the Calif could venture to divide the bulk of his military forces into smaller armies, and, placing them under efficient commanders, send them forth in every direction, wherever they were most needed at the moment. Resistance was borne down with great rapidity, by the united onslaught of these fierce and valiant corps of Mussulman warriors. The isolated Arab tribes were no match for the iron union of martial Islam.

Only, in the Centre of the Peninsula, the rival prophet Moseilama had collected around him so powerful an army, that he could rout two Moslem corps which successively advanced against him. But when the able and daring Cavalry-General Khalid, who till then had been ruthlessly quelling the anti-Islamic rebellion further north, arrived on the field with a fresh army, flushed with a succession of victories, his impetuous valour and dexterous generalship soon prevailed; and the opposing army was completely overthrown with great slaughter, though not without severe losses to the Moslems themselves. By this crushing defeat of the Beni Hanifa in Yemama, in which Moseilama himself lost his life, being afterwards discovered under a heap of slain, the backbone of the general but disunited resistance to Mussulman rule was broken; and, before Abu Bekr had completed the first year of his Califate, all Arabia was compelled to acknowledge his sovereign authority.

With Arabia at his feet, the Calif had his hands free to resume the cherished plan of foreign conquests. This opening prospect of abundant plunder was, at the same time, also the best means for keeping together in one commonwealth the multitude of reluctant and inwardly disunited Arab tribes, by beckoning them to a common goal of self-interest, possessing irresistible attraction to the marauding instincts of the whole nation. What wonder, then, that already in the second year of Abu Bekr's Califate, we find the hungry and fanatical hosts of Arab warriors leaping the northern boundaries of their Peninsula and casting themselves, almost simultaneously, on the already much-weakened empires of Rome and Persia.

This is the manner in which Abu Bekr understood and carried out the duties bequeathed to him by the author of

Islam; and thus it came to pass, that the Mohammedan armies entered upon that furious march of conquest through the world, the track of which has been lurid for centuries with fire and blood. Now, as the saying is true, that the nature of a tree becomes known from the fruit it bears, so also we may be prepared, by what has hitherto passed in review before our eyes, to admit that the untold miseries and woes which the politico-religious amalgam of Islamism has, age after age, inflicted on mankind, as the pages of history testify, are really the outward and tangible manifestation of its true inward nature. As such they revert, in due proportion, to the prophet and author of the system, their indirect cause, and brand them both with the stigma of wellmerited reprobation.