When Heraclius, emperor of the Roman world, returned victorious from the Persian war, A.D. 629, Mohammed having conquered and converted the idolators of Arabia, and thereby united them into one kingdom, judged that the time had come to invite the princes and nations of the Catholic Idolatry to abandon the worship of images and demons, commonly known among the ignorant as the ghosts of dead men and women. He beheld with great disgust and contempt the condition of the catholic apostasy from the religion of Christ. He saw what Gibbon relates. "The christians" (!) says he, "of the seventh century had relapsed into a semblance of paganism; their public and private vows were addressed to the relics and images that disgraced the temples of the east: the throne of the Almighty was darkened by a cloud of martyrs, saints, and angels, the objects of popular veneration; and the Collyridion heretics who flourished in the fruitful soil of Arabia, invested the Virgin Mary with the name and honors of a goddess." In the Koran, or Mohammedan Bible (ch. v), the catholics of the Roman empire are distinctly charged with worshipping the Virgin Mary as God; and in ch. 9, it is said of the priests and monks specifically: "Very many of the priests and monks devour the substance of men in vanity, and obstruct the way of God." This referred to their fraudulent gains by the sale, exhibition, and false miracles attached to relics. Mohammed was right; these shaven crowns "obstructed the way of God," as the clergy of all orders and degree in "christendom" have been doing, and are doing, ever since, even to this day. Though originally an ignorant pagan Arab, and afterwards but imperfectly instructed in the scriptures, he had become wiser than the whole catholic world. He not only spurned the gods of his native land, but he vindicated the Divine Unity against "the infidels" who darkened the Almighty’s throne by the senseless objects of their disgraceful and demoralizing superstition. Being the providentially developed military apostle of the Divine Unity, he offered all idolators, or worshippers of demons, the alternative of conversion and peace, or idolatry and war. Hearing of the presence of the Roman emperor at Emesa, he sent an ambassador to him, and invited him to the profession of Islam. At first their intercourse was amicable, but their friendship proved of short continuance. One of his envoys had been murdered; and the rapacious spirit of the Saracens -- the lion tooth characteristic of the locusts -- inflamed by the new religion, or smoking in the pit, burned to be avenged. The murder afforded their star-king a decent pretext for gratifying it; and he forthwith ordered the invasion of the territory of Palestine eastward of the Jordan, A.D. 630. A small force of three thousand Saracens encountered the Roman army at Muta. After losing three generals, they effected a safe retreat under Caled, who afterwards was renowned as "the Sword of God." This was the first military action that tried the valor of the Moslems against a foreign enemy. It was an opening of the pit; the initiation only of the enterprise in which the forces of the Star may be said to have got the worst of it.

Mohammed now solemnly proclaimed war against the Romans. The Moslems were discouraged. They alleged the intolerable heat of the summer. "Hell," said the indignant prophet, "is much hotter." He advanced at the head of ten thousand horse, and twenty thousand foot. After a painful march, in which they suffered much from lassitude and thirst, aggravated by the scorching and pestilential winds of the desert, they arrived at Tabuc, midway between Medina and Damascus. Beyond this he did not advance. Caled, however, spread around the terror of his name, and the prophet received the submission of the tribes and cities, from the Euphrates to Ailah, at the head of the Red Sea. The power, styled by Schlegel, "the new power of hell," was still restricted to "the pit of the abyss." An expedition against Syria had been set in motion, but was arrested in its march at Medina, by the death of Mohammed in that city, A.D. 632.

Mohammed was succeeded in the throne of the kingdom of Arabia by the venerable Abubeker, who was now "Successor of the prophet, Caliph, and Commander of the Faithful." But the death of Mohammed was the signal of independence; and Abubeker found himself the chief of a power and religion which tottered to its foundations. He forthwith assembled an army of forty thousand men to subdue the rebellion, which sought the reestablishment of the old idolatry. Thus the furnace was rekindled in the pit of the abyss, and smoke ascended toward the heaven. After exhorting the Moslems to confide in the aid of God and his apostle, Abubeker attacked the idolators vigorously. Though unsuccessful at first, he at length broke the power of the rebels, who, without chief or cause, were suppressed by the power and discipline of the rising monarchy; and the whole nation again possessed, and more steadfastly held, the religion of the Koran.