erican Methodists
commenced work there in 1887. No educational or evangelical work
had ever been attempted previous to that time, but the men and
women who came were wise, tactful and industrious, and the result
may be seen in a dozen or more schools, with several thousand
pupils, a flourishing, self-supporting church, a medical mission,
a deaconesses' home and training school, a printing establishment
and bookshop which is self-supporting and a large number of earnest,
intelligent converts. Wherever you go in heathen lands you will
find that wisdom, judgment, tact and ability, when applied in
any direction, always show good results, but all missionaries,
I regret to say, are not endowed with those qualities or with
what Rev. Dr. Hepburn of Japan calls "sanctified common sense,"
and the consequences are sometimes deplorable.

"By their works ye shall know them."

At Aligarh, a town of 50,000 inhabitants on the railway between
Agra and Delhi, is a very rare and indeed a unique institution--a
Moslem university and printing press--the only ones in India, and
the only ones in the world established and conducted on modern
lines. The university is modeled upon the English plan. It has an
English president and dean and several English professors, all
of them graduates of the University of Cambridge. The preparatory
school has an English head master and assistant, and in the faculty
is a professor of physical culture, who has brought manly sports
among the students to a standard unequaled elsewhere in India.
The Aligarh University has the best football team and the best
cricket team in the empire.

This remarkable institution was founded in 1875 by Sir Syed Ahmed
Khan, a Mohammedan lawyer and judge on the civil bench, for the
education of his co-religionists in order that they may take
places in the world beside the graduates of English and European
universities and exercise a similar influence. He recognized
that the Moslem population of India must degenerate unless it
was educated; that it could not keep pace with the rest of the
world. He was shocked at the ignorance and the bigotry of his
fellow Mohammedans and at their stubborn conservatism. He was
a sincere believer in his own religion, and insisted that the
faith of Islam, properly understood, was as much in the interest
of truth and progress in every branch of human knowledge and
activity as the Christian religion, and he devoted his entire
fortune and collected c