives to belie this
conclusion. The Prophet was there, what he professed to be, ’a simple Preacher and a Warner;’ he
was the despised and rejected teacher of a gainsaying people; and he had apparently no ulterior
object but their reformation .... But the scene altogether changes at Medina. There the acquisition
of temporal power, aggrandizement, and self-glorification mingled with the grand object of the
Prophet’s previous life; and they were sought after and attained by precisely the same instrumentality.
Messages from heaven were freely brought forward to justify his political conduct, equally with
his religious precepts. Battles were fought, wholesale executions inflicted, and territories annexed,
under pretext of the Almighty’s sanction. Nay, even baser actions were not only excused but
encouraged, by the pretended divine approval or command .... The student of history will trace for
himself how the pure and lofty aspirations of Mahomet were first tinged, and then gradually debased
by a half unconscious self-deception, and how in this process truth merged into falsehood, sincerity
into guile,—these opposite principles often co-existing even as active agencies in his conduct. The
reader will observe that simultaneously with the anxious desire to extinguish idolatry and to promote
religion and virtue in the world, there was nurtured by the Prophet in his own heart a licentious
self-indulgence; till in the end, assuming to be the favorite of Heaven, he justified himself by
’revelations’ from God in the most flagrant breaches of morality. He will remark that while Mahomet
cherished a kind and tender disposition, ’Weeping with them that wept,’ and binding to his person
the hearts of his followers by the ready and self-denying offices of love and friendship, he could
yet take pleasure in cruel and perfidious assassination, could gloat over the massacre of entire tribes,
and savagely consign the innocent babe to the fires of hell. Inconsistencies such as these continually
present themselves from the period of Mahomet’s arrival at Medina; and it is by, the study of these
inconsistencies that his character must be rightly comprehended. The key, to many difficulties of
this description may be found, I believe, in the chapter ’on the belief of Mahomet in his own
inspiration.’ When once he had dared to forge the name of the Most High God as the seal and
authority of his own words and actions, the germ was laid from which the errors of his after life
freely and fatally developed themselves."^208
Note on Mormonism.
Sources.
The Book of Mormon. First printed at Palmyra, N. Y., 1830. Written by the Prophet Mormon, three
hundred years after Christ, upon plates of gold in the "Reformed Egyptian" (?) language, and
translated by the Prophet Joseph Smith, Jun., with the aid of Urim and Thummim, into English.
(^208) Life of Mah., IV. 317, 322.