To the Protestant Church of the eighteenth century Arabia and the Levant presented no attractions or appeal. The Turks, as representing the Mohammedan world, were remembered as early as 1549, it is true, by the English Book of Common Prayer, in the collect for Good Friday,[133] (which dates from the Sarum Missal). No effort was made, however, to carry the gospel to them or to any part of their empire, until long after other far more distant regions had been reached. Even Carey did not have the Moslem world on his large program. It was Claudius Buchanan who first aroused an interest in the needs of the Moslem world. On his return from India he told, on February 25, 1809, in his sermon at Bristol, the story of two Moslem converts, one of whom had died a martyr to Christ. In his _Christian Researches_ he propounds a comprehensive scheme for the evangelization of the Levant. The Church Missionary Society sent out missionaries, and in 1819 the American Board began work for Moslems by sending Pliny Fisk and Levi Parsons to Syria. This modern beginning of the gospel in Asia Minor had an indirect bearing on the future evangelization of Arabia and was a part of the Divine preparation. The journeys of Eli Smith and H. G. O. Dwight brought the American churches face to face with the whole problem of missions in that region. The Syrian Mission through its press at Malta (1822) began the assault on the citadel of Islam’s learning. In 1833 the press was removed to Beirut; and from that day until now it has been scattering leaves of healing throughout all the Arabic-speaking world. When in 1865 Dr. Van Dyck wrote the last sheet of “copy” of the Arabic Bible translation and handed it to the compositor, he marked an era of importance not only to Syria and Asia Minor, but to the whole of Arabia, greater than any accession or deposition of sultans. That Bible made modern missions to Arabia possible; it was the result of seventeen years of labor; “and herein is that saying true, One soweth, and another reapeth ... other men labored and ye are entered into their labors.” Whatever special difficulties and obstacles missionaries to Arabia have met or will meet, the great work of preparing the Word of God in the language of the people and a complete Christian literature for every department of work, has already been accomplished by others; and accomplished in such a way that the Arabic Bible of Beirut will always be the Bible for Oman and Nejd and the most inland villages of Yemen and Hadramaut.