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[Illustration: GALATA AND PERA AND THE BRIDGE OF BOATS CONNECTING WITH
STAMBOUL, CONSTANTINOPLE]


DAYBREAK IN TURKEY

by

JAMES L. BARTON, D. D.

Secretary of the American Board

Author of
“The Missionary and His Critics,”
“The Unfinished Task of the Christian Church,” etc.


[Illustration]


Second Edition






Boston
The Pilgrim Press
New York      Chicago

Copyright, 1908
by James L. Barton

The University Press, Cambridge, U. S. A.



     _To the revered memory of that noble company
      of men and women of all races and creeds who
      have toiled and sacrificed and died that
      Turkey might be free, this volume is dedicated._




FOREWORD


This book was not written in order to catch popular favor at this time
of revolution in the Ottoman empire. All except the concluding chapter
was prepared some time before the 24th of July, 1908, and the entire
work was at that time nearly ready for the press. Much of the material
had been used in the Hyde Lecture Course at Andover Seminary and in
the Alden Lecture Course at the Chicago Theological Seminary. The
chapter, “Turkey and the Constitution,” was written since the overthrow
of the old régime, and appeared as an article in _The Outlook_ in
September, 1908. The book does not pretend to be an exhaustive study of
the Turkish empire and its problems. Such a work would necessarily be
encyclopedic in its size and scope.

The purpose from the beginning has been briefly and clearly to set
forth the various historical, religious, racial, material, and national
questions having so vital a bearing upon all Turkish matters, and which
now reveal the forces that have had so much to do in changing Turkey
from an absolute monarchy into a constitutional and representative
government. Reformations have never come by accident, and this moral
and political revolution in Turkey, the most sweeping of all, is no
exception. To one who traces the entrance and development in the
Ottoman empire during the last century, of reformative ideas in the
religious, intellectual, and social life of the people, the present
almost bloodless revolution presents no mysteries. It is but the fruit
of the seeds of intelligence, of righteousness, and of holy ambition,
sown in good soil and now bearing fruit after their kind.

                                                 J. L. B.
    BOSTON, December, 1908.




CONTENTS


      CHAPTER                                        PAGE
          I. THE COUNTRY                              13
         II. ITS RESOURCES                            21
        III. HISTORY AND GOVERNMENT                   29
         IV. THE SULTAN, THE HEART OF TURKEY          39
          V. RACE QUESTIONS AND SOME OF THE RACES     49
         VI. THE ARMENIANS                            63
        VII. MOSLEM PEOPLES                           71
       VIII. TURKEY AND THE WEST                      83
         IX. A STRATEGIC MISSIONARY CENTER            91
          X. SOCIAL, MORAL AND RELIGIOUS CONDITIONS   99
         XI. CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM                  111
        XII. EARLY PIONEERING AND EXPLORATIONS       117
       XIII. ESTABLISHED CENTERS                     135
        XIV. BEGINNINGS IN REFORM                    147
         XV. LEADERS, METHODS, AND ANATHEMAS         155
        XVI. RESULTS                                 169
       XVII. INTELLECTUAL RENAISSANCE                179
      XVIII. THE PRINTING-PRESS                      195
        XIX. MODERN MEDICINE                         205
         XX. STANDING OF MISSIONARIES                211
        XXI. COMPLETED WORK                          221
       XXII. INDUSTRIAL AND RELIGIOUS CHANGES        231
      XXIII. AMERICAN RIGHTS                         239
       XXIV. RELIGIOUS TOLERATION                    247
        XXV. THE MACEDONIAN QUESTION                 259
       XXVI. GENERAL POLITICAL SITUATION             265
      XXVII. CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT               273

             INDEX                                   289




ILLUSTRATIONS


    Galata and Pera and the bridge of boats connecting
          with Stamboul, Constantinople               _Frontispiece_
    A group of official Turks in prayer for the Sultan
          upon his birthday                                       42
    An Armenian Ecclesiastic                                      68
    A Koordish chief of Southern Koordistan                       68
    A mountain village in Eastern Turkey                          94
    The Bosporus, Constantinople                                  94
    Robert College, Constantinople                               184
    Syrian Protestant College, Beirut, Syria                     184
    A class of native students, graduates from the American
          College for Girls, Constantinople                      224

            The illustration on the front cover shows the ruins
            of the Arch of Constantine, Salonica, Macedonia.




INTRODUCTION


One of the obstacles which lie in the path of the European when he
wants to arrive at the true opinion of the Oriental is that the
European, especially if he be an official, is almost always in a hurry.
If, he thinks, the Oriental has anything to say to me, why does he not
say it and go away? I am quite prepared to listen most attentively,
but my time is valuable and I have a quantity of other business to do;
I must, therefore, really ask him to come to the point at once. This
frame of mind is quite fatal if one wishes to arrive at the truth. In
order to attain this object, the Oriental must be allowed to tell his
story and put forward his ideas in his own way; and his own way is
generally a lengthy, circuitous, and very involved way. But if any one
has the patience to listen, he will sometimes be amply rewarded for his
pains.

I once asked a high Moslem authority how he reconciled the fact that an
apostate could now no longer be executed with the alleged immutability
of the Sacred Law. The casuistry of his reply would have done honor to
a Spanish Inquisitor. The Kadi, he said, does not recognise any change
in the Law. He would, in the case of an apostate, pronounce sentence
of death according to the Law, but it was for the secular authorities
to carry out the sentence. If they failed in their duty, the sin of
disobeying the Law would lie on their heads. Cases of apostasy are very
rare, but during my tenure of office in Egypt, I had to interfere once
or twice to protect from maltreatment Moslems who had been converted to
Christianity by the American missionaries.

The reasons why Islam as a social system has been a complete failure
are manifold.

First and foremost, Islam keeps women in a position of marked
inferiority. In the second place, Islam, speaking not so much through
the Koran as through the traditions which cluster round the Koran,
crystallises religion and law into one inseparable and immutable whole,
with the result that all elasticity is taken away from the social
system. If to this day an Egyptian goes to law over a question of
testamentary succession, his case is decided according to the antique
principles which were laid down as applicable to the primitive society
of the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century.

                                     —LORD CROMER in “Modern Egypt.”

No other country is so hard to understand, in its political,
intellectual, industrial, and religious conditions, as the Turkish
empire. This difficulty is augmented by the fact that no one of these
conditions can be even measurably understood without a knowledge of the
others. It is this which accounts for the widely divergent opinions
expressed by casual travelers, and makes well-nigh impossible an
explanation of Turkish phenomena to one who as yet knows nothing of the
country and people, of actual conditions and the reasons for them.

Turkey differs in almost every respect from all other countries.
Its government has no parallel either in fundamental principles of
organization or in methods of administration. It is unique in its
religious beliefs, unexampled in its educational conditions, and
incalculable in its dealings with moral and religious questions. We
entertain notions of right and wrong that are generally accepted
by the nations of Christendom as well as by many others not so
classed. These conceptions constitute the fundamental principles of
international usage and form the basis for what we call International
Law. To conclude, however, that these generally accepted principles
will command recognition in Turkey as the basis for its international
relations is to invite disappointment. Turkey recognizes no such law as
having force in its empire.

In the dealings of one nation with another it is customary to regard
the verbal pledge of a sovereign or cabinet minister as worthy of
credence, and a basis for negotiations, at least, if not for final
adjustment. This notion must be laid aside as purely academic and
visionary, in dealing with Turkey.

In view of such facts, it is plain that no phase of Turkish life or
affairs can be clearly understood without considerable knowledge of
the country and its history, the government and its administrative
processes, the diversified religions of its people, and their
interdependence. Such a knowledge is especially necessary to anything
like an intelligent comprehension of the problems and methods of
mission work in the empire of Turkey.

All the chapters of this book except the last were written as they
stand, some months before the promulgation of the Constitution on July
24, 1908. A reading of this manuscript suggests no alterations in
the light of recent facts except the addition of a statement of the
immediate events that led to the overthrow of the old régime and the
inauguration of the new order. Obviously only the transitions can be
recorded here. The new constitutional government has yet to demonstrate
its stability.




I. THE COUNTRY


    In attempting to understand this motley field, two
    principles of the empire must always be kept in mind. One
    is the Mohammedan principle, which allows non-idolatrous
    peoples to retain their religion on payment of a poll-tax,
    at the same time freeing them from military duty. The
    other is the Turkish principle, which allows different
    nationalities to remain distinct, but requires them
    to be represented before the sultan by a political or
    religious head. There is no assimilating power tending to
    unify these many races and religions, like that of the
    British, or even the Mughals, in India. The consequence
    is that all these separate units form a conglomerate
    state, binding religions and nationalities together in a
    repellent contact ready to fly apart into fragments the
    moment the external fettering bond snaps.
                                       —EDWARD A. LAWRENCE
                            in “Modern Missions in the East.”

When the Turks laid siege to Vienna in 1529 it was the period of their
greatest prosperity. If at that time the entire Ottoman empire had
been enclosed by a modest wall it would have taken a large army of
workmen from that day to the present to tear down the old boundaries
and reerect them upon the new lines. A most interesting feature of this
constant change is that it has been almost uniformly a decrease in the
area of the empire. At that time it was the most powerful realm in the
world. It included all the states bordering upon the Mediterranean
except Spain, France, Italy, and Morocco, the entire Black Sea coast,
and nearly all that of the Red Sea, as well as the lower Danube
district. Gradually province after province and state after state have
slipped from the grasp of the sultan. The decline became decided in
1606 beginning with the treaties of the Sitavorok. With the treaty of
Carlowitz in 1699 it amounted to actual dismemberment. The epithet,
“The sick man of the East,” was applied to the sultan, after this loss
of prestige from which he never recovered. The retrograde movement
continued through the seventeenth century. While the Ottoman empire had
been the object of extreme fear upon the part of the nations of Europe
up to the beginning of that century, each of them vying with the rest
in seeking the favor and good-will of the reigning sultan, at the
beginning of the eighteenth century Turkey had reached a point where
it was protected by its relative weakness. It no longer inspired fear
in the hearts of European rulers, while its impotency and the mutual
antagonism of its subject non-Moslem races rendered aggressive national
action practically impossible. Parts of its territory became wholly
lost, like the Danube provinces, the Caucasus and Tunis, while other
sections became semi-independent like Bulgaria, Cyprus, Crete, and
Egypt.

The Turkish empire may now be defined as covering Macedonia in Europe,
extending west to Greece, northward to include Albania, Bulgaria, and
Adrianople,—all of Asia Minor to the Russian and Persian borders upon
the east, Syria and Arabia, with two small sections of Africa and a few
islands in the Mediterranean. It exercises no actual control of Egypt,
while its hold upon parts of Arabia is constantly contested by the
people themselves.

The size and population of territory under direct control of Turkey are:

    Europe       65,350 sq. miles; 6,130,200 inhabitants
    Asia        693,610  “     “  16,898,700      “
    Africa      398,900  “     “   1,000,000      “
              —————————           ——————————
              1,157,860           24,028,900

Under indirect control:

    Bulgaria and Eastern
         Roumelia           37,200 sq. miles; 3,744,300 inhabitants
    Bosnia, etc.            19,800  “     “   1,591,100      “
    Crete                    3,330  “     “     310,400      “
    Cyprus                   3,710  “     “     237,000      “
    Samos                      180  “     “      54,840      “
    Egypt                  400,000  “     “   9,820,700      “
                           ————————          ——————————
                           464,220  “     “  15,758,340      “

This makes a total area covered by both the immediate and quasi
possessions of the sultan 1,622,080 square miles, with a population of
39,787,240. These are the figures given by the Statesman’s Year-Book,
the best attainable authority upon the subject; but even these must
be taken largely as estimates and not as the results of a careful and
reliable census,—something that never takes place in Turkey.

It may be said, therefore, that at the present time the sultan of
Turkey actually rules over only Constantinople, the Macedonian
provinces in Europe and Asia Minor to the borders of Russia and Persia,
extending south through Syria and into Arabia. This includes an area of
about 704,000 square miles, and a population of about 23,500,000.

