Excerpt from The Freethinker's Text-Book, Vol. 3: Freethought

By-and-bye Mohammed began to follow the custom of the Christian hermits and anchorites he accustomed him self to retire to a cave in Mount Hera, near Mecca, in which he either did, or pretended to, indulge in acts of meditation and prayer. He had, in all probability, become. Impressed with a truth which Mr. Bosworth Smith Mohammed and Mohammedanism, sec. Cd., p.' has since enunciated: Neither Christianity nor Judaism ever struck deep root in the Arabian soil. The people2 were not suited to them, or they were not suited to thei people. They lived on, on sufferance only, till a faith, which to the Arabs should be the more living one, should sweep them away. The turn of Arabia came-to use an expression of Voltaire - and came when it did because the aspirant Mohammed was sufficiently clear-sighted to, descry in the social and religious state of his countrymeni the prepared foundation upon which to effect a mighty political revolution, which should be lasting because that it at the same time was a radical social revolution.

It is not necessary to the object of the present treatise that we take any positive side as to the prophet's sincerity whether, as Dr. Draper alleges, that Mohammed was the victim of mental hallucination, or, as others assert, that he was a conscious impostor. Possibly it might be said, both of Mohammed and Swedenborg, that a long-continued con templation or meditation would be very likely to engender hallucination. It cannot, we think, he denied that Mohammed used his pretended revelations from heaven to promote the success of his cause and on the whole - after a careful examination of almost all that has been urged upon both sides of the question - we consider there is much truth in the estimate of this extraordinary man, in the following citation from the historian of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - j 'of his last years, ambition was the ruling passion and a politician will suspect that he [mohammed] secretly smiled (the victorious impostor at the enthusiasm of his youth and the credulity of his prose lytes. In a note to this last sentence Gibbon quotes a sentence from Voltaire, who said that Mohammed might be compared to a fakeer (indian priest or vagrant monk) who detaches the chain from his own neck by bestowing it on the ears of his confreres. A philosopher will observe, continues the historian, that their credulity and iris success would tend more strongly to fortify the assurance of his divine mission, that his interest and religion were insepar ably connected, and that his conscience would be soothed by the persuasion that he alone was absolved by the Deity from the obligation of positive and moral laws. If he re tained any vestige of his native innocence, the sins of Mohammed may be allowed as an evidence of his sincerity. In the support of truth, the arts of fraud and fiction may be deemed less criminal; and he would have started at the foulness of the means had he not been satisfied of the im portance and justice of the end. (gibbon, Decline and Fall, chap.

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