Beacon Lights of History, Volume 05 | Page 5

confidence,
and cherished the memory of his wife in his subsequent apostasy,--if it
be true that he fell, like Solomon. Long afterwards, when she was dead,
Ayésha, his young and favorite wife, thus addressed him: "Am I not
better than Cadijeh? Do you not love me better than you did her? She
was a widow, old and ugly." "No, by Allah!" replied the Prophet; "she
believed in me when no one else did. In the whole world I had but one
friend, and she was that friend." No woman ever retained the affections
of a husband superior to herself, unless she had the spirit of
Cadijeh,--unless she proved herself his friend, and believed in him.
How miserable the life of Jane Carlyle would have been had she not
been proud of her husband! One reason why there is frequent
unhappiness in married life is because there is no mutual appreciation.
How often have we seen a noble, lofty, earnest man fettered and
chained by a frivolous woman who could not be made to see the

dignity and importance of the labors which gave to her husband all his
real power! Not so with the woman who assisted Mohammed. Without
her sympathy and faith he probably would have failed. He told her, and
her alone, his dreams, his ecstasies, his visions; how that God at
different times had sent prophets and teachers to reveal new truths, by
whom religion had been restored; how this one God, who created the
heavens and the earth, had never left Himself without witnesses of His
truth in the most degenerate times; how that the universal recognition
of this sovereign Power and Providence was necessary to the salvation
of society. He had learned much from the study of the Talmud and the
Jewish Scriptures; he had reflected deeply in his isolated cave; he knew
that there was but one supreme God, and that there could be no
elevated morality without the sense of personal responsibility to Him;
that without the fear of this one God there could be neither wisdom nor
virtue.
Hence his soul burned to tell his countrymen his earnest belief in a
supreme and personal God, to whom alone prayers should be made, and
who alone could rescue by His almighty power. He pondered day and
night on this single and simple truth. His perpetual meditations and
ascetic habits induced dreams and ecstasies, such as marked primitive
monks, and Loyola in his Manresan cave. He became a visionary man,
but most intensely earnest, for his convictions were overwhelming. He
fancied himself the ambassador of this God, as the ancient Jewish
prophets were; that he was even greater than they, his mission being to
remove idolatry,--to his mind the greatest evil under the sun, since it
was the root of all vices and follies. Idolatry is either a defiance or a
forgetfulness of God,--high treason to the majesty of Heaven, entailing
the direst calamities.
At last, one day, in his fortieth year, after he had been shut up a whole
month in solitude, so that his soul was filled with ecstasy and
enthusiasm, he declared to Cadijeh that the night before, while wrapped
in his mantle, absorbed in reverie, a form of divine beauty, in a flood of
light, appeared to him, and, in the name of the Almighty who created
the heavens and the earth, thus spake: "O, Mohammed! of a truth thou
art the Prophet of God, and I am his angel Gabriel." "This," says

Carlyle, "is the soul of Islam. This is what Mohammed felt and now
declared to be of infinite moment, that idols and formulas were nothing;
that the jargon of argumentative Greek sects, the vague traditions of
Jews, the stupid routine of Arab idolatry were a mockery and a delusion;
that there is but one God; that we must let idols alone and look to Him.
He alone is reality; He made us and sustains us. Our whole strength lies
in submission to Him. The thing He sends us, be it death even, is good,
is the best. We resign ourselves to Him."
Such were the truths which Mohammed, with preternatural earnestness,
now declared,--doctrines which would revolutionize Arabia. And why
not? They are the same substantially which Moses declared to those
sensual and degraded slaves whom he led out of Egypt,--yea, the
doctrines of David and of Job. "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in
Him." What a grand and all-important truth it is to impress upon people
sunk in forgetfulness and sensuality and pleasure-seeking and idle
schemes of vanity and ambition, that there is a supreme Intelligence
who overrules, and whose laws cannot be violated with impunity; from
whom no one can escape, even though he "take the wings of the
morning and fly to the uttermost