These countries directly and indirectly governed by the Turkish empire
command the interest of the Biblical, classical, and historical student
beyond any other part of the earth. No other land possesses so many
antiquities of such priceless worth. Turkey is the stage upon which
many of the best-known characters of literature and history have lived
and acted. It is the battle-field where, for more than thirty-five
centuries, contending civilizations and hostile religions, under
ambitious leadership, have met in bloody conflict. There is hardly a
section of it that has not been connected directly with some well-known
historical personage or race or that has not given the setting to some
event of world-wide renown. This is true from Salonica on the Ægean Sea
to Persia upon the east, and from Trebizond upon the Black Sea at the
north to Aden at the southern point of Arabia. The ruins of massive
castles and fortresses, moats and walled cities, that tell of former
strength, of pride and of conflict, are found in almost every part of
the empire. Inscriptions in many languages adorn the cliffs or are
built into walls now crumbling to ruin. Fragments of ancient roads
with arches of bridges and of aqueducts still standing, as old as our
Christian era, tell of the engineering skill of the early possessors of
the land.

In the soil thrown up beneath one’s feet are found gold, silver,
bronze, and copper coins, with dates varying from six hundred years
before our Christian era to the coin of the present ruler of the realm.

The ancient city of the Trojans, for ten years defended by Priam
against the finally successful assaults of Agamemnon and his Greeks,
was upon what is now Turkish soil. Many of the scenes pictured in the
Iliad and the Odyssey have their staging in what is modern Turkey.
Assyria and Babylon and Nineveh there arose into prominence, wielded
their power, and passed into ruin. Darius and Xerxes crossed and
recrossed this country; and Cyrus met his great defeat and Xenophon
made his immortal retreat and all within Turkey. Alexander the Great,
born in Macedonia, conducted many of his brilliant campaigns, fought
with Darius and defeated him, occupied Sidon and annexed Babylon and
Nineveh to the throne of Greece, and died in Babylon while planning the
conquest of Arabia; all in territory now subject to Sultan Hamid II.

At the time of Christ much of Asia Minor was a Roman province. Ruins
of Roman roads and Roman bridges, in many parts of the country, extend
to the northern borders of Mesopotamia, while Roman coins and Latin
inscriptions are too common to attract special attention. It is safe to
say that there is no other part of the world which presents so much of
permanent interest to the student of classic literature and life as the
territory now covered by the Turkish empire.

The same is true in no less striking measure of the literature and life
recorded in the Bible. Probably all Old Testament history, except that
part which was enacted in Egypt, belongs to the geography of Turkey;
and Egypt, until recent years, was a part of that empire. The Tigris
and Euphrates rivers rise and flow throughout their length upon Turkish
soil. Chaldea, Haran, Mt. Moriah, Sinai, the Wilderness, Nineveh, and
the Promised Land are a part of the present Moslem empire. Turkey
includes the land of the prophets and kings of Israel, and from what is
to-day her domain the Hebrew poets sang; there, too, the temples were
built, the chosen race was scattered, enslaved, and restored.

Except for one brief sojourn of our Lord in Egypt, his entire life
was passed on what is now Turkish territory. With few exceptions the
apostles lived and labored and wrote and died in regions now ruled over
by the sultan of Turkey. The great foreign missionary, Paul, spent but
little time outside this country, while the site of the seven churches
of the Apocalypse is in Turkish territory. The most of our Christian
Scriptures were written in the same country, passing from there to the
west.

The land of Turkey may well be called the cradle of classic and
Biblical literature of the Jewish and Christian religions as well as
that of Islam. All this, however, be it not forgotten, refers only to
the territory covered to-day by the Turkish empire and not at all to
the empire itself.




II. ITS RESOURCES


    The dominion of the Ottoman clan, which should have been
    a mere passing phenomenon, like the similar dominion of
    another Tartar clan in Russia, owes its continuance,
    as we read its history, to three causes, two of them
    intellectual. The first is the extraordinary, indeed the
    absolutely unrivalled force displayed through ages by the
    descendants of Othman, the Tartar chief from Khorassan.
    The old line, “An Amurath, an Amurath succeeds,” has been
    substantially true. Sprung originally from a stock welded
    into iron by the endless strife of the great Asiatic
    desert, mating always with women picked for some separate
    charm either of beauty or captivation, the sultans,
    with the rarest exceptions, have been personages, great
    soldiers, great statesmen, or great tyrants. Mahmoud the
    destroyer of the Janissaries, who only died in 1839—that
    is, while men still middle-aged were alive—was the equal
    in all but success of Amurath I, who organized, though
    he did not invent, that terrible institution; and even
    the present sultan, in many ways so feeble, is no Romulus
    Augustulus, no connoisseur in poultry, but a timid Louis
    XI, who overmatches Russians and Greeks in craft, who
    terrifies men like his Ottoman Pashas, and who is obeyed
    with trembling by the most distant servant of his throne.
    The terrible emir of Afghanistan, whose satraps, while
    ruling provinces and armies, open his letters “white in
    the lips with fear,” is not regarded with more slavish
    awe than Abdul Hamid, the recluse who watches always in
    his palace against assassination or mutiny. We have only
    to remember what the Hohenzollerns have been to Prussia,
    to understand what the family of Othman, defended as they
    have been against revolution by the Mussulman belief that
    “when Othman falls Islam falls,” has been to a fighting
    clan.
                —MEREDITH TOWNSEND in “Asia and Europe.”

The countries under Turkish rule are lands of real resource, and yet
a superficial view of the greater part of the Turkish empire gives
one the impression of extreme poverty. Throughout most of the country
the hills have been denuded of timber, and trees are found only where
they are cultivated. There are still some forest lands bordering on
the southern shores of the Black Sea, especially towards the east. In
Armenia, the region in which the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have their
rise, even the roots of the scrub-oaks that grow upon the low mountains
and high plateaux are dug up for fuel. The crops, in large part, are
raised by the most primitive methods of irrigation, although in the
western part of Asia Minor, as well as in other sections, considerable
high land crops are produced. These are uncertain, owing to frequent
failure of the rains. There are other large sections, like the plains
to the north of the modern city of Diarbekr—the ancient city of Amida
upon the banks of the Tigris—where for lack of surface water a large
area of the richest arable land lies waste, except as flocks and herds
roam over it during the rainy season in the spring.

Yet there are few countries in the world that can boast of richer
or more productive soil than can Turkey. There are desert regions
in Arabia, but these are not as extensive as we have been wont to
suppose. Turkey exports more foodstuffs than she imports, although
her agricultural resources are but slightly developed. The method of
farming is entirely antiquated, the same primitive plow being in
constant use to-day that was employed by Abraham in the fields of
Haran. In spite of this fact, wheat of excellent quality, barley,
rice, millet, cotton, tobacco, the opium poppy, and almost all kinds
of vegetables, as well as grapes, plums, cherries, olives, quinces,
oranges, lemons, figs, and pomegranates are produced in great
abundance. The mulberry-tree flourishes in many regions. Sheep, goats,
and a stunted breed of cattle and the water-buffalo, donkeys and horses
thrive in most parts of the country, while as beasts of burden the
camel and mule are found in all sections of Asiatic Turkey.

The country is also rich in minerals, but the mines are undeveloped. By
the laws of the land, all minerals belong to the government, hence no
private mining enterprises are permitted. Coal is found in many parts
of the country, but being a mineral, by government classification, it
cannot be mined except officially. Copper, silver, and lead abound, but
the few mines worked by the government have not been paying enterprises
except to the official in charge.

In a word, Turkey is naturally a rich country, with boundless resources
now largely undeveloped, with undreamed-of possibilities of increased
production under modern methods of agriculture and mining. It is
probably true that the empire includes some of the very richest land
and ore deposits in the world.

Exportation from Turkey is limited to the coast borders and to the
proximity of the few railways that exist. Railroads are confined to
the European district and the eastern section of Asia Minor, with
a short line reaching to Tarsus and Adana from Mersin and one from
Joppa up to Jerusalem. New lines are under construction intending to
connect Damascus with Mecca. Railroads cannot long be kept out of the
interior of the country. There are but few made wagon roads, nearly
all of which have been constructed since the Crimean war in 1854. One
of the most noted of these few roads over which wheeled vehicles can
pass extends from Samsoun upon the middle southern coast of the Black
Sea, through Marsovan, Tokat, Amasia, Sivas, Malatia, Harpoot, and
Diarbekr, ending at Mardin, a distance of nearly six hundred miles.
Some of the bridges planned were never built, and many were washed away
soon after construction. Another highway of a similar nature extends
from Trebizond to Erzerum. Others have been recently built in Northern
Syria. These roads never fail to be in poor repair. But the ordinary
roads are worse, being in all parts of the empire mere bridle-paths,
often worn deep in the solid rock by the hoof-beats of the caravans of
fifty centuries.

These conditions necessitate in the interior the transportation
of all freight by horse or camel, thus discouraging commerce and
trade, increasing the price of imports and making export practically
impossible. This explains why a famine may prevail in one part of the
country when at the same time, less than three hundred miles away, the
crops are abundant. A good system of railroads would revolutionize
everything. There is an abundance of foreign capital ready to
construct such roads. Some fifteen years ago the plan was practically
consummated to build a railroad from Samsoun through Asia Minor down
across northern Mesopotamia to Bagdad. At the last moment the plan was
thwarted by the sultan himself. In conversation upon this matter with
an intelligent Mohammedan official who had been educated in England and
France, the writer asked him if he did not understand that such a road
would bring much wealth into the country, and at the same time develop
far more wealth in the country itself. He was asked if he had studied
the railroads of America and Europe and observed the great value they
were in every way in those countries. His reply was characteristic.
It was in substance, “I know well that all that you say of the value
of railroads to a country is true. You have not overstated it. At the
same time I know, and so does my master, the sultan, that every dollar
of foreign capital that comes into this country under concessions as
an investment, curtails by so much the authority of the sultan in his
own domains. Such capital always brings with it foreign protection.
If his imperial majesty should change his mind, as he has full right
to do at any time, in regard to any of these concessions, he is at
once confronted by the protests of that country to which the capital
belongs, demanding that he adhere to the original agreement or pay
damages. The ruler of the Ottoman empire will never willingly submit to
such humiliation. When railroads are built through Turkey, his majesty
will construct them himself.”

This explains why foreign capital is not building railroads, developing
mines, and constructing factories in that country. It explains why, in
this respect, Turkey is still in the depths of the dark ages.

The telegraph system of the country is entirely in the hands of the
government and reaches every city of any considerable size. This
became necessary to the sultan in order to carry on the processes of
government. Telegrams are carefully censored; cipher despatches, when
known to be such, are not accepted except from ambassadors and from
foreign powers to their chief at the Porte, or vice versa. The postal
system is antiquated, irregular, and uncertain, reaching only the large
towns upon the limited cross-country routes. Telephones are strictly
prohibited.

In Constantinople and in several of the port cities like Smyrna,
Trebizond, etc., there are foreign post-offices supported and conducted
by foreign countries and using foreign stamps. These became necessary
because of the unreliability of the Turkish offices. The local
government has made several attempts to abolish the sale and use of
foreign postage-stamps in the country, but has failed of accomplishing
it because the representatives of the leading foreign powers are
unwilling to trust their mail to Turkish supervision and control.




III. HISTORY AND GOVERNMENT


    Even now, when we all talk of the Turkish empire as
    moribund, it is doubtful if it will perish under any decay
    from within. The subject races do not grow stronger, as
    witness recent scenes in Armenia, where a single tribe,
    with only tolerance from the sultan, keeps a whole
    people in agonies of fear. The Arabs, full-blooded and
    half-caste, who might succeed in insurrection, find
    the strength of civilized Europe right across their
    path, and are precipitating themselves, in a fury of
    fanaticism and greed, upon the powerless states of the
    interior of Africa. The European subjects of the sultan
    are cowed, and without foreign assistance will not risk
    a repetition of Batouk. The army for internal purposes
    is far stronger than ever, the men being the old Ottoman
    soldiers, brave as Englishmen, abstemious as Spaniards,
    to whom the Germans have lent their discipline and their
    drill. No force within the empire outside Arabia could
    resist the reorganized troops or hope to reach, as no
    doubt the first Mahdi if left alone might have reached,
    Constantinople itself. The financial difficulties of the
    treasury are great, but the sultans have recently risked
    and have survived complete repudiation, and the revenue is
    enough, and will remain enough, to keep the army together
    and supply the luxury of the palace.
                   —MEREDITH TOWNSEND in “Asia and Europe.”

We cannot trace here the story of the rise and spread of Islam from its
cradle in Arabia to the period of its greatest virility in 1529, when
all Europe trembled at its onward sweep and conquest. We can speak only
of the rise of the Ottoman empire that has been perpetuated in unbroken
succession to the present time.

