294 ABD-UL-WAHHAB. 



" The torch is dark at its foot," and many a pilgrim 

 might exclaim with the Arabian Ovid 



" I set out in the hopes of lightening my sins 

 And returned, bringing home with me a fresh load of transgressions." 



But the very wickedness of a Holy City deepens real 

 enthusiasm into severity and wrath. When Abd-ul- 

 Wahhab saw taverns opened in Mecca itself, and the 

 inhabitants alluring the pilgrims to every kind of vice : 

 when he found that the sacred places were made a 

 show ; that the mosque was inhabited by guides and 

 officials who were as greedy as beasts of prey : that 

 wealth, not piety, was the chief object of consideration 

 in a pilgrim, he felt as Luther felt at Rome. The 

 disgust which was excited in his mind by the manners 

 of the day was extended also to the doctrines that 

 were in vogue. The prayers that were offered up to 

 Mahomet and the saints resembled the prayers that 

 were once offered up to the Daughters of Heaven, the 

 Intercessors of the ancient Arabs. The pilgrimages 

 that were made to the tombs of holy men were the 

 old journeys to the ancestral graves. The worship of 

 One God, which Mahomet had been sent to restore, 

 had again become obscured ; the Days of Darkness had 

 returned. He preached a Unitarian revival : he held 

 up as his standard and his guide the Koran, and 

 nothing but the Koran ; he founded a puritan sect 

 which is now a hundred years of age, and still remains 

 an element of power and disturbance in the East. 



Danfodio, the Black Prophet, also went out of Mecca, 

 his soul burning with zeal. He determined to reform 

 the Soudan. He forbade, like Abd-ul-Wahhab, the 

 smoking of tobacco, the wearing of ornaments, and 

 finery. But he had to contend with more gross abuses 

 still. In many negro lands which professed Islam, 



