however, which were by no means unknown | reputation it enjoyed on account of

among his contemporary Meccans. Expertness in horsemanship and in the use of arms; skill in the management of cattle; shrewdness in buying and selling and in judging of wares, together with such general ingenuity and manual dexterity as were necessary to supply one's personal wants in so primitive a state of society-these were, doubtless, the most conspicuous of the early acquisitions of the future prophet. But even in such a rude way of life, literary sensations and impulses were not wholly wanting. To that passion for song and legend, in which no race of any promise has ever been found deficient, and which the peculiar conditions of Arabian life were so well calculated to foster, the wild Arabs of Mahomet's days joined a degree of literary taste and fastidiousness almost amounting to dilettantism. To hear a fine story well told; to sit at sunset at the door of a tent, listening to the tinkling syllables or rythmic cadences of a practiced speaker, as he wove forth some gorgeous prose-fancy of the wonderful, or declaimed some earnest ode of war-was a recreation of all most suitable to the constitution of the Arab, with his craving for mental stimulus, and his oriental love of repose. Hence, among the ancient Arabs, an æsthetic susceptibility to the pleasure of sound for its own sake, and a conceit in the structure and wealth of their own language, such as we hardly find among any other people at the same stage of its history. To be able to express himself fluently and with elegance on any given occasion, was an accomplishment which, as it was easy by nature to the Arab, so it was his study to acquire and improve. And when this power flashed out at all conspicuously, when a poet was born in any tribe or family, the event was celebrated with all honor; neighboring tribes sent their recognition in gifts, or assembled to hear the new star of Arabian song. At a great fair, too, that was annually held at Ocadh, in Yemen, poets from all parts of Arabia met to recite their compositions, and to compete for prizes; and such poems as then pleased most were afterward written in letters of gold on flags of Egyptian silk, and sent to be hung up on the walls of the Kaaba, at Mecca. Seven of these ancient Arabian prize-poems have been preserved to us, in a collected form, under the name of "The Moallakat," that is, "The Suspended." To

ness and beauty of its dialect, is it w that among the prophet's own kinsm men whose verses were familiar Arabia. Lebid and Hareth, two seven poets of "The Moallakat, Koreishites, and contemporaries homet; and at the time when the was ready to announce his mission people of Mecca, there were poets en the place to criticise and lampoon hir From the recitations of the poets, as from the daily conversations that h have listened to in the streets and ho Mecca, Mahomet, doubtless, acquire knowledge as he afterward exhibited legendary lore of his countrymen. matter thus accumulated in his mind would necessarily consist of traditio lating to the history of his own tribe cially in its connection with Mecca. however, would be of wider importtions relating to such great events of val times as the Creation, the Floo dispersion of races, the peopling of A and its early relations with the adj countries of Persia, Syria, Palestine Egypt; traditions also of specially significance, respecting such notable n those old times, as Adam, Seth, E Noah, Nimrod, Abraham, Isaac, Ish Jacob, Moses, David, Solomon, and the Biblical heroes. What proportion of mass of legendary matter had come do the Arabs by an independent stream of dition from the great Shemitic forew and what proportion, on the other hand, sisted of real Biblical history, originally fused among the Arabs by the Hebrews subsequently corrupted to Arabic use, altogether impossible to determine. An the purely Arabic legends, without do are to be reckoned those that related to extinct tribes of Ad, Thamud, Tasm, Ja the first Jorham, and Amalek, to w tribes, it was alleged, the Arabian penin had belonged before it was occupied by posterity of Joktan. The age of these pri tive Arabians lay behind the historic per of their successors like a dark and gloo background; and one of the most favo exercises of the Arab muse was to open this background, by fictitious descriptio revealing, as it were, in lurid glimpses, splendors of its buried cities, the banners its vanished tents, and the once defiant

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ely, of Hud, the prophet sent by God to Al Uzza; the idol of the tribes of Hodhail im the idolatrous Addites. Long and and Khozah, between Mecca and Medina, ily, said the legend, had the good Hud was a large stone, named Manah; the tribe ched the Word of God to the Addites, of Thakif worshiped a goddess named Allat; they would not listen to him; so that and other local deities of note were Wadd, at last grew wroth against them, and Jawa, Yaguth, Yauk, and Nasr. In one a blast of suffocating wind across their part of Arabia, the chief idol was a lump of try, which destroyed them all. Similar, dough; in others, stones were worshiped, according to another legend, had been that had been originally brought, it was said, ate of the men of Thamud. To them from the holy valley of Mecca. And, as it sent the prophet Saleh, as Hud had was a principle of the Greek Polytheism, sent to the Addites; nay, to cure their that every locality should tolerate the gods ief, God had, at their request, wrought of every other, so among the Arabs, the mulacle by His servant, and caused a she titudinous local gods that existed over the , big with young, to issue from a hard surface of the country, were by no means but, in their wantonness, they killed supposed to exclude or interfere with each camel, and God, to punish them, sent other. On the contrary, in token of their rthquake, which strewed the ground purely local efficacy, and of the subordinaheir corpses. These and other legends tion or their worship to catholic Arabic feelsame kind appear to have made a pro-ing, no fewer than three hundred and sixty impression on the mind of the young met of Mecca.