Near the middle of the thirteenth century a tribe of Turks, not
Suljuks, left their camping-grounds in Khorassan, urged on by the
Mongol invaders, and wandered into Armenia. This tribe was divided into
four sections; one of these, led by Ertogrul, went into Asia Minor,
and there became allied with Aladdin the Suljukian, sultan of Iconium.
He settled upon the borders of Phrygia and Bithynia and there his son
Othman, or Osman, who became the founder of a dynasty and an empire,
was born and nurtured. The name “Ottoman Empire” or “Osmanli Turks”
came from him. The name “Othman” signifies “bone-breaker.”

The young man succeeded his father as the head of the tribe. He united
in his character the traits of shepherd, freebooter, and warrior.
Osman’s ambition was fired by a dream of conquest that seated him
upon the Byzantine throne. He was upon the border of the decaying
Greek empire to the west, and back of him were the vast, restless
populations ready to enlist under any leader of strength and action. He
invaded Nicomedia July 27, 1299, from which time his reign is usually
dated. This was parallel with Edward I of England, Philip the Fair of
France, and Andronicus Palæologus the elder of Constantinople. Slow
encroachment was made upon the imperial domains of the Greek empire,
while at the same time his authority was extended over considerable
districts in the north and west of Asia Minor, including large parts of
Phrygia, Galatia, and Bithynia. Prusa (Brusa) was captured and became
the residence of Othman, and was the seat of his government when he
died in 1326.

Othman was succeeded by Orchan, his son, who extended the boundaries
of the infant state with marked rapidity. He took Nicæa, the rest of
Bithynia, the greater part of Mysia, and was the first Turkish ruler
to pass over into Europe. He coined money in his own name, and assumed
the prerogatives of royalty, and began the systematic organization
of his government. A permanent military force was established. One
of his strongest military organizations was composed of the children
of conquered Christians who were reared in Islam, inured from their
youth to the profession of arms. These became the famous Janissaries
perpetuated in the conquests of the Turkish government until the middle
of the nineteenth century. They were distinguished for their valor
and fanaticism. Through more than three centuries, marked by a long
series of great battles, they experienced only four signal reverses.
One of these was by Tamerlane, in 1402, and another by the Hungarian
general, John Huniades, in 1442. The present methods of administration
of the Ottoman empire are due in no small measure to the despotic
nature and fanatical character of the Janissaries. Their assumption
finally reached such a state that it became necessary to extirpate them
by the sword to prevent their exercise of authority over the sultans
themselves. This was accomplished by Mohammed II in 1826.

Amurath I succeeded Orchan in 1359. He began at once to make advance
against the Greek throne, which was much weakened by its schismatic
separation from the Roman church. In 1361 he took Adrianople in Europe
and made it his official residence, and the first European capital
of the Ottoman power. His successor, Bajazet I, changed the title of
“Emir” for that of “Sultan,” which name has been perpetuated. He set
the example, followed so repeatedly since, of putting his only brother
to death in order that he might not aspire to the throne. He extended
his domains east to the Euphrates and north to the Danube. He boasted
that he would yet feed his horses on the altar of St. Peter’s in Rome.
He was captured by Tamerlane in 1402, dying the following year in
captivity. Tamerlane held undisputed sway over Asia for a few years. A
son of Bajazet, Mahomet I, restored the empire of his fathers in its
integrity. It was during his reign, 1413-21, that the first Turkish
ambassador appeared abroad. He was sent to Venice. The sultan himself
paid a visit to the emperor Manuel at Constantinople.

Without dwelling upon the successive sultans and the advances made
by each, it is sufficient to record that most important of all the
victories, the capture of Constantinople, the capital of the Greek
empire, by Mohammed II, the seventh in succession from Othman, on May
29, 1453, in the second year of his reign. This terminated the Greek
empire, 1123 years after Constantine the Great had removed his imperial
throne to Byzantium, changing its name to Constantinople. Consternation
prevailed among the European nations, especially in those immediately
contiguous to the Mohammedan empire.

From that time to the present day, Constantinople has been the
residence of the sultans ruling over the Ottoman empire, and the seat
of the Turkish power. Much of the machinery of government now in use
was organized and put into operation by Mohammed II. The administrative
departments were constituted in what was then called “The Porte,” while
the head of the department was given the well-known name of “Sublime
Porte.” This name came from the metaphorical resemblance between a
state and a house or tent. The most important part of the tent was the
entrance in which the chiefs sat for the administration of justice, as
well as for the performance of other duties.

Mohammed died in 1481. Succeeding sultans for a century seriously
threatened the institutions of Western nations. In the religious
conflicts of the sixteenth century the pope of Rome was undecided which
to fear the more, the Protestants or the Turks.

The Ottoman empire reached the zenith of its power under Suliman, the
tenth sultan, whose reign was the longest in the annals of the empire,
from 1520-1566. He is often known in Europe as Suliman “the great” or
“the magnificent,” but Moslem writers name him “the lawgiver.” In 1525
the French ambassador appeared at the Ottoman court. The first European
states to stipulate regular capitulations with the Porte were Genoa and
Venice, which accomplished this in 1453 and 1454 respectively. These
were confirmed and enlarged by succeeding sovereigns to 1733. France
next secured capitulations in 1528, which were afterwards amplified,
renewed, and confirmed down to 1861. The first treaty relations of
England with Turkey were in 1579. Other European nations followed in
orderly succession, until the United States concluded its first treaty
at Constantinople, May 7, 1830, which was ratified at Washington, Feb.
4, 1832.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century the Ottoman empire covered
Europe, Macedonia, Adrianople, Greece, and the greater part of Hungary,
while in Asia it held all of Asia Minor, Armenia, Georgia, Daghestan,
the western part of Koordistan, Mesopotamia, Syria, Cyprus, and the
chief part of Arabia. In Africa, Egypt, Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers
acknowledged allegiance to the sultan at Constantinople; and the
khanate of Crimea, the principalities of Wallachia, Moldavia, and
Transylvania with the republic of Ragusa were vassal states. Diplomatic
and commercial relations had been established between the Porte and the
leading European nations. From that time the great power then possessed
began to wane.

Fundamentally the laws of Turkey are based upon the teachings of
the Koran. The only restraint upon the acts of the sultan are the
accepted truths of Islam as laid down in the sacred book of the prophet
Mohammed. Next to the Koran the authority is a code of laws formed of
the supposed sayings and opinions of Mohammed, and of sentences and
decisions of his immediate successors. These are called the “Multeka,”
and are binding upon both the sovereign and his subjects. Beyond these
the will of the man who occupies the throne of the Ottoman empire is
absolute and must be unquestioned by every subject.

The sultan, therefore, is at the head of every department of
government, amenable to no laws except the law of the Koran. He
appoints two high dignitaries,—the grand vizier, to be the nominal
head of the temporal government, and the Sheik-ul-Islam, to be the
head of the spiritual government. The Sheik-ul-Islam presides over the
“Ulema,” a body made up of the Mohammedan clergy, the great judges,
theologians, and jurists, as well as the noted teachers of Mohammedan
literature and science.

There is no constitution to exercise directing influence over either
the sultan or his subordinates. The grand vizier is nominally at the
head of the government and represents the sultan. At the present
time he has come to be only the agent of the sultan in carrying out
his wishes, having little authority to act independently. The privy
council, over which the grand vizier presides, is composed of the
following officials or cabinet officers:

    Sheik-ul-Islam
    Minister of Justice
        “     “ War
        “     “ Marines
    President of the Council of State
    Minister of Foreign Affairs
        “     “ the Interior
        “     “ Finance
        “     “ Pious Foundations
        “     “ Public Instruction
        “     “ Commerce and Public Works

The whole of the country is divided into vilayets or states, and
these are subdivided into sanjaks or provinces, which, in turn, are
also divided and subdivided. The ruler in a vilayet is a vali or
governor-general, who receives his appointment directly from the
sultan, and who, with the assistance of a provincial council, is
master of the vilayet. He has power over the inferior officers of his
district, whom, theoretically at least, he appoints and removes at
will. There are eight of these vilayets in Europe, eleven in Asia, five
in Armenia, three in Mesopotamia, six in Syria, two in Arabia, and two
in Africa, making thirty-seven in all. The man at the head of each one
of these states, averaging a population of about 700,000 souls each, is
accountable to the sultan alone for his position and to him he makes
constant secret reports. These valis are frequently recalled and more
frequently changed from place to place by orders issued directly from
the throne. In this way the sultan controls all parts of his dominions
and personally determines the character of the administration. All
policies carried out in any part of the empire are his own and cannot
be otherwise under present conditions.




IV. THE SULTAN, THE HEART OF TURKEY


    The general tendency of Islam is to stimulate intolerance
    and to engender hatred and contempt not only for
    polytheists, but also, although in a modified form, for
    all monotheists who will not repeat the formula which
    acknowledges that Mohammed was indeed the Prophet of
    God. Neither can this be any matter for surprise. The
    faith of Islam admits of no compromise. The Moslem is
    the antithesis of the pantheistic Hindoo. His faith
    is essentially exclusive. Its founder launched fiery
    anathemas against all who would not accept the divinity
    of his inspiration, and his words fell on fertile ground,
    for a large number of those who have embraced Islam are
    semi-savages, and often warlike savages, whose minds
    are too untrained to receive the idea that an honest
    difference of opinion is no cause for bitter hatred. More
    than this, the Moslem has for centuries past been taught
    that the barbarous principles of the _lex talionis_ are
    sanctioned, and even enjoined by his religion. He is told
    to revenge himself on his enemies, to strike them that
    strike him, to claim an eye for an eye, and a tooth for
    a tooth. Islamism, therefore, unlike Christianity, tends
    to engender the idea that revenge and hatred, rather than
    love and charity, should form the basis of the relations
    between man and man; and it inculcates a special degree
    of hatred against those who do not accept the Moslem
    faith. “When ye encounter the unbelievers,” says the
    Koran, “strike off their heads until ye have made a great
    slaughter among them, and bind them in bonds.... O true
    believers, if ye assist God, by fighting for his religion,
    he will assist you against your enemies; and will set your
    feet fast; but as for the infidels, let them perish; and
    their works God shall render vain.... Verily, God will
    introduce those who believe and do good works into gardens
    beneath which rivers flow, but the unbelievers indulge
    themselves in pleasures, and eat as beasts eat; and their
    abode shall be hell fire.” It is true that when Mohammed
    denounced unbelievers he was alluding more especially to
    the pagans who during his lifetime inhabited the Arabian
    Peninsula, but later commentators and interpreters of the
    Koran applied his denunciations to Christians and Jews,
    and it is in this sense that they are now understood by a
    large number of Mohammedans. Does not the word “Ghazi,”
    which is the highest title attainable by an officer of
    the sultan’s army, signify “one who fights in the cause
    of Islam; a hero; a warrior; one who slays an infidel”?
    Does not every Mollah, when he recites the Khutbeh at the
    Mosque, invoke Divine wrath on the heads of unbelievers
    in terms which are sufficiently pronounced at all times,
    and in which the diapason of invective swells still
    more loudly when any adventitious circumstances may
    have tended to fan the flame of fanaticism? Should not
    every non-Moslem land be considered in strict parlance a
    Dar-el-Harb, a land of warfare? When principles such as
    these have been dinned for centuries past into the ears of
    Moslems, it can be no matter for surprise that a spirit of
    intolerance has been generated.
                             —LORD CROMER in “Modern Egypt.”

The present sultan, Abdul Hamid II, is the thirty-fourth in direct
male succession from Othman and the second son of Sultan Abdul Medjid.
He succeeded to the throne upon the deposition of his brother, Murad
V, August 31, 1876, at the age of thirty-four. By the Turkish law of
succession the crown is inherited according to seniority by the male
descendants of Othman springing from the imperial harem. All children
born in the harem, whether from free women or slaves, are legitimate
and possess equal rights. The sultan is succeeded by his eldest son,
in case there are no uncles or cousins of greater age. The present
heir apparent to the throne is the oldest brother of the sultan, who
outranks all of the five sons of Abdul Hamid as heir to the throne.
It is not the custom of the sultans to contract regular marriages.
The harem is kept full of women by purchase, capture, or voluntary
offering. Most of the inmates come from districts beyond the limits of
the empire, largely from Circassia.

