The British and Foreign Bible Society is also helping to turn this part of the world downside up.  The gospel which has been buried under many superstitions and traditions so long, is again showing its power. Colporteurs are men who carry the Bible about, offer it to the people and read and explain it to those whose hearts are open.  They have a hard task, but if it were not for them the “Little Missionaries” would not get along at all.

On the way from Bagdad to Busrah, we pass Amara, an enterprising village where the people once burned books and threw stones at the missionary, but where now the little Bible-shop of the American Mission shines unhindered,

    “Like a little candle, burning in the night.”

At Busrah, Rev. James Cantine began mission work in 1891, and ever since that time he and others have been ploughing and sowing seed and waiting for the showers that come before the harvest.  It was at Busrah that Kamil Abd el Messiah, the Moslem convert from Syria, died a witness for Christ.  Have you read the wonderful story of his life?  It is full of pathos and shows how in the heart and life of at least one Moslem the Holy Spirit made topsy-turvy things straight.  There are others like Kamil in Arabia, but many of them are still following the Master afar off, because they fear the persecutions of men.  At Busrah, there is also a dispensary, and here too the gospel is sold and preached and lived before the people.

Bahrein, you know, is a group of islands, and it is about six years ago that the people first saw a missionary.  Nearly three-fourths of the population are pearl-merchants or pearl-fishers.  Will you not pray that they may learn to value the Pearl of Great Price?

A visit any morning in the week to the dispensary at Bahrein, would soon convince you that here too the Arab world is slowly but surely turning downside up.  Women learn to their delight that they have equal right to sympathy with men, and they need not wait until the men are helped first.  The Arabs are very ignorant of medicine and their remedies are either foolish or cruel.  To “let out the pain” in rheumatism, they burn the body with a hot iron.  All their ideas are upside down, and very few know on which side of their body the liver is located.  Now when our mission doctors perform miracles of surgery on the maimed, and miracles of mercy on the suffering, the result is to prepare their hearts for Christ’s message.  To the fanatic Moslem a Christian is “an ignorant unbeliever.”  But we may put a parody on Pope’s lines and say, in their case: 

    “A Christian is a monster of such frightful mien
    That to be hated needs but to be seen. 
    But seen too oft familiar with his face
    They first endure, then pity, then embrace.”

Many of the Moslems who in gratitude are ready to embrace a Christian physician may yet learn to embrace Christian teaching.