He was tempted by earthly spoil, by the love of persecution, and promised licentiousness hereafter, it is often said. Perhaps; but has not the same over and over again tempted Christian Powers?—has not love of persecution found sufficient examples in the history of Christianity to deter us from looking for it abroad? Is not our heaven, painted by St John in the Revelation, tended to increase our desire to share in it by picturing its beauties? The Revelation, it may be answered, is an allegory; yet he who argues thus would have been burned at the stake for his pernicious views not many centuries ago. To those who are capable, though generally unwilling, to understand Christianity, it is a religion at once perfect and superlative. It is an ideal seldom if ever reached. It is a goal to be striven after, with but little hopes of doing more than one’s feeble best to reach; and more, far more than all, it is the truth. But so is Islam to the Mahammedan. It is a goal which many reach, because its ideals are tangible and comprehensible. It is a religion founded by a man of vast intellect to enforce a belief in the existence of one God, which the intricacies of Christianity had failed to prove to the Arab races. To them, materialists to the very backbone, the Trinity is impossible. To us it is incomprehensible, but acknowledged. Christ was the Son of God! This alone is sufficient to drive to a distance the Arab, who acknowledges the Messiah’s origin as divine and supernatural, but to whom the idea of filial relationship with the Deity is revolting and incredible. An example of the power that Islam asserted over the minds of the inhabitants of the Yemen is near at hand. There were many Christians in that country at the moment when they received the tidings of the Prophet’s mission. Nejrán, a large province, was governed by a Christian family, and boasted a bishop, by name Kos, who died during the earlier half of the seventh century A.D., probably during the lifetime of Mahammed; yet but a comparatively few years later we find all traces of Christianity disappeared. Not so in Abyssinia, where it exists to-day amongst a people given up to one vice at least, drunkenness, from which were they Moslems they would be free. Were Europe a Mahammedan Power, there is no reason to doubt that we should not be in the same state of civilisation as we enjoy to-day. The Turks are an oriental race, and cannot be taken as a fair example; yet they have so far followed upon the lines of Christian Powers that we find them to-day squeezing their people to obtain the means wherewithal to purchase the destructive implements of war, and existing in a very tolerable state of civilisation and drunkenness.