The sultan is, without question, the most phenomenal person sitting
upon any throne to-day. Educated within his own palace, having passed
but once beyond the borders of the land in which he was born, he is
able to outwit and outmatch in diplomacy the combined rulers of Europe.
He has administered his widely-extended and varied empire in accordance
with the unmodified Moslem principles of the Middle Ages, and has
successfully defied all attempts upon the part of Christian nations to
change his policy. Without a navy he has succeeded in averting repeated
threats of attack by the strongest navies of the world. With depleted
and diminishing resources he has held his creditors at bay, capitalized
his indebtedness, and continued to live in lavish luxury. It is true
that his refusal to comply with the demands for reform have at times in
the past led to the loss of some of his possessions, still he does not
seem to have learned therefrom any permanent lesson.

Turkey as a whole has never been so unrighteously governed as it is
to-day, and, in spite of the pressure of European governments, there is
little prospect of radical reforms so long as the present sultan sits
upon the throne. While he is an astute and unprincipled diplomat and
a tireless sovereign, he is not a reformer in any sense of the word.
So long as he is sultan, he proposes to be master, preferring to lose
entire provinces rather than to share the administration with any. He
yields only when subterfuge fails and the policy of delay is rejected;
after he has yielded, he devotes himself to vitiating the advantages
his subjects might gain by his concessions.

Personally timid and fearful, he astonishes the world by the boldness
of his strokes at home and his stubborn resistance to pressure from
abroad. Himself profoundly religious, he horrifies all by the wholesale
murder of his subjects through his lieutenants acting upon direct
orders from the palace. This he has done repeatedly, and it is a
part of his method of administering his home affairs and keeping his
subjects properly subdued.

[Illustration: A GROUP OF OFFICIAL TURKS IN PRAYER FOR THE SULTAN UPON
HIS BIRTHDAY]

The present political, social, economic, and religious problems of
Turkey center in the sultan. Few countries in the world would respond
so quickly to the influence of good government, and few people would
so appreciatively welcome a firm and righteous administration as the
people of Turkey.

The sultan exercises his power through his army and his appointees
to office. The Turks make perhaps the best soldiers in the world.
They are strong, inured to hardship, uncomplaining, and practical.
To them all war with non-Moslems and rebels—and they fight with no
others—is holy war. Only Mohammedans are enrolled in the army, and all
such, over twenty years of age in the country, are liable to military
service until they are forty. The empire is divided into seven army
administrative districts, in each of which is located an army corps.
These are Constantinople, Adrianople, Monastir, Erzerum, Damascus,
Bagdad, and the Yemen, with the independent divisions of the Hejaz and
Tripoli. The infantry are armed with Mauser rifles. The effective war
strength of the Turkish army is 987,900 men. The navy possesses no
fighting power.

The governing force of the empire is strictly Mohammedan. The army
is indeed a church militant with no unbeliever among its officers or
men, except as European military experts are employed to drill and
discipline the troops. The entire administration of both civil and
military affairs is a religious administration. Men of other religions
are asked to take part in civil affairs only when Mohammedans cannot
be found to do the work required. Many high positions, even in the
cabinet, have been creditably filled by Armenians and Greeks, but this
is the exception and not the rule. Turkey agreed some time ago to admit
Christians to her army, but has never seen her way clear to carry out
the agreement. At the center of this Mohammedan administration sits
the sultan, Hamid II, with his valis or governors at the head of
affairs in every province, in close and constant communication with
himself and carrying out his imperial will. These local governors are
sustained by the Moslem army, commanded by officers who also receive
their instructions directly from the palace on the Bosporus.

This is the system of administration that has become established in the
Ottoman empire, and that must be borne in mind as we proceed with the
study of the country, the people, their economic, social, and religious
conditions.

The position of Turkey and of the Ottoman empire is unique among the
countries of the world. For centuries it has stood before the world as
the one great Mohammedan temporal power, with its laws and usages built
upon the tenets, traditions, and fanaticisms of Islam. Every civilized
definition of a government fails when applied to Turkey, and every
conception of the duty of a government to its subjects is violated in
the existing relations between the Turkish government and the people of
that empire. Under these conditions, much worse now than they were two
generations ago, mission work is carried on.

While there are many Turkish officials who keenly deplore the evils of
the system, and would change if they could the untoward relations of
the government to its oppressed subjects, they are powerless to act
and must even conceal their dissatisfaction for fear of being branded,
as many have been, as traitors to the existing rule, for which charge
the penalty is banishment or death. There is a general feeling that no
reform can be inaugurated or carried out so long as the present monarch
sits upon the throne.

A distinguished Orientalist, intimately acquainted with affairs at
Constantinople, has recently written upon the sultan and his diplomatic
methods in the following terms. For obvious reasons the identity of the
writer is concealed:

Rarely has a young sovereign been in a more desperate and apparently
hopeless position than Abd-ul-Hamid occupied in the third year of his
reign, 1878. His armies had been utterly beaten in a great war. His
people had no confidence in their country, or their future, or their
sultan. Prophecies were widely current about 1878-1882 identifying
him as the last sultan of Turkey and the consummator of its ruin. The
treasury was almost bankrupt. He himself had, and still has, a dislike
and fear of ships, which paralyzed his fleet during the war that had
just ended, and has ever since left it to rot in idleness, until there
is at the present day, probably, not a Turkish ship of war that could
venture to cross the Ægean Sea in the calmest day of summer.

The sultan alone in Turkey did not despair. He alone saw how the power
of the sultans could be restored. And twenty-eight years after he
seemed to be near the end of a disastrous and short reign he is still
on the throne, absolute autocrat to a degree that hardly even the
greatest of the sultans before him attained, in close communication
with the remotest corners of the Mohammedan world from the east of Asia
to the west of Africa, respected and powerful in Moslem lands where the
name of no former sultan was known or heeded, courted by at least one
leading Power in Europe and by the great American republic.

The last fact is, perhaps, the most remarkable of all in this strange
history. The diplomatists of America, so strong and self-confident in
their dealings with the greatest of European Powers, so accustomed to
say to them all, “This is our will and intention,” have for many years
been the humblest and most subservient of all the Christian Powers
in their attitude to Turkey, aiming always at imitating the German
policy and being on the friendly side of the Turks, but forgetting that
Germany has that to give which America has not, and that America has
interests to protect in Turkey of a kind which Germany has not.

The sultan had the genius or the good fortune to divine almost
from the beginning of his reign what only a few even yet dimly
comprehend,—the power of reaction and resistance which Asia can oppose
against the West. He formed the plan of consolidating the power of the
entire Mohammedan world, and placing himself at the head of this power,
and he has carried the plan into effect. The sultans had always claimed
the position of khalif, but this had hitherto been a mere empty name,
until Abd-ul-Hamid appealed from his own subjects, who rejected him,
to the wider world of Mohammedans, won their confidence, and made them
think of him as the true Commander of the Faithful.

One naturally asks whether this result was gained through the strength
of a real religious fervor or through the clever playing of an astute
and purely selfish game. While there may have been something of both
elements, I do not doubt that there was a good deal of religious
enthusiasm or fanaticism; the first idea could never have been struck
out without the inspiration of strong religious feeling.

It used to be said about 1880 by those who were in a position to
know best—no one has ever been in a position to have quite certain
knowledge in Constantinople—that the sultan was a Dervish of the class
called vulgarly the Howling, and that when (as was often the case)
the ministers of state summoned to a council had to wait hour after
hour for the sultan to appear, he was in an inner room with a circle
of other Dervishes loudly invoking the name of Allah and working up
the ecstatic condition in which it should be revealed whether and when
he should enter the council. I do not doubt that the great idea of
appealing to the world of Islam was struck out in some such moment of
ecstasy. At the same time, Abd-ul-Hamid has had a good deal to gain
from the success of this policy.

Europeans who have been admitted to meet the sultan in direct
intercourse are almost all agreed that he possesses great personal
charm and a gracious, winning courtesy. On the other hand, ministers of
state used to speak with deep feeling of the insults and abuse poured
on any, even the highest, who had the misfortune to express an opinion
that did not agree with his wishes.

An official in the palace described very frankly—it is wonderful
how freely and frankly Turks express their opinion; this seems
inseparable from the Turkish nature—to an Englishman whom he knew well
the situation in the palace at the time when an ultimatum had been
presented, and before it was known what would be the issue; how the
sultan was flattered up to believe that he had only to go into Egypt
and resume possession, and that the English would never resist. The
Englishman remarked, “But you know better than that, and of course you
give better advice when the sultan asks your opinion.” “God forbid,”
was the reply, “that I should say to the sultan anything except what
he wishes me to say. No! when he asks me, I reply that of course the
master of a million of soldiers has only to enter Egypt and it is his.
And it is not for nothing that I do this. The sultan is pleased with
me, and signs some paper that I have brought him, and it may be worth
10,000 piastres to me.”

The sultan hates England with a permanent and ineradicable hatred;
this feeling dominates and colors his whole policy; it is only for
that reason that he tolerates Germany, which otherwise he dislikes.
England has always been the friend of the Reform party in Turkey; and
the sultan is the great reactionary who has trodden the Reform party
in the dust. But, worse than that, England, pretending to help Turkey,
took possession of Cyprus, nominally to enable her to guarantee Turkey
against Russia in Asia Minor, but really (as it seems to the Turks)
by pure theft, because all pretence of using Cyprus as a basis of
operations against Russia in Asia Minor was abandoned in 1880, and yet
England kept Cyprus.

Now to the sultan the sting lies in this, that Cyprus was his private
appanage, and not part of the State. The whole revenue of Cyprus went
to the sultan’s privy purse. But worse still: at first the English paid
over the Cypriote revenue, about £95,000 a year, to Constantinople, but
after the Gladstonian government came into power, in 1880, this revenue
was diverted to pay interest on the Turkish debt, emptying the sultan’s
private purse into the lap of the European bondholders.

The sultan, therefore, welcomed the German intervention, for the
Germans encouraged him to govern as he pleased. They even persuaded him
that railways were necessary for military efficiency, and showed that
the Hedjaz Railway must be the foundation of his khalifate. Yet the
railways that he has made, and the Moslem schools that he has founded,
are the surest means of educating his people, and education is the
inevitable enemy of autocracy.

The German policy has seemed to be very successful in promoting German
interests in Turkey. But, after all, the ground fact is that the German
policy was an opportunist policy, and the English policy, ignorant and
ill-managed as it has been, was founded on deeper principles. History
will record hereafter that the former proved a failure, and that the
hatred of a people more than compensated for the favor of an evanescent
tyrant. The same struggle is going on in Turkey as in Russia—the
educated part of the people on one side, a tyranny resting on
bureaucracy and obscurantism on the other. Whatever may be the faults
of Abd-ul-Hamid, his worst enemy must place him on an immensely higher
level than the czar on any point of view, humanitarian or patriotic,
personal or political. But for England in Turkey the greatest danger
is that she be tempted to Germanize her policy from experience of the
apparent German success. Her policy has been, on the whole, the wiser,
but it has been carried out with an ignorance of Turkish facts that is
appalling.




V. RACE QUESTIONS AND SOME OF THE RACES


    The rigidity of the Sacred Law has been at times slightly
    tempered by well-meaning and learned Moslems who have
    tortured their brains in devising sophisms to show that
    the legal principles and social system of the seventh
    century can, by some strained and intricate process of
    reasoning, be consistently and logically made to conform
    with the civilized practices of the twentieth century.
    But, as a rule, custom based on the religious law, coupled
    with exaggerated reverence for the original lawgiver,
    holds all those who cling to the faith of Islam with a
    grip of iron from which there is no escape. “During the
    Middle Ages,” it has been truly said, “man lived enveloped
    in a cowl.” The true Moslem of the present day is even
    more tightly enveloped by the sheriat.

    In the third place, Islam does not, indeed, encourage, but
    it tolerates slavery. “Mohammed found the custom existing
    among the Pagan Arabs; he minimised the evil.” But he was
    powerless to abolish it altogether. His followers have
    forgotten the discouragement, and have very generally made
    the permission to possess slaves the practical guide for
    their conduct. This is another fatal blot in Islam.

