But in the face of both--in the face of the hosts of darkness who take up the words and fling them at us with a stinging taunt--we affirm in faith: "No, it is not dead. It is only dry." * * * * * Dry: that we know sorrowfully well; it cannot be otherwise. It is dry soil because Islam has come nearer doing "despite to the Spirit of grace" than any other religion; it is, as has been truly said, the one anti-Christian faith, the one of openly avowed enmity to the Cross of Christ, the one that deliberately tramples under foot the Son of God. It is dry also because in the religion itself there is something searing, blighting, as with a subtle breath of hell. This is true of the lands where it has laid hold, and true of the hearts,--it is dry. Dry soil, NOT dead soil. If you were out here in Algiers and could see and know the people, you would say so too. The next best thing is to bring you some of their faces to look at that you may judge whether the possibilities have gone out of them yet or not: women faces and girl faces, for it is of these that I write. Will you spend five minutes of your hours to-day in looking--just looking--at them, till they have sunk down into your heart? ARE they the faces of a dead people? Do you see no material for Christ if they had a chance of the Water of Life? These are real living women, living to-day, unmet by Him. [Illustration: TYPES IN TUNIS AND ALGIERS] To begin with, the first glance will show their intelligence. Get an average ignorant Englishwoman of the peasant class to repeat a Bible story that she has never heard before. She will dully remember one or two salient facts. Go up to a mountain village here and get a group of women and talk to them, and choose one of them to repeat to the others what you have said. You will feel after a sentence or two that your Arabic was only English put into Arabic words; hers is sparkling with racy idiom. More than that, she is making the story _live_ before her hearers: a touch of local color here--a quaint addition there. It is all aglow. And this a woman who has sat year after year in her one garment of red woollen drapery, cooking meals and nursing children, with nothing to stimulate any thoughts beyond the day's need. And their powers of feeling: do their faces look as if these have been crushed out by a life of servitude? Not a bit of it. No European who has not lived among them can have any idea of their intensity: love, hate, grief, reign by turns. Anger and grief can take such possession of them as to bring real illness of a strange and undiagnosable kind. We have known such cases to last for months; not unfrequently they end fatally; and more than one whom we have met has gone stone-blind with crying for a dead husband who probably made things none too easy while he lived.