it was not merely in the legendary f his countrymen, and their Arabicised ns of Hebrew narratives, that the w of Abu Thaleb had matter of thought ed to him. Looking abroad over the f Arabia from his stand-point at Mecca, ald command a view of a whole sea of ixed and confused speculation. In the of Ignorance," as the Arabs call the prior to Mahomet, Arabia was a kind ste area of the East, upon which had ccumulated the rubbish and debris of religious systems.

he first place, and forming, as it were, vest stratum of Arabian thought, there e native religion of the Arabs, a kind ley of Fetichism and Polytheism, exg precisely such a degeneracy from re Monotheistic Faith of the days of s would have been presented by the ws, if they had been permitted without ption, for a series of ages, to follow Holatrous tendencies. That there were eams of belief, particularly among the Koreish, in one only living and true ay, that speculatively the unity of God vays present to the thoughtful Arab as of faith, is sufficiently clear to all who the language of the time. But, escaping nderneath this grand doctrine, the Arand at large had provided itself with ing lower and more palpable, in the of a Pantheon of local gods and god

such idols, collected from the Arabic area, and even from districts lying beyond it, within the boundaries of Syria and Persia, were ranged in niches round the Kaaba at Mecca, so as to attract, as it were, to that holy centre, all the possible rays of Arabic devotion. In encircling the Kaaba, therefore, during the holy months, the pilgrims virtually did homage to all the gods of Arabia, while, in the more special acts of kissing the black stone, drinking the waters of Zem-zem, and gazing on the tomb of Ishmael, they merged, as it were, all their local idolatries in burning reverence for their ancestry, and reverted to the purer memories of olden days.

Superinduced upon this native Arabic Polytheism were elements borrowed from two extra-Arabian systems-the Sabæanism of the Chaldees, or Assyrians, on the one side; and the Magian or Zoroastrian religion of the Persians on the other. The peculiar feature of the Sabæan religion was its open and systematic worship of the celestial luminaries. Nowhere on the earth, not even in its native Chaldæa, was this form of idolatry, if once recognized, so likely to prevail, as in that vast peninsula of rock and desert, on which by day the sun looks down like a great bloodshot eye, and over which, by night, there roll such sapphire stars. Not a few of the Arab tribes of Mahomet's days, therefore, were professed Sabæans, making pilgrimages at stated times to Haran in Mesopotamia, but still respecting Mecca as the Kebla of their race. Less considerable, perhaps, but still appre

tual energy and acumen was the the the Trinity. Heresies innumerable had up in the Eastern empire, in connecti this doctrine, almost all having take rise in the great Arian controversy, by in the fourth and fifth centuries, the Un Church had been distracted. Now, precisely these cast-off heresies of the ern Church that Arabia imbibed. Christians of that peninsula, whether converts or settlers from Syria and Asia were almost exclusively sectaries of th lowing denominations:- Nestorians, s ed from their founder, Nestorius, Bish Constantinople, and whose heresy consis a recondite distinction between Jesus the and Christ the God-man: Jacobites, s ed from Jacobus, Bishop of Edessa in and w. ose doctrine, directly contrary t of the Nestorians in one point, denie double nature of Chirst in his state of

been to tincture it with something of the Manichæan sentiment, intensifying the native Shemitic sense of the eternal antagonism existing in the world between the principle of light or goodness, and the principle of darkness or evil. Into this chaos of native Polytheism, Assyrian Sabæanism, and Persian Magianism, there have been introduced a stream of corrupt Judaism, and a stream of still more corrupt Christianity. Independently of the intercouse that had from time immemorial been more or less vigorously kept up between the Jews and the Arabs, and the effect of which had been, as we have already seen, to diffuse some notions of the Jewish religion and history among the Arabs, and even to introduce among them fragments of the Pentateuch, the Psalms, and other books of the Jewish Scripture, various positive attempts had from time to time been made to Judaize portions of the Arabian peninsula. Thus, about two centuries before the Chris-nation: Mariamites, so called because itan era, an Arabian king of Yemen is said to have introduced Judaism among his idolatrous people, and to have endeavored to establish it by force. Later still, the crowds of Jewish fugitives that had dispersed themselves through Arabia, after the destruction of their own country by the Romans, had been the means of spreading a knowledge of Jewish beliefs and customs among the native Arabs. In addition to the pure Scripture and its contents, these Hebrew settlers, not a few of whom must have resided in Mecca, brought with them the multitudinous legends, comments and ceremonial addenda of the Mishnu, the Talmud and the Rabbinical schoo's It was precisely in the same manner, and almost exactly to the same extent, that Christianity found its way into Arabia. Since the visit of the Apostle Paul to the Peninsula, not a few missionaries had doubtless tried to add this outlying portion of the East to the field of Christendom. It was reserved for those Christian exiles, however whom the persecutions of the early centuries drove into the desert, really to spread the the knowledge of Christianity among the Arabs But as these exiles belonged almost exclusively to the Eastern or Greek Church, the Christianity that they carried with them into Arabia was of that lifeless and barren kind that had been manufactured in the Synods of the East. Relic-worship, incense

