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 on it, and gave a corner to the chief of each of the four parties, that each might have the same share in raising it; but he himself guided it to its final resting-place, and fixed it there.

But now the crisis of his life was approaching—the period at which he came forward as the prophet of the one God whose existence he taught. It is hard to judge rightly of his motives in thus proclaiming himself. Nowadays, of course, we do not necessarily regard the founder of a religion different from our own as a wilful impostor, much less as one inspired by Satan. But such was once the opinion Christians held of Mahomet. The Protestant Luther said he was 'a devil.' His Roman Catholic opponents could find nothing worse to say of Mahomet than that he was like Luther. But for us it is no longer necessary to recognise only wickedness or imposture in Mahomet. We may well see in him at first an honest seeker after God, convinced of His unity, His mercy, His justice; and if he turned aside from the straight path, if he allowed pride and ambition to blind him to the true light, and came to believe that his bodily seizures and mental paroxysms were the true workings of God in him, we need not therefore regard him as insincere, though he was no doubt the victim of a self-delusion, which led him, in the end, to consider even the sinful impulses of his heart manifestations of the direct will of Heaven.

In the fortieth year of his life, the year of our Lord 610, he was, according to the story, meditating at night in the cave of Hira, on a mountain three miles north of Mecca. There, in the highest part of the horizon, there appeared to him an angel, mighty in power, endowed with understanding, who drew near