uncivilized pagans the lay mission of Islâm 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.
