A History of Protestant missions in the near East

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74 History of Protestant Missions in the Near East
have been baptized. In the summer of 1864 ten adults were
confirmed at one time. This gave rise to foolish and exaggerated
reports, such as the report that 25,000, or even 400,000
Turks had been converted to Protestantism.
But a storm was brewing, of which the Protestant Mission
was wholly unconscious. The suspicions of the Sultan and of
hostile reactionaries were excited in two ways. A strong
party was planning to separate from Islam and to form a religious
community of their own. Its members are even said
to have sent a petition to the Sultan asking him to place one
of the mosques in the city at their disposal for religious services.
The leaders of this party had no connection whatever
with the missionaries, who nevertheless fell under suspicion.
The other thing which disturbed the Sultan was that Dr. Pfander
was busy forging spiritual weapons for the mission, in the
form of apologetic and polemic tracts. He had just finished a
Turkish translation of his " Mizan ul Haqq," and had put it
through the press. Now, if the few Persian copies, which had
before come into the hands of Turks, had caused such a stir,
it was to be expected that the Turkish translation of the work
would be far more disturbing. Violent counter-publications
against Pfander and his work were issued with the assistance
of the government. Being thus attacked, Pfander openly
replied.
The storm burst suddenly and destructively. Ten or thirteen
Protestant Turks in Constantinople were seized without
previous warning on the 17th of July, 1864, and thrown into
prison. The next day, the offices of the British and American
Bible Societies as well as the assembly halls of the mission
were closed by the police, and the books confiscated. Even
the missionaries were forcibly driven out of their houses.
It is true that by the intervention of the British ambassador,
backed by his government, most of the prisoners were released
or were treated less harshly in prison, and the Bible-depots
and the confiscated Bibles, though not Pfander's books, were
restored to the missionaries. Nevertheless the subsequent
official correspondence led merely to the declaration that a