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Reporting for Southern Nigeria, the Rev. A. W. Wilkie says, Every individual is attached to a household and is under the head of that household. There are about ninety heads of houses. Each house is a branch of a family which has, similarly, a head. There are five main families which together recognize one man as chief of the whole town. I have made an effort to keep in close touch with the heads of the different houses and to influence them for Christ. If the head of a house is won, there is every hope that the whole of his house will be influenced. One such came within the church five years ago. Now, in his farm, which is a good sized village, he has built a school for the children, he supports a teacher, and service is held regularly morning and evening for prayers and on Sabbath for ordinary worship. It was the gain of not one man but a whole community. They are not all Christians, of course, but they are all under the finest influence."

3. Further effort must be made along the line of urging Western governments to coöperate in every legitimate way, preventing the spread of Islam among pagan tribes. This would mean, of course, the removal of many limitations now placed upon Christian missionaries by such governments. It would also mean the correction of many policies unintentionally favourable to Islam. Dr. Karl Kumm, for example, after his trans-African trip, wrote, "The British Egyptian government is unintentionally assisting the advance of Mohammedanism. The soldiers of the Sudanese battalions are nearly all drawn from pagan tribes. As soon as they enter the army they are circumcised, and placed under Moslem religious instruction. They are compelled to rest on Friday, and work on Sunday. The children of the regiment are taught by a Mohammedan Mallam. The great holidays and feast days in the year are Mohammedar

holidays. If, therefore, the soldiers, after their period of service, return to their tribes, they carry with them and spread the faith of Mohammed."

It ought to be recognized that in many instances, individual British government officials heartily sympathize with the desire to check the inroads of Islam, and coöperate in so far as the governmental policies laid upon them enable them to do so. The Rev. E. McCreery, writing from the Sobat region of the Egyptian Sudan, says: "Up to the present time, the Governor of the Upper Nile province has made a determined effort to keep out the Arab traders from these tribes." Dr. Karl Kumm also reports: "Sir Reginald Wingate, the Sirdar of the Eastern Sudan, told me he is strongly in favour of missionaries going to the pagan tribes in the Sudan, which in the absence of such are going over to Islam. He desires to encourage the conversion to Christianity of the heathen tribes. He expressed to me also his belief that at the present rate of progress of Islam, the Bahr el Ghazal province, a vast territory, will shortly become Moslem."

4. In conclusion, whatever be the policy followed, whatever the methods employed, emphasis must be laid upon the time-element as a condition of success. It was this consideration that led Commission I of the Edinburgh Conference to give to the African missionary situation the second place (China alone being ahead) in a list of critical missionary situations claiming the immediate attention of the Church as a whole.'

We can do no better than to quote the following stirring sentences from that Commission's Report on Africa: "In no respect is the situation in Africa more critical than in respect of the rapid and persistent advance of Islam. From its broad base in the north and from its

strong entrenchments on the east coast, it is steadily pressing southward and westward. It offers to the primitive tribes, along with the attractions of a nobler belief, the inducements of a certain social elevation, of connection with a great religious community, and of a better standing with foreign administrations, while its terms both of conversion and of membership present no difficulty to the understanding or morality of a heathen. The question is, shall we tarry and trifle in our mission, while Africa is being made the prey of Islam? The added difficulty of our task to-day is the penalty of our past neglect; and if we are to avert our task being made harder still by the onward march of Islam, there is not a day to lose."

XIV

ISLAM UNDER CHRISTIAN RULE

REV. W. H. T. GAIRDNER, B. A., CAIRO

T

HERE are five European nations who between them rule the enormously greater majority of all the Moslems in the world: Great Britain, France, Germany, Holland and Russia. And to these must now be added the United States, which has become a ruler of Moslems-comparatively few it is true-in the Philippine Islands. But the former five are all great Moslem rulers; and the greatest Moslem ruler in the world is Great Britain.

Under France:

The attitude of France towards work among Moslems of course is one aspect of the general attitude of France to all missions, and especially to non-Roman and non-French missions. The attitude towards the latter is unfortunately still intensely suspicious and unfriendly. The accounts from Madagascar do not seem to be improving; for though France may be a little less suspicious than formerly, she makes up for it by the deliberate way she is prosecuting her secularizing policy, for which she is apparently zealous with a zeal worthy of a better cause. Nevertheless the French missionaries at the Edinburgh Conference of 1910 besought the foreign societies not to withdraw or lose heart. We must therefore never forget to take into our purview the enormous French Moslem Empire in North and North Central and West Central Africa, and eastward to the borders of Darfur, for last

year the French occupied Wadai effectively. France grudgingly tolerates non-Roman missions in Algiers and Tunis. I do not know what her attitude would be to the idea of missions to Moslems in the Sahara or the Niger district or Lake Chad or Wadai. One imagines that such missions would be at present barred, and if this is so it calls for earnest prayer; for on the attitude of France depends the evangelization of these vast regions.

Under Russia:

On the 17th of April, 1905, the new law of Religious Toleration was promulgated in Russia. One of the first results of this was the return of some 50,000 so-called converts to Christianity to their former Moslem allegiance. And they took with them some converts who were not formerly Moslems.

The astounding thing is that Russia appears to allow Islam to proselytize, even from the Greek Church, while proselytizing efforts or results on the part of non-Greek religious communities are still very severely discountenanced by the government. All my Russian informants are clear on this point. Thus Russian neutrality appears to be a very ambiguous affair, for the attitude which we have here described acts as an unlimited encouragement to the Moslems, while it places many forces of earnest Christian effort still under severe and vexatious restraints. Under these conditions the race is unequal.

The Russian lady who has studied the subject most, and has contributed a paper to this conference, adds: "Our government holds the same strange attitude to Islam as England seems to me to do in Egypt or Africa. It seems to me that our government is afraid of arousing the Mohammedan part of the nation by any such unjust and harsh measures which it is not afraid to apply towards Russian sectarians.

The effect of this policy is an en