Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/92

 Empire has been an effort to convert Eastern Christians to a Western interpretation of Christianity. But this their supporters in the United States have to this day never realized. Americans at home have assumed that the word Christian is an all-sufficing label, that the communicants of the Orthodox and Gregorian Churches in the East are Christians as Western Protestants understand the term, that Eastern Moslems are heathen in the Western meaning of the word; and on this assumption they have built up out of the mutual tragedies of racial and religious disentanglement in the Ottoman Empire, their Christian martyr-legend and the sorry butcher-legend which they have attached to the Turks.

The missionaries' supporters at home are firm believers in prohibition, but the missionaries themselves know that the liquor traffic in the Ottoman Empire has been in the hands of native and Western Christians, protected under the Capitulations by Christian Governments. Yet so habitual has the Christian attitude of superiority become, that American churchmen have actually gone to Constantinople within these last four years and have come away unhumbled. The city of Islam has been under the Christians' control for four years and the sight of it has been such a rebuke as Christendom has not suffered since the great Moslem reformation first purged the decadent Eastern Christendom of the Middle Ages. Americans at home have not yet learned that European Governments have sometimes accepted Christianity "in principle" rather than in fact, and that only when the Christians themselves, from British Foreign