A History of Protestant missions in the near East

The Muhammadan World and the Eastern Churches 87
ing whom Johannes War neck, in his book " The Living Christ
and the Dying Heathenism," shows convincingly that, when
congregations are gathered from their midst, the first step
consists in turning from the worship of false gods and demons
to the worship of the one God, while comparatively few
advance to a complete acceptance of the redeeming work of
Christ. Muhammadans, on the contrary, can be brought
into the Christian Church only by persuading them of the
truth of Eedemption through the Son of God, an undertaking
the extreme difficulty of which we have pointed out. No
wonder, then, that few Moslems find the way to the Christian
Church. Muhammadan work is like that among the Jews,
who also already believe in one God.
(3) Subsequent preaching. When ignorant heathen accept
Christianity they have passed from under the dominion of
demons into the Kingdom of God. They feel that they are
thereby bound to conform to the rules of conduct in this
Kingdom. They display great willingness to cast out the
leaven of heathenism and permit the leaven of Christianity to
work through their thoughts and actions. Islam, on the
contrary, is too stereotyped and thorough a system of thought
and conduct to admit of an easy advance in " putting off the
old man."
A Moslem who has embraced Christianity must recast all
his ideas of God in conformity with his new Christian knowledge.
He must replace his former arbitrary, despotic God by
one of ethical excellence. Almost more, difficult is it for him
to free himself from that fatalism, which, in Islam, is a
correlative of belief in the almighty power of God, and to feel
himself to be in the Christian relation of a child to the Father,
who orders the whole life of His children according to His wise
counsel, but who at the same time wills that we should work
out our salvation with fear and trembling.
Side by side with this revolution in his ideas is the necessary
adaptation of his life to the Christian ideal in Christ. This
is the more difficult since, roughly speaking, what occupies a
central position in the ethics of the Christian lies on the