Copt and Parsee, all manifest in a hundred ways of daily
life the great fact of their belief in a God. In their vices as well
as in their virtues the recognition of Deity is dominant.

"With the Western, on the contrary, the outward form of practising
belief in a God is a thing to be half-ashamed of--something to hide. A
procession of priests in the Strada Reale would probably cause an
average Briton to regard it with less tolerant eye than he would cast
upon a Juggernaut festival in Orissa: but to each alike would he
display the same iconoclasm of creed, the same idea, not the less
fixed because it is seldom expressed in words: "You pray; therefore I
do not think much of you." But there is a deeper difference between
East and West lying beneath this incompatibility of temper on the part
of modern Englishmen to accept the religious habit of thought in the
East. All Eastern peoples possess this habit of thought. It is the one
tie which links together their widely differing races. Let us give an
illustration of our meaning. On an Austrian Lloyd's steamboat in the
Levant a traveller from Beyrout will frequently see strange groups of
men crowded together on the quarter-deck. In the morning the missal
books of the Greek Church will be laid along the bulwarks of the ship,
and a couple of Russian priests, coming from Jerusalem, will be busy
muttering mass. A yard to right or left a Turkish pilgrim, returning
from Mecca, sits a respectful observer of the scene. It is prayer, and
therefore it is holy in his sight. So, too, when the evening hour has
come, and the Turk spreads out his bit of carpet for the sunset
prayers and obeisance towards Mecca, the Greek looks on in silence,
without trace of scorn in his face, for it is again the worship of the
Creator by the created. They are both fulfilling the _first_ law of
the East--prayer to God; and whether the shrine be Jerusalem, Mecca,
or Lhassa, the sanctity of worship surrounds the votary, and protects
the pilgrim.

"Into this life comes the Englishman, frequently destitute of one
touch of sympathy with the prayers of any people, or the faith of any
creed; hence our rule in the East has ever rested, and will ever rest,
upon the bayonet. We have never yet got beyond the stage of conquest;
never assimilated a people to our ways, never even civilized a single
tribe around the wide dominion of our empire. It is curious how
frequently a well-meaning Briton will speak of a foreign chu