Pan-Islam

folk with divergent views. Presuming that the necessary change in human nature will be wrought by enactment, we have sti

our religious views on people who do not want them and encroach on the borders of other creeds? Are other people's spi

nd the example of His daily life. He never sought to change a man's religious belief (such as it was) or his method of livelihood (however questionable it might be), but to reform him within the limits of his convictions and his duties. He has also left on record an indictment of proselytisers that will endure for all time. Of course, if the Gospel narrative

Moslems are permissible and justifiable features of missionary endeavour, if not forced upon an unwi

sion field has been achieved by practical, Christian work on the above lines, and not by religious propaganda; but the flag which missionary societies flaunt before a s

eir zeal to involve them in a web of inconsistency and misstatement, or else they let

arding their public utterances and tracts as privileged, like the platform-speeches and vote-catching pamp

seem powerless to check the reign of hell in Bolshevist Europe, where the liberty of man is demonstrated by murder, rapine, torture and every fiendish orgy or bestial lust which mortal mind can conceive. The people among whom these devilries are being enacted are Christians ruled by Christians, and have been Christian for centuries. They are still Christian so far as a blood-besotted clique will let them be anything. And in the face of such facts there are missionaries who enunciate in cold print that without Christianity ther

than the oft-repeated statement that all the modern blessings of Western civilisation are the fruit o

ls. Even then Western supremacy was gradual and only recently completed by the exploitation of petroleum, rubber and high explosives. Brown Bess, as a shooting weapon, was far inferior to the long-barrelled flint-lock of Morocco, and the Arabian match-lock could out-range any firearm in existence till sharp cutting tools m

ts and handicrafts. Damascus blades, Cordovan leather, Moorish architecture, Persian carpet

pire and the Copts? Fourteen hundred years after the birth of Christianity in Palestine the fall of Constantinople shattered her last vestige of sovereignty in the

lar stages, except that it has been spared the intrigues of an organised priesthood and

d and lacked vitality, as is now the case with Moslem teaching as a rule. There is no reason why Islam should not recover as Christianity did, and i

ns of those days, while the vast majority are infinitely better, viewed by any general standard of humanity. Christendom's only possible defence is that civilisation has influenced Christianity for good, and not the other way about. There is one other loophole which I, for one, refuse to crawl through-that Christianity is a greater moral force than Islam or more rapid in its action. Missionaries say that Islam is incapable of high ideals owing to its impersonal and inhuman conception of the Deity, whom it does not limit by any human standards of justice. Th

od is from God, whatever ill from thyself," is a Koranic aphorism. Nor do they seek to drive bargains with Him, as do many pious Christians, and their sup

ion of a deity who sent the Entente bad harvests to help German submarine activities. Such absurdities incur the rebuke of the staunch

deriving its austere and sensual features, but the thesis applies with equal force to Christianity. The marked cleavage of hermit-like asceticism and gross sensuality which rock-bound deserts and the lush Nile valley wrought in Egyp

to give it the coup de grace, or that Islam is the most dangerous foe to Christendom in the world and must be fought to a finish lest it unite three hundred million Moslems against us. I have seen both reasons given in the same missionary book; both are absurd. The latter is a mere red herring drawn across the trail of existing facts, more so, indeed, than the ex-Kaiser's Yellow Peril, for that at least was trailed from a vast country enclosing within a ring fence a huge population of homogeneous race and creed. As for crushing Islam by missionary enterprise, you cannot kill a great religion with pin-pricks, however numerous and frequent; you can only cause superficial hurts and irritation, as i

be so swayed for the time being, and, in a few favourable cases, the initial impetus will be carried on, but most human souls are like locusts and flutter earthward when the wind drops. They may have advanced more or less, but are just as likely to be deflected or even swept back again by a change in the wind. Revi

countless efforts and ceaseless striving to ameliorate existing conditions, whereas religion started as a perfect thesis and has since got overgrown with human bigotry and fantasies while absorbing very little of the vast, increasing store of human knowledge. That is why civilisation has got so much in advance of religion that the latter cannot lead or guide the former, but only lags behind, like a horse hitched to a cart-tail. Missionary

occupations, though neither can make it or repair it except superficially, and both fumble more or less with unfamiliar mechanical appliances. The young man from the country blows the gas out or tries to light his cheroot at an incandescent bulb, and may be considered lucky if he does not get some swift, silent form of vehicular traffic in the small of his back when he is gaping at an electric advertisement in changing-coloured lights. It has been my object, and to a certain extent my duty, on several occasions to try to impress a party of chiefs and their retinue when visiting Aden from

ne-tenders in the East, as they have a penchant for mechanism o

average missionary swam ashore with an Arab fireman from a shipwreck and landed on an uninhabited island of ordinary tropical aspect, the Arab would know the knack of scaling coco-nut palms (no easy task), the vegetatio

aged evangelical activities. "Hence the low plane of Arabia morally. Slavery and concubinage and, n

