Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/56

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of Moslems, in theory it was all to the good that the missionaries should draw their new Protestant community out of the old Gregorian Church. But that the Armenians should be exposed incautiously to Western ideas of nationalism was quite another matter. Events might have worked out differently had the missionaries been able to lay aside their Americanism, had they became Ottoman subjects themselves and confined their work to the propagation of Protestantism under Ottoman rule. But this sort of thing is not done. Without the steadying influence of responsibility to the Ottoman Government, they permitted their work to take them into the most intimate and delicate parts of the Ottoman structure. Their attitude toward the Ottoman Government was that of the Capitulations, their only responsibility was to their American supporters at home to whom the Ottoman Government was as far away as the moon.

Nobody has ever expected American missionaries in the Ottoman Empire to become Ottoman subjects. Indeed, nothing could have made such a proceeding more ridiculous than the mere mention of it, and I am inclined to believe that in the very ridicule which its mention would have provoked, there is food for very sober reflection. Among imperialists, one can thoroughly understand such an attitude, for imperialism is based on force and prestige is the very necessary legend of the invincibility of Western force. But do we Christians also build on force?

Yet the history of Old Greece is by no means an isolated instance of intolerance in modern Christendom. We Christians have built a world in which