heavy loss in the death of his little son, fifteen months old. This was a blow from which he never recovered, and about a year afterwards, at Medina, in May, 632, he was seized with a violent fever. On the 8th of June he recovered sufficiently to attend at the mosque. But the effort was too great for him, and he returned exhausted and fainting to the room of his faithful wife Ayesha. In great pain he lay with his head in her lap to wait for the approach of death. At last he fainted with the intensity of the agony; but recovering again, he opened his eyes, and raising them upwards saw, or seemed to see, some vision of heaven; then, in a broken voice: 'O God,' he cried, 'pardon my sins! Yes, I come among my fellow-citizens on high!' And so he died, and the wild, untaught soul went out to learn the truth.
A strange man surely, but not uninspired, not without some spark of fire from heaven; else how can we explain his influence during life, and still more the influence of his religion after his death? For he who was once the camel-driver of Mecca is now the prophet, almost the Messiah of millions, standing before their God to intercede for their sins. He fell before the temptation which Christ resisted in the wilderness—the temptation to make all the kingdoms of the world his own, by worldly power and force of arms; and in this lies the weak point of his religion. But he was not an impostor, he was not a hypocrite.
'I have many sheep,' said Our Lord, 'which are not of this fold; and them also I will call, and they shall hear My voice, and there shall be one fold and One Shepherd.'
