se; the more
so because they themselves entertain but little hope of attaining
their ultimate aim of conversion. Mohammedans who take any interest in
Christianity are taught by their own teachers that the revelation of Jesus,
after having suffered serious corruption by the Christians themselves, has
been purified and restored to its original simplicity by Mohammed, and are
therefore inaccessible to missionary arguments; nay, amongst uncivilized
pagans the lay mission of Islam is the most formidable competitor of
clerical propagation of the Christian faith.

People who take no active part in missionary work are not competent to
dissuade Christian missionaries from continuing their seemingly hopeless
labour among Mohammedans, nor to prescribe to them the methods they are
to adopt; their full autonomy is to be respected. But all agree that
Mohammedans, disinclined as they are to reject their own traditions of
thirteen centuries and to adopt a new religious faith, become ever better
disposed to associate their intellectual, social, and political life with
that of the modern world. Here lies the starting point for two divisions of
mankind which for centuries have lived their own lives separately in mutual
misunderstanding, from which to pursue their way arm in arm to the greater
advantage of both. We must leave it to the Mohammedans themselves to
reconcile the new ideas which they want with the old ones with which they
cannot dispense; but we can help them in adapting their educational system
to modern requirements and give them a good example by rejecting the
detestable identification of power and right in politics which lies at the
basis of their own canonical law on holy war as well as at the basis of the
political practice of modern Western states. This is a work in which we
all may collaborate, whatever our own religious conviction may be. The
principal condition for a fruitful friendly intercourse of this kind is
that we make the Moslim world an object of continual serious investigation
in our intellectual centres.

Having spent a good deal of my life in seeking for the right method of
associating with modern thought the thirty-five millions of Mohammedans
whom history has placed under the guardianship of my own country, I could
not help drawing some practical conclusions from the lessons of history
which I have tried to reduce to their most abridged form. There is no lack
of pessimists, whose wisdom has found its poet