travel.  Moreover, in the fifteenth century the Ottoman Turks, then an irresistible power, were invading Europe, and a new element of contact with an outside world was created, and a new fear.  Christendom certainly at that time was in danger of political annihilation, or fancied itself to be so, and the apprehensions of devout persons in Central Europe were roused to a vivid consciousness of impending evil by the thought that this was perhaps another authorized scourge of God.

I will not strain the parallel further than it will bear, but I would suggest that causes somewhat analogous to these are now at work among the Mussulmans of the still independent states of Islam, and that they are operating somewhat in the same direction.  The Mussulman peasantry, especially of the Ottoman Empire, are miserable, and they know that they are so, and they look in vain to their religion to protect them, as in former days, against their rulers.  They find that all their world now is corrupt—­that the law is broken daily by those who should enforce the law; that the illegalities of those who ruin them are constantly condoned by a conniving body of the Ulema; that for all practical purposes of justice and mercy religion has abdicated its claim to direct and govern.  They have learned, too, by their intercourse with strangers, and in the towns by the newspapers which they now eagerly read, that this has not been always so, and that servitude is not the natural state of man or acquiescence in evil the true position of religion, and they see in all they suffer an outrage inflicted on the better law of Islam.  I was much struck by hearing the Egyptian peasantry last year attribute the lighter taxes they were then enjoying to the fact that their new ruler was “a man who feared God.”

At the same time the learned classes are shocked and alarmed at the political decline of Islam and the still greater dangers which stare her in the face, and they attribute them to the unchecked wickedness and corruption with which the long rule of Constantinople has pervaded every class of society, even beyond its own territorial borders.  They complain now that they have been led astray, and believe that the vengeance of Heaven will overtake them if they do not amend their ways.  In all this, I say, there is something of the spirit which once goaded Christians into an examination of the bases on which their belief rested, and of the true nature of the law which tolerated such great corruption.

Nor must we suppose that any part of this dissatisfaction is attributable as yet to a decay of faith, such as we now witness among ourselves.  Islam as yet shows hardly a taint of infidelity.  The Mussulman of the present day, whatever his rank in life, believes with as absolute a faith as did the Christian of the period just referred to.  With the exception of here and there a false convert or, as a very rare case, an Europeanized infidel of the modern type, there