The missionaries in these and other lines of eleemosynary operations have demonstrated that they are the friends of all without reference to creed or religion. While these disasters have been terrible to contemplate and have brought immeasurable hardship and care upon the missionaries, they have yet opened new opportunities of approach to the people and have revealed the sincere desire to relieve them in their supreme distress. All classes have learned to trust the missionaries, and in times of trouble, all races appeal to them for assistance. XXI. COMPLETED WORK What is in the future no man can tell, but the growth of pure religion in whatever form of church organization; the development of freedom of thought; the attainment of civil liberty, and that not merely for Armenia, but for Greek, Nestorian, Jacobite, and even for the Turk himself, depends upon the continuance of the influences for a higher life that have been at work during the past sixty years, and that depends upon the missionaries being supported at their posts. Theirs is no sectarian work. They stand as the friends of Gregorian Armenians, Roman Catholic Chaldeans, Nestorians and Jacobites as well as of those in closer affiliation with the Protestant Churches of Europe and America. America should stand by them and demand their full protection. It is our right by treaty; it is our right by the duty we owe humanity, by the duty we owe to our tradition as a liberty-loving nation. We have no political ends to serve; we want not a square foot of the sultan’s domains; but we stand, as we have always stood, for freedom for the oppressed, for the right of every man to worship his God in the light of his own conscience. —EDWIN MUNSELL BLISS, in “Turkey and the Armenian Atrocities.” In order to understand the methods employed in planting missions in Turkey and the permanent results following, one must have a clear idea of what the missionaries were attempting to accomplish. Perhaps we make the subject clearer by stating first some of the things they were not attempting to do. They were not attempting to plant American churches in Turkey over which the missionaries should preside as pastors and which should be under the control and direction of the mission. They were not attempting to transport into Turkey American churches, and American schools, and American customs and dress or anything else that is American. They were not attempting to plant churches or schools or any other line of Christian work which should be perpetually dependent upon contributions from America for their maintenance.