very considerable, to his widow, who wanted a factor to manage it for her, invited Mahomet to her service. During three years time, wherein he traded for her at Damascus and other places, he acquitted himself so honourably, and so far gained the favour and good opinion of his mistress, that she married him in the twenty-eighth year of his age; and thus from the condition of a servant, she advanced him to be master both of her person and estate. By this means, being rendered equal in wealth to the greatest in the city; his ambition made him aspire to the sovereignty which his ancestors had enjoyed, and of which he himself had been deprived, only by being an orphan before the death of his grand-father.
His trading into Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, made him well acquainted both with Jews and Christians; and observing that each of them were divided into several sects, he concluded that nothing would be more likely to raise him a party, and to accomplish his designs, than the framing and advancing of a new religion. For such a change he judged the inhabitants of Mecca might be well disposed, as their traffic and frequent converse with the Christians had abated somewhat of their zeal for that gross idolatry, to which they had been hitherto addicted; and at the same time, they were falling from Heathenism to Zendichism, an error much like that of the Sadducees among the Jews, as denying the resurrection and a future state: He therefore betook himself to frame such a religion as he thought would be most easily swallowed by those he had to deal with: and his scheme being a medley of Judaism, and Christianity; the heresies of the eastern Christians at that time, and the old Pagan rites of the Arabs, too
