Constantinople is the assembling place of pilgrimage for all Mohammedans west of the Ural Mountains, who reach it by the Black Sea, and could never be replaced to them by any new centre further south among the Arab races, with whom they have little sympathy or direct religious connection.  A Caliph at Mecca or in Egypt could do little for them, and the Turkish-speaking Sunites would have no university open to them nearer than Bokhara.  In this respect they would find themselves in a far worse position than the Moors, however universally these may become subject to Europe, and their religious disintegration would be a mere question of time.  I believe, therefore, that Islam must be prepared for a loss, not only of political power in Europe and in Western Asia, but also of the Mohammedan population in the Ottoman lands absorbed by Russia.  It will be a strange revenge of history if the Ottoman Turks, whom Europe has for so many centuries held to be the symbolic figure of Mohammedanism, shall one day cease to be Mohammedan.  Yet it is a revenge our children or our grandchildren may well live to see.

How far eastward the full results of this religious disintegration may extend, it is perhaps fanciful to speculate.  The north-western provinces of Persia, which are inhabited by Mussulmans of mixed race speaking the Turkish language and largely interfused with Christian Armenians, would, I am inclined to think, follow the destiny of the West, and ultimately accept Christianity as a dominant religion.  But, east of the Caspian, Sunite Islam, though severely shaken, may yet hope to survive and hold its ground for centuries.

The present policy of Russia, whatever it may be in Europe, is far from hostile to Mohammedanism in Central Asia.  As a religion it is even protected there, and it is encouraged by the Government in its missionary labours among the idolatrous tribes of the Steppes, and among the Buddhists, who are largely accepting its doctrines in the extreme East.  Hitherto there has been no Christian colonization in the direction of the Khanates, nor is there any indigenous form of Christianity.  Moreover, Central Asia, though connected by ties of sympathy with Constantinople, has never been politically or even religiously dependent on it.  It has a university of its own in Bokhara, a seat of learning still renowned throughout Asia, and it is thither and not to St. Sophia that the Sunite Mussulmans east of the Caspian proceed for their degrees.

Mohammedanism, therefore, in Eastern Asia is not exposed to such immediate danger as in the West.  Bokhara may lose its political independence, but there is no probability for many generations to come of its being Christianized as Constantinople certainly must be, and it may even on the fall of the latter become the chief centre of Sunite orthodoxy of the existing Hanefite type, remaining so perhaps long after the rest of Islam shall have abandoned Hanefism.  It is obvious, however, that cut off geographically as