burning monotonous chantings and minuto

worshiped the Virgin Mary, and reg her as, along with the Father and the one of the persons of the Divine Trinity Collyridians, a sect guilty of a similar sy, and deriving their name from their tice of offering to the Virgin Mary a parti kind of cake, called Collyris. Of these sects the Jacobites seem to have had disciples in Arabia; and they and the torians together were numerous enoug sustain several bishops, who regarded t selves as attached to the Eastern Chu Heretical as the Arabic Christians were, were still (the Nestorians particularly) positaries of precious seeds; and throug the wranglings of their creeds, and the malities of their worship, certain glim must have reached the Arabs at large, of great light that had been kindled for n six centuries before, at Jerusalem. As Jews had brought the Old, so the Christ brought the New Testament into the Aral territory; and hence both were known to Pagan Arabs as the "People of the Boo There were doubtless copies of the Scriptu in Mecca, and Mahomet may have heard pa sages of them read.

There remains yet to be mention another important ingredient of that f menting mass of thought with which Ara was laboring about the period of the birth Mahomet. This was the ingredient of po

tiva and doematia. Atheism of Sadducso

homet. We have even a suspicion that rated, were the speculative elements and any the fact will appear incredible. tendencies that were diffused through the sm, we are told by some of our modern Arabian atmosphere at the time when Maists-the spirit, in other words, that homet began to breathe it. These were the ribes the resolute non-recognition of the influences to which, till his manhood, he was natural as the highest effort of rational necessarily subjected. Nothing is more clear ence, and that, chalking on the doors than that the forces which operated on the e grand questions of God and Immor- future Prophet were exclusively those that the peremptory phrase "No data," the soil of Arabia supplied. There is, indrag back the soul to earthly task-deed, a story, that in his boyhood he accomand earthly pleasures-this spirit, we panied his uncle, Abu Thaleb, in a caravanld, is the latest result of human expe- expedition from Mecca, along the borders of ; the calm and equable state of mind the Red Sea, as far as Bostra in Syria; and hich the human race, long harrassed that at Bostra a Nestorian monk, or priest finite problems, is only now beginning called Sergius, took great interest in him, ork itself in some favored spots of and gave him lessons in the principles of the ern Europe. But it is not so-it is not Christian religion. And certainly, if there This occidental and nineteenth century was any country besides Arabia from which called Atheism has, in its essence, exMahomet derived hints and impressions, it n all ages. Even among the so-called was Syria; a country more closely connected tic races, the characteristic of whose with Arabia than any other, and which his peech is, and always has been, a sur- mercantile persuits must have led him even e of "the religious idea," the spirit of frequently to visit. But the fact is, that in ef and Sadduceeism prevailed like a returning from such visits Mahomet could "The fool hath said in his heart, bring very little with him in the shape of inis no God," said the Hebrew psalmist; tellectual material that Arabia might not its to say, there were Hebrew Atheists self have furnished. During his journeys to days of David. And that there were and from Syria, however, as well as during t Arabic Atheists too-men who, his journeys southward and eastward across ll the Kaaba-worship of Mecca and its the peninsula, he necessarily picked up much orhood, cherished the cold theory, that Mecca could hardly have given him. ehind the grass, and the earth, and the Scenes, for example, seen during such jourand all the apparent show and para- neys, would haunt his memory afterward, lia of life, there was actually and and legends first heard amid such scenes y Nothing, and that all was but a would not be easily forgotten. Mahomet had -spun cob-web over the pit of dissolu- doubtless crossed the very track of the Isthis every page of the Koran ought to raelites on their return from Egypt; had clear. 66 They say, After we shall gazed across the Red Sea at the spot pointed ecome bones and dust, shall we surely out by tradition as the place of their pased new creatures?" "They will say, sage; and, walking perchance by the watchvill restore us to life?" "They swear fire amid his sleeping camels in the valley of olemnly by God, saying, God will not Sinai, had seen the stars rise and set behind he dead." Such are the incessant allu- the mount of thunders. But all this was of Mahomet in his book; proving, at Arabic. Arabia bounded his views. That that many of his countrymen, even Syria formed part of a large monarchy callalking the language of Theism, swear- ed the Greek or Eastern Empire, the capital oaths of Arabia, and trembling to all of which was Constantinople, and that beabic superstitions regarding the pre- yond Arabia, on the other side, was a great fe, were infected with a speculative Persian Monarchy, were facts which he eesism, equivalent, in fact, to a total could not but know; but of the great Medn of the supernatural. Mahomet in iterranean world that lay beyond Syria, th, must have listened to such Sad- and of all that under the name of Greek and discussing their theory of No data Roman history had been transacted there, as egard to the Resurrection, and may well as of the vast Asiatic regions that Per

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