On the other hand, Persians have very strong notions of loyalty both to causes and to individuals. Nothing has brought this out more than the history of the Babi movement, which has certainly exhibited the strength of Persian character. Boys and young men have in this movement willingly undergone the most terrible tortures in the service of their spiritual teachers and the common cause. It ought to be understood that the motives of the Babi martyr are not quite the same as those which have generally influenced the Christians who have died for their faith. The Christian martyrs have generally died rather than do some act which they felt to be sinful, or leave undone something which they regarded as essential. A large number of the Babi martyrs on the other hand have died because they chose not to deny their faith, which according to their tenets was perfectly permissible to do. Now I know of at least one man, a Persian of high position, who was killed as a Babi, but who would have preferred embracing Christianity. What was his connection with Babiism I cannot say: he would, I believe, have embraced Christianity had it not been that he shrank from a religion where a direct denial of one’s faith must always be accounted sinful. Whatever he was, he certainly did not shrink from making his divergence from orthodox Islam dangerously plain, and in this way he met his death. My purpose in mentioning the fact is to show that it is most difficult to induce a Mussulman to accept a very hard and fast line. Of course the story is only an illustration and does not prove the point, because there must have been other considerations which made Babiism, or a degree of unorthodoxy which passed for Babiism, easier to such a man than Christianity. It is not necessary to suppose that he was only influenced by a dislike to unbending rules; for the inability to ever deny his faith might have exposed him to petty insults, which would have been to him worse than death. Also his position as a Christian would have been, humanly speaking, a more solitary one. Still, when all has been said, I am convinced that the constitutional dislike to a hard and fast rule played at least some part in bringing the man to his decision, and also that this dislike is more pronounced in the Mussulman Yezdi than in the Yezdi Parsi.