Mohammedans ...............................169,054,789 Jews ....................................... 7,612,784 Parsees (fire-worshipers in Persia) ........ 1,000,000 Pagans not otherwise enumerated ...........277,000,000 ______________ Making a total of .......................1,007,267,573 [8] Surely when the superior advantages for the propagation of the Christian religion are taken into account, one could reasonably expect better results than this, after a period of nineteen centuries, sixteen of which may be said to have been of a character favorable to the extension of the borders of the church. But let us take a nearer view of the status of Christendom. As seen in the foregoing, but a little more than one-fourth of the population of the earth is even nominally Christian. No one will contend that all those nominally Christians are really Christians. Church membership may be one thing, conversion to the Christian religion quite another. If those who are Christians in name only, and church members from custom or for worldly advantage were separated from those who are Christians upon principle, upon conversion and real faith, the number of Christians in the world would be materially reduced. For it cannot be denied that when any religion becomes popular there are multitudes of insincere men who will outwardly accept it, and give it lip-service in return for the advantages that accrue to them socially, financially or politically. Moreover, Christendom is not united in one great body or church; but on the contrary it is divided into numerous contending factions whose differences are so far fundamental that there appears no prospect of reconciliation among them. The Catholics refuse to recognize any power of salvation in Protestantism. To the Catholic the Protestant is an heretic, a renegade child; and on the other hand, to the Protestant, the Catholic is an idolator, and the pope the very anti-Christ, prophesied of in scripture. Nor are the Roman and Greek Catholics much nearer at one with each other than the Roman Catholics and Protestants. Away back in the ninth century, as a result of the controversy between the Eastern and Western Churches, Pope Nicholas, in a council held at Rome, solemnly excommunicated Photius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, and had his ordination declared null and void. The Greek emperor resented this conduct of the pope, and under his sanction Photius, in his turn, convened what he called an acumenical council, in which he pronounced sentence of excommunication and deposition against the pope, and got it subscribed by twenty-one bishops and others amounting in number to one thousand.