done much to make plain to the missionaries themselves the reasons for the great Moslem reformation which all but swept Christianity out of existence in the land of its origin. Whatever may have been thought in the United States as to the work in which American missionaries have been engaged in the Empire, that work has been directed towards the reformation of the decadent survivals of Christian worship. The missionaries themselves, as distinct from their supporters in the United States, have rightly observed that Christianity will not command the respect of Islam until Moslems have been shown a different type of Christian from that type to which they have been accustomed. The missionaries accordingly, beginning on one of the outermost fringes of Christendom, have devoted themselves to work largely among the Armenians and have drawn away from their Gregorian Church a new community which the Caliph in Constantinople recognized as the Prodesdan community.
But an important circumstance exists which is inevitably present in any missionary endeavor in an alien land and of which we sometimes need to remind ourselves. In actual practice, Islam is not only a religion but a form of civilization as well and, in the life of any devout Moslem, it would be very difficult to say where the one ends and the other begins. Precisely the same is true of American Protestantism. It might be simple enough to state the theology of American Protestantism, but that theology would fall far short of defining the actual missionary. For the missionary is not only a Protestant but an American as well, and in any alien country he embodies the American Protestant
