ir religious terminology take
liberties with their intellect and that of the public.

We will glance briefly at their indictment of Islam as presented in
their quasi-geographical works, disregarding their public utterances and
tracts as privileged, like the platform-speeches and vote-catching
pamphlets of a General Election; also we will keep to their own
terminology and expressions as far as possible.

First and foremost, especially in the United States, where knowledge of
non-Christian creeds is not so general as with us, the literature of
foreign missions insists on grouping together all regions as yet
unexploited by them (whether populated by heathen, Moslems, Buddhists
or any other non-Christian race) and describing them indiscriminately as
Gibraltars of Satan's power, a challenge to Christendom and a reproach
to Zion (whatever that may mean). Yet the four great Christian
Churches--Greek, Russian, Catholic and Protestant--seem powerless to
check the reign of hell in Bolshevist Europe, where the liberty of man
is demonstrated by murder, rapine, torture and every fiendish orgy or
bestial lust which mortal mind can conceive. The people among whom these
devilries are being enacted are Christians ruled by Christians, and have
been Christian for centuries. They are still Christian so far as a
blood-besotted clique will let them be anything. And in the face of such
facts there are missionaries who enunciate in cold print that without
Christianity there could be no charitable or humane organisation of any
sort, or good government, or security of property, and--clinching
argument--trade would suffer. Could there be any more glaring example of
the cart before the horse? Does a dog wag his tail or the tail wag the
dog? Is Japan hopelessly benighted and devoid of the activities
described as the monopoly of Christianity? Moreover: Can Christian
teaching or preaching pacify the embittered struggle between labour and
capital which threatens yet to wreck civilisation? Does it even try?

There is no more ridiculous or extravagant boast among a certain class
of self-appointed evangelists than the oft-repeated statement that all
the modern blessings of Western civilisation are the fruit of
Christianity and that the backward state of oriental Moslems is due to
the absence of Christianity.

Any thoughtful schoolboy knows that it was the exploitation of coal and
iron which lifted us Western nations out of the ruck, backed by the
nat