Here he was gladly received both by Jews and Arabs, rival races, who divided the city between them. The Jews were ready to welcome him as their expected Messiah, whilst the Arabs had heard of his fame from their brethren at Mecca; and Mahomet seems from this time to have entirely laid aside the character of a mere reformer, for that of the founder of a new revelation. The Koran and the Sword were now called in to aid in their respective ways in extending the power of the ambitious adventurer. [Sidenote: Cruelty.] Violence and bloodshed enforced the pretended inspiration by which Mahomet claimed to be acknowledged as _the_ Prophet of God, and the civil and religious head of the nation; and the last ten years of his life present an almost unbroken { 90} course of warfare, which too often degenerated into simple robbery and murder. [Sidenote: and conquests of Mahomet.] He made himself master of the whole of Arabia, including the city of Mecca, where he destroyed the idols against which he had in earlier days protested, and then made an ineffectual attempt to take possession of Palestine. [Sidenote: His death.] Mahomet died on June 8th, A.D. 632, partly from the effects of poison, which had been given to him some years before, and partly from the consequences of a life of excess and self-indulgence.
The false faith of which Mahomet was at once the prophet and the founder, seems to have taken for its basis the traditionary religion then prevalent amongst the Arab tribes. These traditions were probably compounded of dim remnants of the Truth which had been revealed to Abraham and handed down through his son Ishmael, and of a very corrupt form of Sabaeanism, which included the worship of the heavenly bodies, as well as of idols, and which had been the religion of Terah and his fellow-countrymen. [Sidenote: Mixture of truth and error in Mahometanism.] Upon this foundation was engrafted a mixture of Persian philosophy, and of such perversions of Christianity and of Scriptural doctrine as Mahomet could gather from a Persian Jew and a Nestorian monk. [Sidenote: Opposition of the Koran to Christianity.] The Koran, which Mahomet pretended to have received from heaven by the mouth of the archangel Gabriel, makes mention of our Blessed Lord and of many of the facts of Old Testament History, but its teaching is essentially { 91} anti-Christian and blasphemous, inasmuch as it denies the Divinity of Christ, and represents Him as a Teacher and Prophet far inferior to Mahomet himself. An intended contradiction of the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity is also conveyed in its opening sentence, which is the Mahometan confession of faith,--"There is but one God, and Mahomet is His prophet."