Islam enjoys over Christianity in the propagation of its faith
in Africa. The discussion has been continued by Canon Taylor of York,
England, and, more recently, in a very clear article in the _Nineteenth
Century_, by Dean R. Bosworth Smith. Our space does not permit us either
to summarize the facts as to this progress, nor can we present all the
reasons for it. But one of these reasons touches so nearly a point that
is of such vital interest to American Christians, that we feel called
upon to state it and emphasize it. We abridge the full statement thus:
Christianity has labored under the great disadvantage of coming to the
Negro in "a foreign garb." Its teachers came from a land that first
reached the Negro by capturing him as a slave; they came to him with the
conscious or unconscious air of superiority born of race-prejudice.
Christianity came to him as the creed, not of his friends, his
well-wishers, his kindred, but of his masters and oppressors. They
differed from him in education, in manners, in color, in civilization.
Mohammedanism, on the other hand, reached the Negro in his own country,
in the midst of his own surroundings. When it had acclimatized itself
and taken root in the soil of Africa, it was handed on to others, and
then no longer exclusively by Arab missionaries, but by men of the
Negro's own race, his own proclivities, his own color. The advantages of
this method of approach cannot be over-estimated. We care not to enter
at all into the question of the value of the two religions nor of the
good they may respectively do for poor Africa. We wish simply to deal
with the methods and means, and with the peoples who may best employ
them. We again summarize the language of Dean Smith: The very fact that
there are millions of Negroes in America and the West India Islands,
many of whom are men of cultivation and lead more or less Christian
lives, is proof positive that Christianity is welcomed by them. Is there
not room to hope that many of these men, returning to their own country,
may be able to present Christianity to their fellow-countrymen in a
shape in which it has never yet been presented,--in which it would be
very difficult for Europeans or Americans ever to succeed in presenting
it--to them, and may so develop a type of Christianity and civilization
combined which shall be neither American nor European, but African,
redolent alike of the people and of the soil?

This is a point which the American Mi