    Lastly, Islam has the reputation of being an intolerant
    religion, and the reputation is, from some points of view,
    well deserved, though the bald and sweeping accusation of
    intolerance requires qualification and explanation. The
    followers of the Prophet have, indeed, waged war against
    those whom they considered infidels. They are taught by
    their religious code that any unbelievers, who may be
    made prisoners of war, may rightly be enslaved. Moreover,
    sectarian strife has not been uncommon. Sunni has fought
    against Shiah. The orthodox Moslem has mercilessly
    repressed the followers of Abdul Wahab. Further, apostasy
    from Islam is punishable with death, and it is not many
    years ago that the sentence used to be carried into
    effect. On the other hand, the annals of Islam are not
    stained by the history of an Inquisition. More than this,
    when he is not moved by any circumstances specially
    calculated to rouse his religious passions, the Moslem
    readily extends a half-contemptuous tolerance to the Jew
    and the Christian. In the villages of Upper Egypt, the
    Crescent and the Cross, the Mosque and the monastery,
    have stood peacefully side by side for many a long
    year.
                           —LORD CROMER in “Modern Egypt.”

All questions relating to the internal government of the Ottoman
empire would be greatly simplified and much more easily comprehended,
were the people of Turkey substantially of one race like those of
China or Japan. But this is not the case. As the Moslems overran
Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Asia Minor, they conquered peoples
of other races than themselves and of other religions. In their wars
of conquest the Mohammedans revealed a degree of toleration which is
to be commended. All conquered people were asked to embrace Islam.
If they persistently refused, they were conceded the right to live
upon the payment of an annual tribute _per capita_. The acceptance
of this condition was an outward recognition that the Moslems were
their masters, while the money thus obtained enabled the conquerors
to extend their conquests. Whoever declined to accept Islam and
refused to pay the life tax was put to the sword. This left within the
conquered districts only two classes, the Mohammedan rulers and those
who, by annual tribute, confessed themselves to be a conquered people,
permitted to live from year to year by virtue of the money paid.

It is most natural that this distinction, perpetuated for thirty
generations, should lead to aggravated relations of conqueror and
conquered. It was inevitable that the Moslems should become imperious
and the other people depressed and subservient.

In order to understand certain governmental and religious phases of
the Turkish empire, it is essential that we look a little in detail
into the history and characteristics of these divergent elements of
its population which together make up the populations of that country.
It is a subject preeminently of races and religions. Within the empire
there is only one unifying force and that is Mohammedanism. All who
embrace Islam, irrespective of the race from which they sprang, become
an integral part of the governing body. Such begin at once to use
either the Turkish or the Arabic language and to bear the name “Turk.”

Besides this one unifying force, there is no tendency to bring
together the different races or to amalgamate them. There is little
intermarriage. Each race has its own language and its distinct
religion. To them all religion is racial, or, as they call it,
“national.” A man without a religion is beyond their conception; and
under the laws of the empire he can have no place in any community or
possess any rights that others are bound to respect. Each man, woman,
and child must be registered upon the rolls of some national church.
There his name stands, and in that record his rights inhere until he
changes to Islam. Turkey allows few rights or privileges to one not a
registered member of a religious community.

We will consider briefly a few of the old historical and, in some
cases, once powerful races, now found in that empire, and among which
mission work is carried on. Only by acquaintance with these races can
we understand the real factors in the problem.

There are the many non-Moslem races of Syria, the country first
overrun by the Moslem invaders as they pushed their way northward. The
races who occupy that country in connection with perhaps one million
Mohammedans are the Nusairiyeh, the Maronites, Greeks and Armenians,
Jacobites, Druses, and Jews. The three mentioned here especially
peculiar to Syria are the Nusairiyeh, the Maronites, and the Jews.


THE NUSAIRIYEH

The Nusairiyeh number a quarter of a million souls or more and are
perhaps the most degraded of all of the races in Turkey. They are
also most difficult to classify religiously or ethnologically. Their
religion is a mixture of ancient heathenism, the survival of certain
Gnostic beliefs, tinged strongly with Mohammedanism. The Mohammedans
claim them, as they do the Koords and Albanians. They dwell in the
mountains north of Syria and along the Mediterranean coast as far north
as Cilicia. Their origin is lost in obscurity. At present they are
decidedly a mixed race. Their name comes from Nusair, who led them in
their separation from the Shiites, of which they were a branch. The
Nusairiyeh are most reticent upon the subject of their religion. It is
regarded as an unpardonable sin to reveal their religious beliefs and
rites. They worship the moon, which they think is the throne of Ali,
and the sun, which is the throne of Mohammed. They also worship fire,
the waves of the sea, and anything that manifests power. They believe
in transmigration of the soul, progress being upward or downward
according to the life of the individual.

It is, in short, a rude, primitive, rough, and ignorant race,
absolutely under Turkish sway and terribly oppressed. Little progress
has yet been made in the line of mission work among them. The Turks
guard them with a jealous eye, and the severest persecutions await all
who profess Christianity, and every effort is made to prevent their
education and general enlightenment.


THE MARONITES

The Syrian Maronites number not less than 250,000 and are scattered all
over the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon ranges. They are found in largest
numbers in the northern districts of Lebanon and there they have
control of local affairs. They are also found as far south as Mount
Hermon in the country of the Druses. The hostility of these two races
led to the massacres of 1860 in which thousands of the Maronites were
slain. They take their name from John Maron, their first patriarch
and political leader, who died in 701 A. D. They were mixed up with
the Monophysite controversy in the sixth and seventh centuries. In
an attempt to reconcile them, John Maron, a Monothelite (one will)
leader, at the time of the Moslem invasion, conducted them into the
high mountains of the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, where for five hundred
years they maintained their independent existence in the face of
every attempt to subdue or dislodge them. They developed qualities of
manly strength and industry. Their language was the Syrian and their
government a simple feudal system. They had a patriarch with Episcopal
dioceses at Aleppo, Balbek, Jebeil, Tripoli, Ehden, Damascus, Beirut,
Tyre, and Cyprus.

This interesting people was discovered to the world by the Crusaders
and through them were brought under the wing of the Roman Catholic
Church at the Council of Florence in 1445. They adopted the Arabic
language but retained their old Syriac ritual. They are to-day
recognized as followers of the Church of Rome with a form of worship
somewhat modified to meet their special conditions. The Jesuits and
forces of the Catholic Church have made every effort to prevent the
Protestant missionaries from getting a foothold among them. Much,
however, has been done for them by both the Presbyterian Board North,
and the Free Church of Scotland. The Irish Presbyterian Church of
Damascus is reaching the Maronites in that part of the country.
Education is greatly transforming the race and through this they are
becoming more and more responsive to evangelical religion.


THE DRUSES

The Druses are a smaller sect numbering probably not more than 100,000,
possibly less, and occupying the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon in touch with
the Maronites. They are found as far north as Beirut and as far south
as Tyre, extending even to Damascus. Their chief town is Deir-el-Kamor,
about fifteen miles southeast of Beirut. They are decidedly a mixed
race with the blood of the Crusaders mingling with that of native
and invading peoples. They are a people of an unusually high order
of intelligence and outward refinement. They are an offshoot of the
Mohammedans through the fanatical, if not insane, leadership of one of
the caliphs of Egypt who began to reign in 996. One Darazi who made
known the claims of the caliph to divine incarnation led these people
into the mountains of Lebanon and is supposed to have given them his
own name.

They believe in one God and in a fixed number of human souls that can
never be increased or diminished. This resemblance to the religions of
India is probably due to Persian teaching. They recognize the claims
upon them of no other religion, and yet with manifest indifference
they join in the prayers of the Mohammedans in their mosques and
sprinkle the holy water of the Catholic Church with the Maronites,
according as expediency may require. They have seven commandments:

    1. Speaking the truth (only between Druses, however).
    2. Combination for mutual defense.
    3. Renunciation of all other creeds.
    4. Social separation from all who are in error.
    5. Recognition of the unity of Hakim with God.
    6. Complete resignation of the will.
    7. Obedience to orders.

They believe in free will and reject the fatalism of the Mohammedans.

When the Mohammedans inaugurated the massacre of the Maronites to check
their growing strength under Christian enlightenment, the Druses joined
with the Turks as the enemies of Christianity. It was this massacre
which led to the intervention of Europe, resulting in the exclusion of
Turkish officials from the Lebanon and the establishment of a special
government for that district with a Roman Catholic governor and a
mixed council under a constitution drawn by the European Powers. This
has made a great change in the Lebanon, affording the people of that
vilayet larger freedom of action and greater exemption from Turkish
persecution than are enjoyed in any other part of the Turkish empire.
The Druses and Maronites live on terms of harmony. They are a brave,
fine-looking and enterprising people, living mostly by agriculture.


THE JEWS

The Jews are too well known in both ancient and modern history to
demand space here. While they are found in considerable numbers in
Syria, possibly as many as eighty thousand, they do not hold an
important position in relation to the government of that country, or in
the mission problems. While the Jews in Russia are always at the front,
in Turkey they seldom appear. The Turks seem to have no fear that they
will interfere in any way with the affairs of state.

They do not command the prominence commercially in Turkey that they
do in most other countries. In the city of Constantinople it is
estimated that there are seventy-five thousand Jews, and in the other
large cities of the empire they exist in smaller numbers. They are an
inoffensive people, attending to their own affairs and not interfering
with the other races, all of whom look down upon them as inferior. In
many places in the interior where they appear in small numbers they
are, for the most part, extremely poor.


SYRIANS OR JACOBITES

There is probably no distinct race in Turkey that may be called Syrian.
Dwelling in Syria and extending north into Mesopotamia and east towards
Persia are Christian peoples who do not belong to any of the races
mentioned, but who are the direct descendants of the early Christian
Church. This country has been the great meeting-ground of nations,
over which have swept from time to time Egyptians, Greeks, Armenians,
Persians, Mongols, Koords, and Europeans of every name and race. The
presence of the sacred places of the Christian faith has called forth
pilgrimages and given occasion for conflicts. It was here that the
early Christian Church was named, and here have dwelt some of the
greatest of the fathers of the early Greek Church, such as Ignatius,
Justin Martyr, and Jerome. In those earlier days missionary influences
went out from that land to other regions and countries.

Under the special effort of Constantine and his mother, Helena,
pilgrims began to turn their steps towards Palestine, and monasteries
sprang up all over the country. When Chosroes of Persia swept over
that land, he slaughtered Christian monks by the thousand. Then came
the Arabs with Mohammedanism, who converted some of the churches into
mosques, but left others for the service of the Christians. Many
Syrians accepted Islam and the strength of the Church waned. At the
time of the crusades there were not more than five hundred thousand
Christians in the country, according to some estimates. To win these
the Roman pontiff had made prodigious efforts, but for the most part
they refused to acknowledge the supremacy of the pope.

The Syrian Church, therefore, is the remnant which remains from the
conflicts and persecutions of the last eight centuries. It does not
represent a single race or people, but is able to trace its pedigree as
a church back to the very beginnings of Christianity. The remnants of
this early church are found throughout Palestine and northern Syria,
including Damascus. They are found also in Mosul, Mardin, and northern
Mesopotamia in considerable numbers. In the northern regions they are
sometimes called _Jacobites_. There are many strong men among them and
in some places not a little of the pride and glory of the old church
remains. Some of their old churches and monasteries contain valuable
manuscripts in the Syriac language of ancient date. The spoken language
of these people is now, for the most part, Arabic.

They have suffered much persecution from the Mohammedans, especially
from the Suljuk Turks, which had much influence in arousing the
knighthood of Europe to enter upon the crusades. After the failure of
the crusades these Christians were again subject to Moslem misrule at
the hands of the Mohammedan sultans of Egypt and invaders from Turkey.
The whole land was conquered in 1517 by the Ottoman Turk, Selim I.
Except for the brief period (1832-1841) when Syria was held by Ibrahim
Pasha, this country and this church have been under the rule of the
sultan who sat upon the throne in Constantinople.

As the manuscript Bibles, liturgy, and church books were in Syriac,
while the common people spoke and understood only the Arabic,
Christianity became largely a matter of form from which the spirit had
departed. The same conditions prevailed here which we shall discuss
later in the Gregorian Church.


THE GREEKS

The Greeks claim that they have the oldest Christian Church, since they
are the heirs to the old Byzantine empire at Constantinople, and use
even now in their worship the Greek of the apostles and the liturgy of
the early fathers. They constituted the majority at the first seven
ecumenical councils, dominating in no small degree by their philosophy
and thought the doctrines there established. They contend with the
Syrian Church over priority of origin. The political history of the
Greek Church began with the conversion of Constantine in 312 A. D.,
when persecution ceased and Christianity became the state religion.

