[3] The reader is recommended to keep the map (on pp. 200-1) open while reading this chapter. [4] Kashmir and the North-West Frontier Province are Moslem almost to a man; the hardy races of the Punjab are predominantly Moslem; the whole of that huge stretch called the United Provinces, with its old Mohammedan citadels and mosques, is still the intellectual centre of Indian Mohammedanism. Calcutta, and the dense network of villages of Bengal, contain twenty-five million professed Moslems. In Bombay one-fifth of the people are Mohammedans. During recent years Mohammedanism has still been spreading in India. [5] Speaking at the Lagos Church Synod in 1906, the Rev. A. W. Smith said, 'Mohammedanism was introduced into the Ijebu country [a huge and densely populated district near Lagos] in 1893, and to-day half its population is professedly Mohammedan.' [6] Sir Reginald Wingate, _Mahdiism and the Egyptian Soudan_, pp. 239, 431, 432. {168} CHAPTER XI ISLAM AND THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 'For a brave man, to know that an evil is, is simply to know that it has to be vanquished.'--A. M. FAIRBAIRN. 'O, it is great, and there's no other greatness, to make some part of God's creation a little fruitfuller, better, more worthy of God.'--CARLYLE. [Sidenote: Livingstone and Stanley.] On November 10, 1871, two men met in the heart of Africa. One, David Livingstone, intrepid missionary and explorer, had been lost, and reputed dead for years. The other, Henry Stanley, after long months of heroic search, found the 'white man with hair on his face' within sound of the thunderous surf on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, and greeted him with, 'Dr. Livingstone, I presume?' The day of that meeting is one of the most significant dates in Africa's history. Stanley returned home to rouse Europe. Livingstone, worn and weakened by illness, remained. At Ilala, a year after Stanley {169} left him, his faithful African boys found 'the great master' kneeling by his bedside, dead. The life and death of Livingstone is said to have inspired the founding of twenty-two Missionary Societies. Certainly it opened a new chapter in the story of African Missions. The ears of Europe rang with the tales of Livingstone and Stanley, and the heart of Europe responded to their appeal to heal that great open sore, the slave trade. [Sidenote: The Slave Trade.] And who were the slave traders? Our friends the Moslem Arabs. But Stanley and Livingstone, standing in the heart of that Dark Continent, saw plainly enough that something else was needed to lighten the darkness than even the most vigorous suppression of the Slave Trade and its attendant atrocities. Superstition, misery, degradation, cruelty, were everywhere. And as for the Moslems, pouring in from the north in peaceful caravan or devastating slave raid, they were making the situation tenfold worse in every way than it was. It was evident that no healing of Africa's sores could come from them.