“It surely is not without a purpose that this widespread and powerful race [the Arabs] has been kept these four thousand years, unsubdued and undegenerate, preserving still the vigor and simplicity of its character. It is certainly capable of a great future; and as certainly a great future lies before it. In may be among the last peoples of Southwestern Asia to yield to the transforming influences of Christianity and a Christian civilization. But to those influences it will assuredly yield in the fullness of time.”—_Edson L. Clark._ “Every nation has its appointed time, and when their appointed time comes they cannot keep it back an hour nor can they bring it on.”—_The Koran._ Islam dates from 622 A. D., but the first Christian missionary to Mohammedans was Raymund Lull, who was stoned to death outside the town of Bugia, North Africa, on June 30, 1315. He was also the first and only Christian of his day who felt the extent and urgency of the call to evangelize the Mohammedan world. His constant argument with Moslem teachers was: Islam is false and must die. His devotion and his pure character coupled with such intense moral earnestness won some converts, but his great central purpose was to overthrow the power of Islam as a system by logical demonstration of its error; in this he failed. His two spiritual treatises are interesting, but his _Ars Major_ would not convince a Moslem to-day any more than it did in the fourteenth century. His life is of romantic interest and his indefatigable zeal will always be a model and an inspiration to missionaries among Moslems.[132] But he lived before his time and his age was unworthy of him. Nothing was done to give the gospel to Arabia or the Mohammedans from the time of Raymund Lull to that of Henry Martyn, the first modern missionary to the Mohammedans. The histories of these two men contain all that there is to be written about missionary work for the Mohammedan world from 622 until 1812, so little did the Church of God feel its responsibility toward the millions walking in darkness after the false prophet.