To judge such things with equity, we must remember that every man possessed of a firm conviction of any kind is more or less a missionary; and the belief in the possibility of winning souls by violence has many adherents everywhere.  One of my friends among the young-Turkish state officials, who wished to persuade me of the perfect religious tolerance of Turkey of today, concluded his argument by the following reflection:  “Formerly men used to behead each other for difference of opinion about the Hereafter.  Nowadays, praise be to Allah, we are permitted to believe what we like; but people continue to kill each other for political or social dissension.  That is most pitiful indeed; for the weapons in use being more terrible and more costly than before, mankind lacks the peace necessary to enjoy the liberty of conscience it has acquired.”

The truthful irony of these words need not prevent us from considering the independence of spiritual life and the liberation of its development from material compulsion as one of the greatest blessings of our civilization.  We feel urged by missionary zeal of the better kind to make the Mohammedan world partake in its enjoyment.  In the Turkish Empire, in Egypt, in many Mohammedan countries under Western control, the progressive elements of Moslim society spontaneously meet us half-way.  But behind them are the millions who firmly adhere to the old superstition and are supported by the canonists, those faithful guardians of what the infallible Community declared almost one thousand years ago to be the doctrine and rule of life for all centuries to come.  Will it ever prove possible to move in one direction a body composed of such different elements, or will this body be torn in pieces when the movement has become irresistible?

We have more than once pointed to the catholic character of orthodox Islam.  In fact, the diversity of spiritual tendencies is not less in the Moslim world than within the sphere of Christian influence; but in Islam, apart from the political schisms of the first centuries, that diversity has not given rise to anything like the division of Christianity into sects.  There is a prophetic saying, related by Tradition, which later generations have generally misunderstood to mean that the Mohammedan community would be split into seventy-three different sects.  Moslim heresiologists have been induced by this prediction to fill up their lists of seventy-three numbers with all sorts of names, many of which represent nothing but individual opinions of more or less famous scholars on subordinate points of doctrine or law.  Almost ninety-five per cent. of all Mohammedans are indeed bound together by a spiritual unity that may be compared with that of the Roman Catholic Church, within whose walls there is also room for religious and intellectual life of very different origin and tendency.  In the sense of broadness, Islam has this advantage, that there is no generally recognized palpable authority