We do not need for our present purpose to trace the history of the
Church of Constantinople down to its separation from the Church of Rome
in 1054, and the capture of the city by the Turks in 1453.

During this period the Church conducted a vigorous missionary
propaganda. Cyril and Methodius went into Thessalonica and Bulgaria
and there did substantial fundamental Christian work. Russia was also
reached from this center and the czar was baptized and the nation
became Christian.

In government, the Greek Church is Episcopal. The temporal power
centers in the patriarch. There are several of these, the chief of
whom resides at Constantinople, although the patriarchs at Antioch,
Alexandria, and Jerusalem have nominally the same authority. Under
Turkish rule the office of the patriarch has been exalted into
practically the head of the Church, the bishops exercising spiritual
authority alone. This arrangement is the same that exists in the
Gregorian Church, as we shall see later. The general synod, made up
of the bishops of the surrounding provinces, is presided over by the
patriarchs, whom they are supposed to elect, but whose election must
always be confirmed by the sultan of Turkey. The authority by which the
patriarch acts comes from a firman or charter granted by the sultan.

In 1833 the branch of the Greek Church now included in the kingdom
of Greece severed itself from primary dependence upon the patriarch
at Constantinople. The Church of Russia, up to the middle of the
seventeenth century, was holden to the Constantinople patriarch to
confirm the primate of Moscow. Peter the Great in 1712 curtailed
the authority of this primate, putting in his place the Holy Synod,
over which the czar is supreme. These changes left the patriarch at
Constantinople with authority over only the Greek churches within the
bounds of the Turkish empire. The Greek Church of Roumania and Servia
soon became independent and in 1870 the Church of Bulgaria withdrew and
reunited under one chief bishop called the Bulgarian exarch.

One prominent fact that must be constantly kept in mind is that
after these churches had separated from the mother Church and become
independent of her control, they constituted what is virtually another
Church. Relations one with the other were completely severed, and often
violent hostility prevailed. In 1905 a severe and bloody conflict was
waged in Macedonia between officers of the Greek Church who claimed
allegiance to the Synod at Athens, and officers of the same Church who
recognized as their head the Bulgarian exarch. Hostility was as severe
and bloody as between Moslems and Christians. Church buildings were
captured, the one from the other, and loyal subjects fought to the
death in resistance of these attacks. This is a fact that must be taken
into consideration as the various Churches and Christian sects in that
part of the world are studied and their relation to Mohammedanism and
the Turkish empire weighed.

We are not especially concerned here with the peculiar beliefs of
this Church. We are not dealing with the question from a theological
standpoint, but from the general standpoint of its relations to the
government of Turkey and to the other coreligionists within the empire.

The most of the adherents of the Greek Church within the Turkish empire
are Greeks. They are a strong, hardy, vigorous and intelligent race.
Many of them are direct descendants, without doubt, of mighty men
of valor who held their own in the face of overpowering odds in the
early days of Greek chivalry. In Constantinople, where some 175,000
live to-day, they stand first among the bankers and leading merchants.
Greeks figure largely in Smyrna and in fact in all of the cities of
western Asia Minor, while they are found as far in the interior as
Marsovan, Cæsarea and Sivas. As one goes still farther east, Greeks for
the most part disappear and their place in trade and commerce is taken
by Armenians. It is an interesting fact that along the upper Tigris
and Euphrates rivers, where mines exist, in many instances there is a
colony of Greeks close by. Tradition reports that these are descendants
of the men left behind in the famous retreat of the Ten Thousand across
that country to Trebizond upon the Black Sea.

These Greeks, while citizens of Turkey, it may be, for fifty
generations, not infrequently refer to the king of Greece as “our king
George.” Along the borders of Macedonia towards Greece they cause the
sultan much trouble by their sympathy with that kingdom rather than
with him. For the most part, throughout Turkey they are quiet and give
little trouble by revolutionary propagandism.

In educational institutions the Greek youth show superior intellectual
ability and unusual eagerness. In commercial affairs they rank second
to no other race and as merchants they have already gone into all the
earth. Destitute of the intense national feeling of the Armenians,
they have not given the Turkish government the trouble and anxiety
that the Armenians have caused. As their fatherland is outside the
borders of the present Turkish empire there is no fear upon the part
of the Turkish rulers that they will attempt to set up an independent
government. They have not, therefore, suffered the persecution that has
been laid upon the Armenians.




VI. THE ARMENIANS


    When I was in Constantinople I felt the restless tossings
    of long enthralled nationalities awaking to the new
    destinies that might be theirs—Armenians thirsting for
    their lost country and dispersed people; Bulgarians
    panting and striving for freedom in a Greater Bulgaria;
    Egyptians claiming independence; Jews praying for a return
    to the land of David and Solomon; Greeks dreaming strange
    dreams of a greater and united Greece, yes, even of an
    eastern empire restored to them, with Constantinople
    as its centre. I saw the Turk, still defiant but
    apprehensive, dimly conscious that the end is near at
    hand, lamenting the sins of his people—such sins as that
    the women do not wholly veil their faces, that the men do
    not slay the infidels. I discerned the subtle plotting
    of diplomacy to guard or gain the Queen City, and so
    the empire of the East. Everything seemed then, as now,
    uncertain. It might be peace, it might be war; but all
    were sure that the old was breaking up, whether to make
    way for inrushing floods of destruction, or for better
    days and nobler nations, none could tell. Then I went to
    the most sacred and vital spot of Stamboul, not to St.
    Sophia, which, with all the lights and prayers of Ramazan,
    testified only to the degradation and defeat of the purer
    by a coarser faith, which had become God’s scourge. I
    went to the Bible House, and there first, while all was
    shaking about, I felt that I stood upon a rock, the very
    Rock of Ages. The old city had fallen because it was built
    upon a shut Bible; this city was about to fall because it
    was built upon the Koran. But here on the open Bible was
    being reared a city which hath a foundation whose builder
    and maker is God.
                                   —EDWARD A. LAWRENCE in
                              “Modern Missions in the East.”

Of all the races and sects of the Ottoman empire, none except the Turks
are so closely identified with the country, its progress and present
conditions, as the Armenians. They have been preeminently the means
and occasion for prosecuting missionary work there, and the Armenian
question has been discussed in the parliaments of all Europe and even
now is far from solution.

The Armenians constitute one of the two distinct Christian peoples in
the empire, the other being the Greeks. They stand with the Greeks,
a keen rival for the honors of antiquity, while from the Christian
standpoint they hold a position entirely unique. Their antiquity,
racial strength, intellectual alertness, large numbers, and importance
in that empire all demand a more extended consideration.

There are two distinct sources from which account of them comes,—one,
their own historians, and the other, contemporary historians. According
to the former, they are the direct descendants from Noah through
Japheth, who was the father of Gomer, the father of Togarmah, who begat
Haig, the father of the Armenian race. It is a fact to be noted here
that they always refer to themselves not as Armenians but as Haiks,
and to their country as Haiasdan. They find no little difficulty in
pronouncing the word “Armenia.” The name “Armenians” was applied to the
race by outside nations because of the exploits of one Aram, the king
of Haiasdan, the seventh removed from Haik, who made many conquests and
impressed the power of his arms upon the weaker people about him. To
these people the Haiks were the followers of Aram and so were called
Armenians. The Armenians claim that their present language, except for
the changes that have crept in through the centuries, was spoken in the
ark. Their traditions blend in the third and fourth centuries before
Christ with many facts of Assyrian, Median, and Greek history, so it
is impossible to differentiate precisely where legend ends and history
begins.

There is no doubt that during the Assyrian and Median period there
was in Armenia, which included the mountains of Ararat, and the upper
Araxes, Euphrates and Tigris rivers, centering perhaps in the region of
Lake Van, a well-organized and powerful monarchy. The ancient Assyrian
records show that this people had to be reckoned with in all plans for
campaigns in the Ararat country, and not infrequently the invaders were
compelled to retire in apparent haste. Well-preserved inscriptions
are found upon the cliffs at Van and in the same language across the
country six hundred miles or more to the east, which show the presence
there (700 B. C.) of a powerful and warlike people. Whether these were
the progenitors of the present Armenian race or whether they were
conquered by some stronger invading force, which completely dominated
the country, is not as yet clear.

The last of the Haig dynasty, Vahe, formed an alliance with Darius III
against the Macedonians. He was defeated by the forces under Alexander
and was slain. The people were without a leader for one hundred and
thirty years, and were trampled upon and plundered by invading armies
from every side. About 190 B. C. two Armenian nobles arose who divided
the kingdom and ruled over it. This divided kingdom was again united
under Tigranes (Dickran II) in 89 B. C. In 67 B. C. the Armenians
became an ally of Rome, and in 30 B. C. were made tributary. For two
and a half centuries thereafter the entire country was again in turmoil
and political disorder. From that time to the present the Armenians
have never represented a political power that needed to be reckoned
with. Their people were scattered with no uniting force, without a
commanding leader or a distinctive country.

A little Armenian kingdom in Cilicia in the Taurus Mountains maintained
an existence until 1375 A. D. Since that time Armenians have had no
political existence whatever. They have been, and are still, a people
without a country, a nation without a government.

As soon as the Mohammedan invasion took place they had no alternative
but to yield to their conquerors or die. It was but natural that they
should scatter from the old ancestral haunts to all points of the
compass, in search of more liberty and a better opportunity to secure
a living. They have gone into every city, if not into nearly every
village of size in the empire. Before the massacre of 1895-96 there
were nearly a quarter of a million Armenians in Constantinople alone.
Their energy and enterprise and industry give them prominence in trade,
in the professions, and in the cultivation of the soil. They have gone
far beyond the borders of Turkey, and are found to-day in nearly every
country in the world. Many hold high and honorable positions in foreign
lands.

Armenians exist in larger numbers still in their old haunts about Lake
Van, where they constitute perhaps a majority of the population. In all
the cities of Eastern Turkey, extending from the Black Sea south into
northern Mesopotamia, westward to the Euphrates river, and beyond, they
hold a prominent place, although they are upon the whole a minority.
The rest of the population are mostly Turks, the ruling body, and the
Koords. These races, especially the Turks and Armenians, live in the
same towns, but never intermarry. The Koords live more by themselves in
the mountains. As we pass on into Asia Minor, the Armenians decrease
while the Greeks increase in numbers and in the importance of the
positions they command.

The Armenians are also numerous in northern Syria, especially in
the region near their last Cilician kingdom. Adana, Tarsus, Marash,
Aintab, Hadjin, Oorfa and many other cities in that region have a large
Armenian population. Their language is Turanian, constructed upon
the Greek model, and is especially rich in its power of expressing
Christian truths and sentiments. The most of the Armenians speak this
tongue, but some in the mountains of Koordistan speak only Koordish,
while the Armenians in northern Syria use the Turkish language. Turkish
is spoken by nearly all Armenians, as well as by all the races north of
Syria.

Religiously, the history of the Armenians is full of interest. Their
histories claim that at the time of Christ their king Abgar, called by
Tacitus the king of the Arabs, resided at Urfa in northern Mesopotamia.
He is reported to have had some communication with Christ, who, at
his death, through the apostle Thomas, sent Thaddeus to preach to
the Armenians. The king and his court were baptized. His successor
apostatized from the faith, and so Christianity was lost to the race
until the fourth century. At the beginning of this century St. Gregory
the Illuminator preached at the court of Armenia with such effect that
from that period to this Christianity has been the national religion.
The Church has held the race together. It is known as the Gregorian
Church, after St. Gregory, while the people themselves always refer to
their church as Loosavorchagan, derived from Loosavorich, meaning “The
Illuminator.” As this is the national Church, all Armenian children are
baptized in infancy and become members.

[Illustration: AN ARMENIAN ECCLESIASTIC

A KOORDISH CHIEF OF SOUTHERN KOORDISTAN]

At first the Gregorian Church took part in the ecumenical conferences,
but for some reason they had no representatives in the council which
met at Chalcedon in 451 A. D. In a synod of Armenian bishops in 491 the
decisions of the council of Chalcedon were rejected, and at a later
synod they declared openly for the Monophysite doctrine. This led to
their complete separation from the Greek Church.

