Try the same method with a Mussulman, and you will soon find that all your efforts are fruitless.  He has already a theology and a prophet of his own, and sees no reason why he should exchange them for those which you have to offer.  Perhaps he will show you more or less openly that he pities your ignorance and wonders that you have not been able to advance from Christianity to Mahometanism.  In his opinion—­I am supposing that he is a man of education—­Moses and Christ were great prophets in their day, and consequently he is accustomed to respect their memory; but he is profoundly convinced that however appropriate they were for their own times, they have been entirely superseded by Mahomet, precisely as we believe that Judaism was superseded by Christianity.  Proud of his superior knowledge, he regards you as a benighted polytheist, and may perhaps tell you that the Orthodox Christians with whom he comes in contact have three Gods and a host of lesser deities called saints, that they pray to idols called Icons, and that they keep their holy days by getting drunk.  In vain you endeavour to explain to him that saints and Icons are not essential parts of Christianity, and that habits of intoxication have no religious significance.  On these points he may make concessions to you, but the doctrine of the Trinity remains for him a fatal stumbling-block.  “You Christians,” he will say, “once had a great prophet called Jisous, who is mentioned with respect in the Koran, but you falsified your sacred writings and took to worshipping him, and now you declare that he is the equal of Allah.  Far from us be such blasphemy!  There is but one God, and Mahomet is His prophet.”

A worthy Christian missionary, who had laboured long and zealously among a Mussulman population, once called me sharply to account for having expressed the opinion that Mahometans are very rarely converted to Christianity.  When I brought him down from the region of vague general statements and insisted on knowing how many cases he had met with in his own personal experience during sixteen years of missionary work, he was constrained to admit that he had know only one:  and when I pressed him farther as to the disinterested sincerity of the convert in question his reply was not altogether satisfactory.

The policy of religious non-intervention has not always been practised by the Government.  Soon after the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan in the sixteenth century, the Tsars of Muscovy attempted to convert their new subjects from Mahometanism to Christianity.  The means employed were partly spiritual and partly administrative, but the police-officers seem to have played a more important part than the clergy.  In this way a certain number of Tartars were baptised; but the authorities were obliged to admit that the new converts “shamelessly retain many horrid Tartar customs, and neither hold nor know the Christian faith.”  When spiritual exhortations failed,