be thought of for a moment.”  I replied, “Effendum, you put your foot on the women’s necks and then blame them for not rising.  Educate your girls and train them to intelligence and virtue, and then their pens will write only what ought to be written.  Train the hand to hold a pen, without training the mind to direct it, and only mischief can result.” “Saheah, saheah,” “very true, very true,” said he, “But how can this be done?”

It has begun to be done in Syria.  From the days of Mrs. Sarah L. Smith to the present time, Moslem girls have been taught to read and write and sew, and there are many now learning in the various American, British and Prussian schools.  But it will be long before any true idea of the dignity of woman enters the debased minds of Arab Mohammedans.  The simple fact is that there is no moral purity or elevation among the men, and how can it be expected among the women.  The Moslem idea of woman is infinitely lower than the old Jewish idea.  Woman in the time of Christ was highly honored.  Believing women followed Christ throughout Galilee and Judea, and although enemies stood watching with hateful gaze on every side, not one word of insinuation was ever lisped against them.  It is a most sadly impressive fact to one living in Syria at the present day, that the liberty and respect allowed to woman in the days of our Saviour would now be absolutely impossible.  In purely Greek or Maronite or Armenian villages, the women enjoy far greater liberty than where there is a Moslem element in the population.  And it is worthy of remark and grateful recognition, that although Christianity in the East has sunk almost to a level, in outward morality, with the Islamic and semi-Pagan sects, there is a striking difference between the lowest nominal Christian community and the highest Mohammedan, in the respect paid to woman.  Ignorant and oppressed as the Greek and Maronite women may be, you feel on entering their houses, that the degrading yoke of Moslem brutality is not on their necks.  Their husbands may be coarse, ignorant and brutal, beating their wives and despising their daughters, mourning at the birth of a daughter, and marrying her without her consent, and yet there are lower depths of coarseness and brutality, of cruelty and bestiality, which are only found among Mohammedans.  I once suggested to a Tripoli Moslem, that he send his daughters to our Girls’ School, then taught by Miss Sada Gregory, a native teacher trained in the family of Mrs. Whiting, and he looked at me with an expression of mingled pity and contempt, saying, “Educate a girl!  You might as well attempt to educate a cat!”

Not two months since, I was conversing with several of the aristocratic Mohammedans of Beirut, who were in attendance at the commencement of the Beirut Protestant Medical College.  The subject of the education of girls was introduced, and one of them said, “we are beginning to have our girls instructed in your Protestant schools, and would you believe it, I heard one of them read the other day, (probably his own daughter,) and she actually asked a question about the construction of a noun preceded by a preposition!  I never heard the like of it.  The things do distinguish and understand what they read, after all!” The others replied, “Mashallah!  Mashallah!” “The will of God be done!”