Their church government is Episcopal, with the same form of patriarchal
control which dominates the Greek Church in Turkey. The bishop of the
main body of the Armenians resides at Etchmiadzin, their holy city, now
in Russia, not far from the Turkish borders. There is also a bishop
on the island of Octamar in the lake of Van, and another at Cis in
Cilicia, each with a small following. The bishops have authority over
the spiritual affairs of the Church, like the ordaining of priests
and vartabeds, while the two patriarchs, one at Jerusalem and one at
Constantinople, control its temporal affairs. As these patriarchs, and
especially the one at Constantinople, are in a measure the appointees
of the sultan, and as he represents his people in all their government
matters, the office is largely political and secular. The importance as
well as the delicacy of the position is greatly increased during the
times of political unrest.

At its beginning, the Church was as pure in doctrine and practise as
was the Greek Church at Constantinople. It was an important branch
of the Church of Christ on earth. The location of the unprotected
Armenians, in a country swept by invasion and persecutors of every
kind, made the position of the Church a most trying one. As illiteracy
increased, the spoken language of the people underwent marked changes.
The Church possessed most sacredly guarded manuscript copies of the
Scriptures and beautiful liturgies, all in the then spoken language
of the people. These were read at all church services and sermons
were preached by the officiating clergy. As the spoken language
changed during the last ten centuries, under the blasting influence
of Mohammedan rule, the sacred books of the Church ceased to speak to
the people. The priests read the words of the ritual, but neither they
nor the people understood it. The church was too holy a place in which
to make use of the vulgar vernacular, so the sermon was discontinued
because there was no one to preach in the classic tongue of the race.

Under these conditions the Christianity of the Gregorian Church became,
for the most part, a religion of form, from which the spirit had
departed. Thus bereft of the true power of Christianity and subject to
the temptations and persecutions of the Moslems among whom they dwelt,
it is not strange that the Christianity of the Gregorian Church lost
its vital power.




VII. MOSLEM PEOPLES


    What was said above concerning Islam as the hereditary
    faith of the Ottoman Turk does not hold true of the
    other Moslem races of Turkey. Koords, Circassians,
    Albanians—nearly half as many, all together, as the
    Turks—are, at best, but half Mohammedan. To a large
    extent the profession of Islam by Koords and Circassians
    is purely outward and formal, while their esoteric
    faith is a mixture of Mohammedanism, Christianity and
    heathenism. In grouping and generalization we cannot go
    farther than the statement just made. Take the Koords
    alone. There is almost infinite variety in their religious
    beliefs and superstitions. It is well known that there
    are whole villages among them ready to declare themselves
    Christians, could they be assured of protection in so
    doing. The Moslem Albanians—somewhat more than half the
    race—are more bigoted and violent Mohammedans than the
    Turks, just as the Janissaries, likewise of Christian
    origin, who were compelled from childhood to embrace
    Islam, out-Heroded Herod in the fanaticism of their
    anti-Christian zeal.

    With the exception of the Albanians, Islam has, in all
    the centuries of the reign of the Ottoman Power over
    these lands, made very slight gains from the Christian
    races. The number of Greek, Armenian, Bulgarian,
    Roumanian, Servian, Bosnian, or Montenegrin Mohammedans
    is insignificant. Of these seven races, for hundreds of
    years under Moslem sway, the number to-day free from
    Ottoman control is nearly equal to the entire population,
    Moslem and Christian, now directly under Turkish
    domination.
                       —From “The Mohammedan World of To-day.”


THE KOORDS

Besides the Turks and Armenians, no race in Turkey has commanded
more attention during the past two decades than the Koords. They
have attracted the notice of the world by their large part in the
Armenian massacres in 1895-96 as well as by their relations to the
sultan himself through the organization and arming of the Hamidich
cavalry within the last quarter of a century. They were almost unknown
and unheard-of except locally until they came into prominence at the
time of the siege of Erzerum by the Russians in 1876, when the Koords
were used by the Turks in defense. They rendered little real service,
however.

Whatever else may be said, this race has now to be reckoned with in all
plans for propagating Christianity in any form in Eastern Turkey and
western Persia, as well as in all questions of order in that region.
Sometimes they are in open conflict with the Turks, and troops are
mobilized and sent against them in their mountain fastnesses. Again
they are provided with arms by the government and sent out to subdue
and suppress revolutionary bands of Armenians who are more ambitious
than discreet in their endeavors to obtain liberty.

Little is known of the origin and history of this wild and most
interesting people. They probably are the direct descendants of the
Karduchi, who occupied the same plateaus and commanded the same
mountain passes that the Koords now hold. It is probable that they
are not a race by themselves, but a collection of tribes with little
among them all that is common except their hardihood, roughness, and
tendency to plunder. One chief, whom the writer knew, declared that
his ancestors came to the upper waters of the Tigris from Mesopotamia
some eight centuries ago, and, after conquering the region, ruled it as
feudal lords. That form of government is in existence among them even
at the present time. Undoubtedly the word Koord, Kurd, Gutu, Gardu, or
Karu, has been promiscuously applied to any mountain race, clan, or
tribe occupying the upper waters of the great rivers in that part of
the empire, if they were not already claimed by another race.

There are some marked distinctions between the peoples called Koords.
Some are nomadic and pastoral, taking their flocks into the north of
Armenia as the summer advances, and returning to the warmer regions of
the south as it recedes. These live almost entirely in black tents,
and, while they steal, are not generally robbers. Others settle in
villages and the men devote their time usually to robbing traders and
caravans passing through their country, and levying blackmail upon the
Armenians who dwell upon their borders. It is this class who cause both
the Turkish government and the Armenians the most trouble. A chief,
whom the writer knew personally, and at whose castle he has often
passed the night, boasted that he owned nearly four hundred villages
with the adjacent land, and could throw, within two days’ notice, two
thousand armed horsemen into a fight anywhere within the bounds of his
territory. He said that he had over three hundred armed men out upon
the road most of the time. His castle had dungeons, and was, to all
intents and purposes, a fort.

These various Koordish leaders not only have little in common, but
they are frequently in open conflict one with another. Could these
people unite under a bold leader and form an alliance with the Arabs of
the south, nothing in Turkey could stand against them. Many renowned
leaders from among the Koords have appeared from time to time. Saladin,
a noted ameer at the time of the crusades, was a Koord.

They occupy the mountainous regions throughout Eastern Turkey, reaching
far down the Tigris to Mosul and into Mesopotamia, extending into
Persia upon the east and coming west as far even as Anatolia. The mass
of the Koords dwell within this area, but not a few are found outside.
An estimate given of their numbers places it as high as 3,000,000.

Their languages are unclassified. There are two of them, neither of
which ever was put into writing except within the last generation, so
that the spoken tongues of those professing to speak the same language
greatly differ in different parts of the country. Their speech is
rough, like the life they live, and resembles in no small degree the
barren cliffs amid which they dwell.

Some years ago Sultan Hamid II conceived the idea of subduing the
Koords in the eastern part of his dominions by calling the chiefs
to Constantinople and making them each commander of a body of their
own people, giving this troop his own name as a special honor. The
chiefs were to provide the men and the horses and the sultan furnished
the equipment. The proposition was most acceptable to the Koordish
nobles, for it provided them with modern equipments of warfare and at
the same time stamped their acts, even of depredation, with official
authority. Under the new dispensation, whoever offered resistance to
a Koord armed with a government rifle, by that very act put himself
into open rebellion against the government. These conditions prevail
at the present time in the Erzerum, Bitlis, Diarbekr and Van vilayets
along the Russian frontier. Much of the trouble of the last fifteen
years in these regions is due to this fact. Were it not that the Koords
are urged by the government to take aggressive measures against the
resident Christian population, conditions there would be better than
they are at the present time.

It is often stated that all Koords are Mohammedans. The Turks take this
ground, as they do regarding the Albanians of Macedonia. The fact is
that few of the Koords are good Moslems. They do not hesitate to put
out of the way a Turkish tax-collector who makes himself obnoxious.
The fact that he is a brother Moslem interposes no obstacle. Many of
them observe few of the rites and customs of Islam, and one tribe, at
least, living along the upper waters of the Euphrates openly declares
that it is not Mohammedan. The writer, in conversation with a leading
man of that tribe, said, “You are a Mohammedan.” With great indignation
he spat into the air, and, beating upon his breast, he said, “I am
a Koord; Moslems are dogs.” They have certain religious rites which
greatly resemble some of the Christian customs, as, for instance, they
have a service in which bread dipped in wine is put into the mouths of
the kneeling participants by their religious leader. These people often
tell the Armenian Christians that their sympathy is with them rather
than with the Turks.

Owing to the claim of the Turks that all Koords are Mohammedans,
missionaries have not been able to inaugurate special work among them.
Throughout the country called Armenia and where the Armenians are the
most numerous, there also the Koords are found in the largest numbers.
Frequently they reside in the same city, side by side, but more often
the Armenians dwell in the plains, where they are the cultivators of
the soil, while the Koords live higher up the mountains. A study of the
regeneration of the Turkish empire cannot be complete without giving
large consideration to this ancient, wild and violent people.


THE TURKS

In Turkey the word “Turk” is used only to designate a Mohammedan. A
Greek who had accepted Islam would at once be called a “Turk.” It
would be said of him that “he had Turkofied himself.” In its ordinary
use, therefore, in Turkey it signifies a religious belief and that
alone. The same may be said of the other names for nationality, such
as Armenian, Greek, Jacobite, Yezidi, Koord, etc. Instead of using
the word “Mohammedan” at this point we will consider this part of our
subject under the title “The Turks,” thus keeping the national and
religious parallel intact.

The Turks of Turkey comprise every race that has ever lived within its
territory and has accepted Islam. As the people of the different races
embrace Islam, they come at once into the Mohammedan body and are in a
large measure unified with it by the common customs imposed upon them
through the government and by their religion. These assimilated races
marry and intermarry so that to-day, outside of Arabia, where the race
has been kept more free from mixture, it is difficult to find among the
Turks a clear racial type.

The original Turkish people were invaders, coming into the country
from the north and east for plunder and conquest. As soon as these
conquering hordes accepted Islam, every victory over a foe meant new
women for the harem and added men who chose Islam to tribute or death.
When the country had been overrun and Turkish rule was established,
there was exhibited the spectacle of a Mohammedan body of officials
from every race of the East, scattered over all parts of the empire,
except possibly some sections of Koordistan and Arabia, administering
a government over the other races dwelling among them. The Turks alone
could hold office, serve in the army, collect the taxes, and control
affairs. In Arabia the rulers or Turks (not so called there, however)
comprised the main part of the population and so had things their
own way. In all other sections of the country, other races, and not
infrequently races of strength and energy who had occupied that same
territory for generations before Mohammedanism arose, looked upon the
Turk as an intruder and were not slow to make him aware of the fact.
These were, for the most part, disorganized, and, by Turkish law,
disarmed, so that little could be done to change local conditions.

The Druses of Syria, the Koords in Eastern Turkey, and the Albanians
of Macedonia were reckoned as Mohammedans by their rulers. As these
people had few religious convictions of any kind, and as the Mohammedan
yoke placed upon them did not seem heavy, they fell in with the idea in
so far as it seemed to conserve their interests to do so. Even at the
present time, it is not clear how sincerely these races are Mohammedan.
It is thought by many who have been among them that their Mohammedanism
is largely in name. During recent years, undoubtedly influences have
been brought upon the Koords which bound them more closely to the
sultan, although this is not true of all classes of Koords.

Years of Turkish rule, by which the non-Moslem subject is looked down
upon as a “Raya” who has no rights that a Mohammedan is bound or
expected to respect, has made the Turk selfish and cruel, while it has
hardened the Rayas, and made them hate the government. It has come
to be generally understood that the government exists only for the
Turks, to serve whom the Rayas are permitted to live. Through several
centuries of Turkish rule, when the Raya subjects of the Turks were in
grossest ignorance and widely scattered in the country, they came to
accept in stolid silence the situation as divinely ordained. Something
of the fatalism of their masters seemed to settle down upon even the
Christian subjects and, with little complaint, almost human slavery was
accepted.

If the immediate possessions of Turkey include a population of about
24,000,000, probably 6,000,000 of these are nominal Christians, and
perhaps 1,000,000 are neither Christians nor Mohammedans.

It should be said that among the Turks are found men of great strength
of intellect, and not a few of high character. Every one who has been
in the country speaks of men of this class whom he has met. All would
probably agree with the statement that the Turk as a whole is far
better than his government.

It should also be stated that in recent years the Turks themselves have
been more boldly open in expressing their intense dissatisfaction with
the methods of government administration, especially in the eastern
part of the country. The New Turk Party, so called, has no one knows
how many followers, but undoubtedly it represents the modern spirit of
unrest and progress.


