It is the Christian mission that shows the deepest consciousness of this state of things, and the greatest activity in promoting an association of Mohammedan thought with that of Western nations.  The solid mass of experience due to the efforts of numerous missionaries is not of an encouraging nature.  There is no reasonable hope of the conversion of important numbers of Mohammedans to any Christian denomination.  Broad-minded missionary societies have therefore given up the old fruitless proselytizing methods and have turned to social improvement in the way of education, medical treatment, and the like.  It cannot be denied, that what they want above all to bring to Mohammedans is just what these most energetically decline to accept.  On the other hand the advocates of a purely civilizing mission are bound to acknowledge that, but for rare exceptions, the desire of incorporating Mohammedan nations into our world of thought does not rouse the devoted, self-denying enthusiasm inspired by the vocation of propagating a religious belief.  The ardour displayed by some missionaries in establishing in the Dar al-Islam Christian centres from which they distribute to the Mohammedans those elements of our civilization which are acceptable to them deserves cordial praise; 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.