Third, the Ottoman Turks drew men and ideas from both Mohammedans and Christians. They have commonly been regarded as wholly Mohammedan, and therefore they have been shut off by a well-nigh impenetrable barrier from the sympathies of a world still possessed by the prejudices of crusading days. The foundations of such prejudices are easily open to attack. The main religious ideas of Mohammedanism are not, except as to the divinity of Christ, inharmonious with those of Christianity; they were, indeed, in all probability drawn chiefly from the religious teachings of the Old Testament. The social system of Mohammedanism is also much like that of the Old Testament. Its most objectionable features, the seclusion of women, polygamy, and slavery, may be regarded as survivals from an older condition of mankind out of which a portion of the human race has emerged—not without frequent cases of atavism—and which Mohammedans themselves are tending to abandon. But, leaving aside the question of the kinship of Christianity and Mohammedanism, no one can deny that the Ottomans ruled over many Christians, that many of their ablest men and families were of Christian ancestry, and that, according to the nature of humanity, as much of their civilization and ruling ideas may have come from Christian as from Mohammedan sources. It is true that as a nation the Ottoman Turks remained Mohammedan; this has constituted the real “tragedy of the Turk.” Bound hand and foot by that scholastic Mohammedanism which was reaching rigid perfection at the time when the Turks first became prominent in the Saracen Empire, and which only in very recent days seems tending toward a Reformation, they could not amalgamate the subject Christian peoples, already confirmed in nationalism by the events of centuries. The deadening system stilled their active spirits, imprisoned their extraordinary adaptability, and held them at a stage of culture which, though in some respects it distinctly led Europe in the sixteenth century, was before long passed through and left behind by the progressive West. Nevertheless, the Turks were no more limited to Mohammedan ideas than to Mohammedan men, and they are entitled to be considered in the light of their double origin.