A History of Protestant missions in the near East

Egypt and Abyssinia 361
The Cairo hospital has a ca-
educational and evangelistic.
pable staff of two doctors and four nurses, and has had a
valuable accession in the " Ethel Pain
"
Memorial Hospital
for women and children. It has many Muhammadan patients.
The lady missionaries devote themselves largely to girls'
schools. They have established girls' primary schools in Cairo
itself, in the Old Cairo suburb and in Helwan, a health resort
of world-wide fame. There are also girls' boarding-schools in
Cairo and Helwan. A training class for Bible-women and
teachers completes
the scheme. Not
so many Muhammadan
girls, however, attend these schools as the mission could wish,
especially since the Muhammadans themselves have opened
girls' schools with great zeal, and considerable financial support.
Whenever a girl appears to be yielding to Christian influences,
or a Muhammadan joins the Christian Church, the
schools at once feel the shock. The lady missionaries also do
a great amount of house to house visiting among Muhammadan
and Koptic women, in which arduous work they have to
contend with much opposition.
A new branch of the Church Missionary Society work was
inaugurated in 1898, when two close friends, Eev. Douglas
Thornton and Rev. Wm. H. G. Gairdner, were sent out to do
evangelistic work among Muhammadans. Both these men
had prepared themselves for their task by special study.
They made arrangements for public discussions in Arabic and
English, on which occasions they usually opened the debate
with an address. They even ventured openly to preach the
Gospel on other evenings, but not without exciting fanatical
opposition and stormy scenes. They also made great use of
the bookstore, to which, as usual, a reading-room was attached,
being much frequented. Here they found many an
opportunit} r quietly to present the contrast between Christianity
and Islam, Christ and Muhammad. Their weekly
paper, Orient and Occident, which had a large circulation, extending
as far as Upper Egypt, was a still more effective
branch of their work. This paper, like the Epiphany of the
Oxford Brotherhood in Calcutta, opened its columns to any