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European Witness
George Horton's
EXCERPTS FROM TURKEY - THE BLIGHT OF ASIA
Most Important Parts Selected by Ellopos
Page 19
From MOHAMMEDANISM AND CHRISTIANITY
THE SPECTACLE of the Great War has profoundly influenced all non-Christian peoples and has made missionary work more difficult than ever. "Christ is not the Prince of Peace," they say; and no amount of preaching can make them believe it. "Prince of Peace," they sneer, "He is the Prince of the submarine, the bomb-throwing aeroplane, poison gas, the machine gun." The supposed results of the teachings of Christ are more evident than the teachings themselves. [...]
It seems probable that the great gift of Christianity has been so abused and shamed by the so-called Christian nations that God is weary of them, and considers it presumptuous for them to send out missionaries to convert people of another faith. It has been abundantly shown to all reasonable human beings, who are not religious zealots, that money expended in the attempt to convert Moslems is money thrown away. Even the missionaries themselves in Turkey seem to have given it up. [...]
The attention of the reader has already been called to the fact that the Turks are the lowest of the Moslem races and it would not be fair to Mohammedans in general to say that they approve of butchery and rape as carried out by that people, so well characterized by Gladstone and many historians. In fact the Turks are not the greatest danger to the Christian church. They have accomplished their fell task, and their influence as a proselytizing power will not spread beyond their own dominions unless they wage another successful war. [...] The strongest and best organized proselytizing order among the Moslems are the Senussiya. [...]
The Mohammedans, in the organized propaganda which they are making against Christianity, both by written arguments and by their extensive system of lay missionaries, are well aware of the unchristian history of the Christian world, and the fearful spectacle of the Great War has added a powerful argument to their already full quiver. [...] Christianity lost her power as a world-conquering religion—and thus became an easy prey to Mohammedanism—as soon as she became obscured in a smoke-screen of controversy. The innumerable and bewildering quibbles which arose, giving rise to many sects, and the violent hatreds and schisms engendered, form a history in themselves. [...] When a Mohammedan is asked to be a Christian, a common answer is, "What kind? There are so many kinds of you, each warning us against the others." There is less hope today of pan-Christianity than of pan-Islamism. Says Kurtz, already referred to: "To-day Mohammedanism is the one rival of Christianity to become a world religion," and a writer in the "Moslem World" for January, 1925: "The Christian Church, after thirteen centuries of hard struggle finds Islam still a most baffling problem. It is true historically that Islam has been born after Christianity and has displaced it almost wherever it has spread. The history of the whole of North Africa, Palestine and Syria, and present Asia Minor shows this plainly." [...] And the situation among the "Christian Nations" that allowed the Turks to burn Smyrna and massacre and abuse its inhabitants was such a culmination of infamy and shame as shows that the world is becoming less Christian as the years go by.
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