; concubinage and polygamy, as practised by the patriarchs of Holy Writ, are still legal in that part of the world; there is nothing sinful about them in themselves-a Moslem might as well rebuke Western society for being addicted to whisky and bridge. He might even remind us that divorce is easier in the States than in Arabia and quote the Prophet's words on the subject: "Of all lawful acts divorce is the most hateful in the sight of God." With us a woman can be convicted of adultery in the eyes of the world on evidence that would not hang a cat for stealing cream, but in Islam the act must be proved b

overnment, and the Arab tribesman goes armed to make sure that it continues democratic-as many a would-be despot knows to his cost. They use these

, and they become really mischievous when they culminate in an appeal to the general public calling for resources and personnel to "wi

dawn of Islam, Christian and pagan Arabs fought side by side to overthrow a despotic Jew king in Yamen who was trying to proselytise them with the crude but convincing contrivance of a

far more equable charters and greater respect among Moslems. In fact, it was never driven out, but gradually merged into

h that Abyssinian general built when he came over to help the Arabs against the Jew king of proselytising tendencies has nothing left of it above ground except a bare sit

in a false position, for most practical mission workers know and admit that the wholesale conversion of Moslems is not a feasible proposition and that sporadic proselytes are very doubtful trophies. Knowing this, they concentrate their principal efforts on schools, hospitals and charitable relief, all based on friendly relations with the n

ountries demand, and get, the highest type of human devotion and courage. It is a healthy sign that the public should support such enterprise and that men and women should be readily found to under

he Islamic attitude

, which are black and white in streaks instead of blending in various shades of grey. He considers that Islam with its simple austerities is better suited to such characters than Christianity with its unattainable ideals. He himself has visited Western cities and observed their conditions shrewdly. He regards missionaries as zealous bagmen travelling with excellent samples for a chaotic firm which does not stock the goods they are trying to push. The missionary may say that he has no "call" to reform existing conditions in his own country, just as the bagman may disclaim responsibility for his firm's slackness; but

ionary hand-bag:-the prayers of childhood and the mother's hymn, the distant bells of a Sabbath countryside, the bird-chorus of Spring emphasising the magic hush of Communion on Easter morning, the holly-decked church ringing with the glad carols of Christmastide

quantities of faith are pressed upon him which do not quite meet his requirements, as it

taphors were used by our Lord in speaking to a people who readily understood them, but for some obscure reason they have not only been retained but amplified extensively to the exclusion of much beaut

t's mission or its cheery, swinging reiteration as the dead are carried to the magenna or "gate of Heaven." Certainly not; the less he contemplates their fate the better for his peace of mind, since (if the effort to convert him is anything more tha

social ostracism of a human being, the damnation of his folk and the salvation of none but a remnant of mankind mean

ible than badgering a man to go to your doctor when his own physician understands his case and has studied it for a long time. At

n works as mission education, medical treatment and organised charity, so they should

amours for attack on it as if it were an invention of the devil and then complains of Moslem fanaticism, forgetting that if it were an artifice of Satan they cast doubts on the omnipotence, omniscience or beneficence of God for permitting it to exist and flourish. Otherwise, they inf

countries, which are always being attacked by it and urged to give more facilities of spiritual aggression, es

, when the war-worn nations of Christendom are trying to reconstruct themselves, and

mongrel strain begotten of the two great militant creeds such as our leading exponent of paradox wittily describ

do well to remember what Christian civilisation has done for them in trade, agriculture and industries. If you accept gifts

. He may expand or (more rarely) contract his views, but

n of the Deity is correct and all others wrong, nor is

dross of a sordid environment to the gold of self-sacrific

fate by an equally stupendous miracle, we know that He faced persecution and death for mankind and His ideals, and that both c

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