tion _only_? Is it not to be
feared that with minds enlightened to see the errors of Mohammedanism,
they will cast off its bonds only to become entangled in the meshes of
atheism and become a nation of "libre-penseurs," so that having escaped
the rocks of Scylla they find themselves engulfed in the whirlpool of
Charybdis?

My second illustration represents a poor Arab woman entering a saint's
tomb, over the portal of which is written: "He (God) opens the doors.
Open to us (O Lord) the best door!" And with my Christian readers I
would plead that they would do all in their power both by prayer and by
effort, that while the doors of education and progress are being thrown
wide to these Moslems, the best door--the door of the Gospel--may be
opened also, so that they too may know the glorious liberty wherewith
Christ hath made _us_ free.

VI

"NOT DEAD, ONLY DRY"

"It is useless to plant anything: the earth is dead."

"No, it is not dead, it is only dry."

"But I tell you, it is dead. In summer the earth is always dead: see
here." And the Arab who spoke stooped and picked up a rock-like clod,
that he had hewn with his pickaxe from the trench at his feet. It looked
dead enough certainly; the Algerian soil in August is much the same in
texture as a well-trodden highway. But it is only waiting.

"It is the very same earth that it is in winter," I replied; "all it
wants is water, and water you must give it."

With an Oriental's laconic patience, though all unconvinced, the man
went on with the digging of his trench, and the planting therein of
acacia clippings to make a new thorn hedge where it had been broken
down.

And with a new hope in God my own words came back to me as I turned
away. "It is not dead: it is only dry."

For of all the soils in the world our Moslem soil in Algiers seems the
most barren, while friend and foe repeat the same words: "It is useless
to plant anything: the earth is dead."

But in the face of both--in the face of the hosts of darkness who take
up the words and fling them at us with a stinging taunt--we affirm in
faith:

"No, it is not dead. It is only dry."

* * * * *

Dry: that we know sorrowfully well; it cannot be otherwise. It is dry
soil because Islam has come nearer doing "despite to the Spirit of
grace" than any other religion; it is, as has been truly said, the one
anti-Christian faith, the one of openly avowed enmity to the Cross of