wanted to put before the public an armed Tartufe and thought he might
lay the part upon Mohammed, for, says he, "is not the man, who makes war
against his own country and dares to do it in the name of God, capable of
any ill?" The dislike that Voltaire had conceived for the Qorân from a
superficial acquaintance with it, "ce livre inintelligible qui fait frémir
le sens commun à chaque page," probably increased his unfavourable opinion,
but the principal motive of his choice of a representative must have been
that the general public still regarded Mohammed as the incarnation of
fanaticism and priestcraft.

Almost a century lies between Gagnier's biography of Mohammed and that of
the Heidelberg professor Weil (_Mohammed der Prophet, sein Leben and seine
Lehre_, Stuttgart, 1843); and yet Weil did well to call Gagnier his last
independent predecessor. Weil's great merit is, that he is the first in his
field who instituted an extensive historico-critical investigation without
any preconceived opinion. His final opinion of Mohammed is, with the
necessary reservations: "In so far as he brought the most beautiful
teachings of the Old and the New Testament to a people which was not
illuminated by one ray of faith, he may be regarded, even by those who
are not Mohammedans, as a messenger of God." Four years later Caussin
de Perceval in his _Essai sur l'histoire des Arabes_, written quite
independently of Weil, expresses the same idea in these words: "It would be
an injustice to Mohammed to consider him as no more than a clever impostor,
an ambitious man of genius; he was in the first place a man convinced of
his vocation to deliver his nation from error and to regenerate it."

About twenty years later the biography of Mohammed made an enormous advance
through the works of Muir, Sprenger, and Nôldeke. On the ground of much
wider and at the same time deeper study of the sources than had been
possible for Weil and Caussin de Perceval, each of these three scholars