dreadful shriek, and blow after blow falling upon her back and head.  I could hear the brute cursing her as he beat her.  The police would not interfere, and I could not enter the house.  The next day there was a funeral from that house, and she was carried off and buried in the most hasty and unfeeling manner.  Sometimes it happens that the woman is strong enough to defend herself, and conquers a peace; but ordinarily when you hear a scream in the Moslem quarter of the city and ask the reason, it will be said to you with an indifferent shrug of the shoulder, “that is only some man beating his wife.”

That thirty-eighth verse of Sura iv. is one of the many proofs that the Koran is not the book of God, because it violates the law of love.  “Husbands love your wives,” is a precept of the Gospel and not of the Koran.  Yet it is a sad fact that the nominal Christians of this dark land are not much better in this respect than their Moslem neighbors.  The Greeks, Maronites and Papal Greeks beat their wives on the slightest provocation.  In the more enlightened towns and cities this custom is “going out of fashion,” though still often resorted to in fits of passion.  Sometimes the male relatives of the wife retaliate in case a husband beats her.  In the village of Schwire, in Lebanon, a man beat his wife in a brutal manner and she fled to the house of her brother.  The brother watched his opportunity; waylaid the offending husband, and avenged his sister’s injuries by giving him a severe flogging.  In Eastern Turkey, a missionary in one of the towns noticed that not one woman attended church on Sunday.  He expostulated with the Protestants, and urged them to persuade their wives to accompany them.  The next Sunday the women were all present, as meek and quiet as could be wished.  The missionary was delighted, and asked one of the men how they persuaded them to come?  He replied, “We all beat our wives soundly until they consented to come!” This wife-beating custom has evidently been borrowed by the Christian sects from their Moslem rulers and oppressors, and nothing but a pure Christianity can induce them to abandon it.

III.  Some have supposed that there will be no place in the Moslem Paradise for women, as their place will be taken by the seventy-two bright-eyed Houris or damsels of Paradise.  Mohammed once said that when he took a view of Paradise he saw the majority of its inhabitants to be the poor, and when he looked down into hell, he saw the greater part of the wretches confined there to be women!  Yet he positively promised his followers that the very meanest in Paradise will have eighty thousand servants, seventy-two wives of the Houris, besides the wives he had in this world.  The promises of the Houris are almost exclusively to be found in Suras, written at a time when Mohammed had only a single wife of sixty years of age, and in all the ten years subsequent to the Hegira, women are only twice mentioned as the reward of the faithful.  And this, while in four Suras, the proper wives of the faithful are spoken of as accompanying their husbands into the gardens of bliss.