s. The presence in a heathen or a Muslim district of a single man
who, filled with the missionary spirit, exhibits in his preaching and,
so far as may be, in his life, the self-denying and the Christian
virtues, who is charged with sympathy for those among whom his lot is
cast, who is patient of disappointment and of failure, and of the sneers
of the ignorant or the irreligious, and who works steadily on with a
single eye to the glory of God and the good of his fellow-men, is, of
itself, an influence for good, and a centre from which it radiates,
wholly independent of the number of converts he is able to enlist. There
is a vast number of such men engaged in mission work all over the
world, and our best Indian statesmen, some of whom, for obvious reasons,
have been hostile to direct proselytizing efforts, are unanimous as to
the quantity and quality of the services they render.

"Nothing, therefore, can be more shallow, or more disingenuous, or more
misleading, than to attempt to disparage Christian missions by pitting
the bare number of converts whom they claim against the number of
converts claimed by Islam. The numbers are, of course, enormously in
favor of Islam. But does conversion mean the same, or anything like the
same, thing in each? Is it _in pari materia_, and if not, is the
comparison worth the paper on which it is written? The submission to the
rite of circumcision and the repetition of a confession of faith,
however noble and however elevating in its ultimate effect, do not
necessitate, they do not even necessarily tend toward what a Christian
means by a change of heart. It is the characteristic of Mohammedanism to
deal with batches and with masses. It is the characteristic of
Christianity to speak straight to the individual conscience.

"The conversion of a whole Pagan community to Islam need not imply more
effort, more sincerity, or more vital change, than the conversion of a
single individual to Christianity. The Christianity accepted wholesale
by Clovis and his fierce warriors, in the flush of victory, on the field
of battle, or by the Russian peasants, when they were driven by the
Cossack whips into the Dnieper, and baptized there by force--these are
truer parallels to the tribal conversions to Mohammedanism in Africa at
the present day. And, whatever may have been their beneficial effects in
the march of the centuries, they are not the Christianity of Christ, nor
are they the methods or the objects at