From what has been previously said it will be understood that from the missionary point of view there are, when dealing with the Persian, certain peculiar difficulties, and also certain things which tend to make missionary work more easy. We have to deal with a people whose fundamental notions of God and of His dealings with men are absolutely different from our own. I am not now so much speaking of those tenets on which the Mussulman loves to dwell, but rather of those tenets of which he does not think it necessary to speak, which are not so much the objects of his faith, but rather indisputable facts which stand outside the sphere of faith. The difficulty is not so much that the Persian is repelled by our holding contrary ideas; he cannot believe that we hold them; and indeed it is a serious difficulty that in accepting the Persian language we often unconsciously admit the very Mussulman ideas which we intend to attack, and give to the Persian premises upon which he can build his whole argument. To give an illustration; a Persian enquirer will say to the missionary, “Of course you allow that Moses and David were prophets?” The missionary will probably admit this. Now if the Persian has used the most ordinary term for such prophets, that is, the term _paighambar_, he will naturally suppose that the missionary has admitted the following: first of all, that God sends from time to time men who are appointed by Him to reveal a new law of human action, which, so far as the moral commandments are concerned, has no necessary connection with previous revelation; secondly, that Moses and David gave each of them a sufficient direction to the peoples of their day to enable them to apprehend salvation. In all probability your Mussulman friend will assume that you have granted even more; for instance, that Moses and David were both of them commissioned to invite everyone they came across to accept their religion; and I should be sorry to say that you would not have been supposed to have made other still more impossible admissions.