To the modern Christian world, missionary work implies missionary societies, paid agents, subscriptions, reports and journals; and missionary enterprise without a regularly constituted and continuous organisation seems a misnomer. The ecclesiastical constitution of the Christian Church has, from the very beginning of its history, made provision for the propagation of Christian teaching among unbelievers; its missionaries have been in most cases, regularly ordained priests or monks; the monastic orders (from the Benedictines downwards) and the missionary societies of more modern times have devoted themselves with special and concentrated attention to the furthering of a department of Christian work that, from the first, has been recognised to be one of the prime duties of the Church. But in Islam the absence of any kind of priesthood or any ecclesiastical organisation whatever has caused the missionary energy of the Muslims to exhibit itself in forms very different to those that appear in the history of Christian missions: there are no missionary societies, [1343] no specially trained agents, very little continuity of effort. The only exception appears to be found in the religious orders of Islam, whose organisation resembles to some extent that of the monastic orders of Christendom. But even here the absence of the priestly ideal, of any theory of the separateness of the religious teacher from the common body of believers or of the necessity of a special consecration and authorisation for the performance of religious functions, makes the fundamental difference in the two systems stand out as clearly as elsewhere.