and perfidious assassination, could gloat over the massacre of an entire tribe, and savagely consign the innocent babe to the fires of hell."--Muir's Life of Mahomet, Vol. IV, pp. 322-3.]
[Footnote 140: "In domestic life the conduct of Mahomet with one grave exception was exemplary. As a husband his fondness and devotion was entire, bordering, however, at times upon jealousy. As a father he was loving and tender. In his youth he is said to have lived a virtuous life. At the age of twenty-five he married a widow forty years old; and for five and twenty years he was a faithful husband to her alone. Yet it is remarkable that during this period was composed most of those passages of the Coran in which the black-eyed Houris, reserved for believers in Paradise, are depicted in such glowing colours. Shortly after the death of Khadija the Prophet married again; but it was not till the mature age of fifty-four that he made the dangerous trial of polygamy, by taking Ayesha, yet a child, as the rival of Sauda. Once the natural limits of restraint were overpassed, Mahomet fell an easy prey to his strong passion for the sex. In his fifty-sixth year he married Haphsa; and the following year, in two succeeding months, Zeinab bint Khozeima and Omm Salma. But his desires were not to be satisfied by the range of a harem already greater than was permitted to any of his followers; rather as age advanced, they were stimulated to seek for new and varied indulgence. A few months after his nuptials with Zeinab and Omm Salma, the charms of a second Zeinab were by accident discovered too fully before the Prophet's admiring gaze. She was the wife of Zeid, his adopted son and bosom friend; but he was unable to smother the flame she kindled in his breast; and, by divine command, she was taken to his bed. In the same year he married a seventh wife, and also a concubine. And at last, when he was full three score years of age, no fewer than three new wives, besides Mary the Coptic slave, were within the space of seven months added to his already well-filled harem."--Muir's Life of Mahomet, Vol. IV, pp. 309-10.]
[Footnote 141: "Vide Muhammad and Muhammadanism, by Mr. R. Bosworth Smith, M.A., an Assistant Master of Harrow School."]
[Footnote 142: Notes on Muhammadanism, by the Rev. T.P. Hughes, Missionary to the Afghans, Peshawar; Second Edition, page 4, London, 1877.]
[Footnote 143: Mohammed, Buddha and Christ, by Marcus Dods, D.D., pp. 24 & 25.]
[Footnote 144: Vide pp. 48-61. This work is being printed at Education Society's Press, Byculla, Bombay. It appears that Dr. Dods, in the first instance, had in view Sura XXXIII, 51. This is by no means giving Mohammad conjugal allowances which he himself had proscribed as unlawful. As a preliminary measure to abolish polygamy and to accustom the people to monogamy, Mohammad, when reducing the unlimited polygamy practised in Arabia, had put a strong condition to treat their wives, when more than one, equitably in every sense of the word,--i.e., in the matter of social comfort, love and household establishment (Sura IV, 3). When the measure had given a monogamous tendency to the Arab society, it was declared that it was impossible practically to treat equitably in all respects the contemporary wives (Sura IV, 128), and those who had already contracted contemporaneous marriage before the measure referred to above was introduced were absolved from the condition laid down in Sura IV, 3, but were advised, regarding their then existing wives, not to yield wholly to disinclination. Similarly Mohammad was also relieved from that condition in Sura XXXIII, 51, without "giving him any conjugal allowance which he had himself pronounced unlawful." The second instance is of Zeinab's case I suppose. Zeinab was in no way, when divorced by Zeid, "a woman forbidden to him by his own laws."]