In view of the clearness and simplicity of this creed, it is difficult to understand how the Western World has so signally failed to comprehend the real nature of Mohammed’s teaching. It is equally difficult to conceive how the authors of the countless books on the Prophet and his religion could have been honest and sincere when they penned their diatribes against Mohammed or pronounced their bitter and ludicrous invectives against his followers and the religion to which they were so ardently attached. Had they been actuated by a spirit of fairness and Christian charity they could so easily have ascertained the truth about the doctrine which they so strangely misrepresented and the people whom they so pitilessly maligned. For there never was a time since the day Saladin entered the Holy City of Jerusalem accompanied by its bishop, who had gone out to greet the humane conqueror; never a time since the Poverello of Assisi went as a missionary to the Sultan of Egypt, when men of good will, seeking the truth and nothing but the truth, might not have had all the information desired both about the doctrines of Islam and the practices of the millions who looked upon Mohammed as directly commissioned by God to teach them the way to Heaven. Those who always exhibited such readiness to defame Islam and its followers should have recalled the words of St. Augustine when he declares that “there is no false doctrine which does not contain something of truth.”[239] They should have given heed to the counsels of the learned and zealous Father Marracci, who, guided by the experiences among the Mohammedans of his brothers in religion, taught them how they might bring the followers of Islam to a knowledge of the Gospel and to a love of the Crucified. Had they done so there would not be that inveterate hatred that now exists between the Cross and the Crescent, and there would not be that separation into two hostile camps of so many hundred millions of people who normally should be in the same fold and under the same Shepherd. For, contrary to what has been so often said and written during the last thousand years and more, there is much, very much good in Islam. No less an authority than the illustrious Cardinal Hergenrœther declares: Islamism ought to prepare for civilization the peoples most advanced in barbarism, notably those of Africa. Those peoples whom it is necessary to lead from fetishism to monotheism are in their low degree of culture and brutal sensualism materially aided by such a stepping-stone in their transition to Christianity.[240]