OTHER RACES

We need not speak at length of the Circassians, who in some respects
are the most interesting race in Asiatic Turkey. These are Mohammedans
who came into Turkey in large numbers after the Russian conquest of the
Caucasus. Their business is primarily robbery. They are a race which
must be reckoned with in the northern half of Asia Minor. We must pass
over the Turkmen, or Turkomans, who can be traced back at least eight
centuries. These are also Mohammedans and nomads in their habits. They
are found in considerable numbers, scattered mainly over the southern
half of Asia Minor. There are also the Albanians in the western part
of European Turkey, able to substantiate their claim of being one of
the purest and oldest races in Europe. These number perhaps two million
souls, and are more united as a race than either the Circassians or
the Turkomen. All three of these peoples are nominally Mohammedans,
and from them have come some of the ablest and best of the Turkish
officials.

The Bulgarians have a government of their own, practically independent
of Turkey. Many of these, however, dwell in Macedonia, together with
Turks, Albanians, and Greeks, and so constitute an important part of
the Macedonian question. These are Christian and were originally a part
of the Greek Church, with headquarters at Constantinople. They are a
sturdy, vigorous, and intelligent race.

Space forbids the mention of other minor races like the Yezidis,
neither is there call for a description of the Arabs who dwell in
Arabia and northward.

It is sufficient to say that all these divergent, crude, and often
hostile races, each with a religion differing from that of all others,
together constitute the people of the Turkish empire. The dominating
class is the Turk, representing the Mohammedan faith, but far from
harmonious even among themselves, except as they are practically
united in a common hatred of the Christians and in a common purpose to
keep them from gaining supremacy in wealth, number, intelligence, or
influence.

Outside of the large coast cities there are but few people in Turkey
who are not native to the country. Turkey has offered little attraction
to people of other countries for colonization. Far more are seeking to
leave that country than are attempting to enter it. The exactions of
the government upon all who dwell within the empire, the insecurity
of the protection afforded to life and property, and the risks which
gather about trade and commerce are not calculated to attract foreign
capital or induce natives of other lands to immigrate there.




VIII. TURKEY AND THE WEST


    Only last year the Arabic paper, Es-Zahir, published in
    Egypt, said: “Has the time not come yet when uniting the
    suppressed wailings of India with our own groans and
    sighs in Egypt, we should say to each other, Come, let
    us be one, following the divine words, ‘Victory belongs
    to the united forces’? Certainly the time has come when
    we, India and Egypt, should cut and tear asunder the ties
    of the yoke imposed on us by the English.” On the other
    hand, Mohammed Husain, the editor of a paper at Lahore,
    wrote a treatise on Jihad (1893), stating: “The present
    treatise on the question of Jihad has been compiled for
    two reasons. My first object is that the Mohammedans,
    ignorant of the texts bearing on Jihad and the conditions
    of Islam, may become acquainted with them, and that they
    may not labor under the misapprehension that it is their
    religious duty to wage war against another people solely
    because that people is opposed to Islam. Thus they, by
    ascertaining the fixed conditions and texts, may be saved
    forever from rebellion, and may not sacrifice their lives
    and property fruitlessly nor unjustly shed the blood of
    others. My second object is that non-Mohammedans and
    the government under whose protection the Mohammedans
    live, may not suspect Mohammedans of thinking that it is
    lawful for us to fight against non-Mohammedans, or that
    it is our duty to interfere with the life and property of
    others, or that we are bound to convert others forcibly to
    Mohammedanism, or to spread Islam by means of the sword.”

    So the question of “religion and the sword” is still an
    open one among Moslems. It must needs be so long as they
    obey the Koran and tradition, for Mohammed said, “He
    who dies and has not fought for the religion of Islam,
    nor has even said in his heart, ‘Would to God I were a
    champion that could die in the road of God,’ is even as
    a hypocrite.” And again, still more forcibly, “The fire
    of hell shall not touch the legs of him who is covered
    with the dust of battle in the road of God.” In spite
    of cruelty, bloodshed, dissension and deceit, the story
    of the Moslem conquest with the sword of Jihad is full
    of heroism and inspiration.
                    —S. M. ZWEMER, F. R. G. S. in “Islam.”

Selim III, sultan of Turkey from 1789-1807, more formally and
openly displayed the spirit and purpose of reform than had any of
his predecessors. He had been carefully educated, and conceived the
bold design of becoming the regenerator of the empire. He erected a
printing-press at Scutari, welcomed intelligent foreigners, employed
Christian workmen, and, among many other things, changed the system
of taxation. He also called in European generals to train his army,
and sought advice from the European residents of his capital. In the
meantime, the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon had stirred up the passions
of the populace of Constantinople, and the sultan with his unpopular
reform measures tottered upon his throne. Russians marched into the
Danubian provinces, while a British fleet passed the Dardanelles and
anchored at the mouth of the Bosporus. The Janissaries mutinied in
1807 and Selim’s rule ceased. These internal imbroglios had attracted
the attention of the world to Constantinople and Egypt, if not to all
Turkey.

After the brief reign of Mustipha IV, Mahmud II ascended the throne in
1808. He possessed extraordinary energy and force, and warmly espoused
the reform measures of Selim. Resisting Russia’s demand that all Greeks
in Turkey should be placed under the immediate protection of Russia,
he was soon at war with that country. Napoleon prevented the occupancy
of Constantinople by the Russians, but most of the Danube province was
lost. A Hellenic revolution was later fermented which broke into open
conflict early in the beginning of mission work in Turkey.

Turkey as a government and as a factor in the relations of Russia to
Europe was thus brought to the attention of the West. At the same
time there was a revival of interest in the Jews, both in Europe and
in the United States. There was a restudying of history and prophecy
with new interpretations, which led to the formation of societies
to circulate among them the New Testament and to preach to them the
gospel of Christ. Naturally, Palestine and Syria came first of all
to be recognized as a land that had peculiar claims upon Christians.
There was a wide-spread belief that the Jews were about to return to
their ancestral home, and that such return would be limited only by the
obstructions put in their way by the Ottoman government. Levi Parsons,
the first American missionary to Palestine, said, in 1819, just before
sailing, “Destroy the Ottoman empire and nothing but a miracle will
prevent the Jews’ immediate return from the four winds of heaven.” It
was natural that, in their judgment, missionaries ought to be there
to receive them when the Ottoman empire, then apparently in its death
struggle, tottered to its fall.

Moreover, the Turkish empire embraced the lands of the Bible. There
was in the minds and hearts of American Christians not a little of
the spirit of the crusaders of the middle ages. Why should the soil
trodden by the feet of the prophets and apostles, yes, even by the
Lord himself, remain a stranger to the voice of the preacher of
righteousness and untouched by the feet of the modern apostle? The
instructions given to the first missionaries to Turkey dwelt upon
this impressive and moving fact, as did the early letters of the
missionaries. Unlike the crusaders, these aimed at a purely spiritual
conquest, but it included the Christian subjection of all races and
peoples.

As a part of this same impulse may be placed the interest in the
historic Greek and Syrian Churches. Students of Church history were
profoundly moved as they learned of the decadence of vital Christianity
in these Churches, and they were thrilled with the desire to inaugurate
among them a revival that should restore them to their former
prominence and power. The purpose to reach Mohammedans does not appear
prominent in the earlier documents of this period, although it is not
by any means entirely wanting.

In view of these facts and also since Turkey was the most accessible to
America of any Asiatic country, it is not strange that in 1819, with
unusual enthusiasm, two missionaries, Levi Parsons and Pliny Fisk, were
set apart for work in Turkey by the American Board of Commissioners,
with special reference to the Jews in Palestine.

As a strategic center in which to begin to prosecute missionary work,
few countries are more attractive than Turkey. It lies along the
southern border of Russia throughout its entire length, except as
separated by the Black Sea. Upon the east it borders upon Persia, and
constitutes almost the only approach to this country of the shah, as
well as to the Caucasus possessions of the czar. Arabia, Egypt, and
North Africa all border upon the same Mediterranean Sea, and many
important islands like Cyprus and Crete lie but little off its coast.

Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman empire, occupies the most
strategic position of any city in Europe and dominates both the
European and Asiatic sides of the Bosporus. To this center all the
great and historic cities of Turkey look for political direction, and
to it come sooner or later representatives of every tribe and race
in the empire. All traffic from the Black Sea to the outer world and
even from Persia and southern and eastern Russia must perforce pass
through Constantinople and the Dardanelles. It stands upon the highway
and at the crossroads of commerce and travel. As a base for missionary
operations, not only upon Turkey but upon adjacent countries as well,
it is unexcelled. Smyrna upon the Grecian Sea, with immense populations
behind it, by the strategic force of its location, commanded the early
attention of those sent out to explore for location. Beirut in Syria
attracted for the same reason the attention of the missionaries to
Palestine.

There is an advantage in carrying on missionary work among sturdy
races. When such are converted, they become a force in the work of the
Church, the conduct of Christian institutions, and the propagation of
the gospel. No country in the world could present such an array of
ancient, historic, and hardy races as Turkey. Race survival there was
under the law of the survival of the fittest. None but the invincible
remained. Some had proven themselves invincible by arms, others had
conquered by superior intelligence, strategy, and cunning. Each race
remained because, in some particular, it had an advantage over its
natural and persistent antagonists. The very fact that these races had
kept themselves apart, resisting gradual absorption while repelling
open attempts at conquest, and all for twenty centuries or more,
testifies to their sturdy worth.

Some of these, like the Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and Arabs, had been
masters of an ancient and proud civilization, in which learning
had high place and religion was supreme. There was no ground for
questioning native ability to grasp the principles of Christianity
when once these peoples were enlisted. A modern Church and a modern
civilization built upon such historic races, and propagated by such
men, could not fail to become an irresistible force in that needy land.
It is no wonder that the officers of the American Board of Missions
early concluded that the Ottoman empire was a strategic point in which
to plant modern Christianity and the institutions which it fosters and
propagates.

While the sultan represents one sect of Mohammedanism, namely, the
Sunni, and the Persians another, the Shiah, between whom there has
existed great and often bloody hostility, yet the Persian Mohammedans
make their pilgrimages to Mecca, pray towards that holy of holies, and
reverence the sacred relics in the keeping of the sultan. However much
the shah may bluster, he listens when the sultan speaks. His country
can find outlet in the West only across Turkey, and much that comes
from the outside world comes through some part of the Turkish empire.
As the Nestorians and Armenians are found upon both sides of the line,
and constitute the chief non-Moslem populations of Persia, it was most
natural to connect the mission work of Persia directly with that in
Turkey. Such a connection holds to the present time. In many respects
Turkey was the key to Persia and is to-day.

At the beginning of mission operations, Russia was especially open to
the circulation of the Scriptures in the vernacular. It was hoped and
expected that soon the entire country would be accessible for direct
Christian and educational operations among the millions of that empire.
The whole Caucasus region can be easily approached by no other route
than the Black Sea. The Armenians dwell in large numbers in that
section of the country and are constantly passing back and forth in
trade and commerce. Constantinople lies at the crossing of all roads
from the Black Sea regions and beyond to the outer world and the West.

The Balkan peninsula and Macedonia, lying to the north and west, also
center in the capital of the Ottoman empire. As the seat of government
for Macedonia and the province of Adrianople, all political influence
and movement are that way. For generations it was the capital of the
Balkan provinces and even yet it is the great metropolis to which
merchants, students, and workmen go for a longer or a shorter period of
residence abroad. There is no other center so well calculated to be the
base of operations upon all that region.

The American Board was organized in 1810 and its first missionaries
were sent out in 1812. These went to the farther East, to India and
Ceylon. It was not the intention of the Board to confine its foreign
operations to these two countries. Christian leaders in America were
surveying the world for the purpose of finding other countries in which
to establish Christian missions. Explorations into the western parts of
our own country resulted in beginning work among the Indians as early
as 1816. It is not surprising that in their survey of the wide world,
its special needs and promising openings, attention should have been
early called to Turkey.




IX. A STRATEGIC MISSIONARY CENTER


    In Constantinople one does not fail to meet Greeks and
    Armenians who are bright and entertaining and obliging, or
    Mohammedans who are noble and courteous, and thoughtful
    enough to make their acquaintance an acquisition. But
    every study of the people in mass is a revelation of
    arrested development, absence of initiative, and general
    uselessness by reason of narrow selfishness. The city,
    and with it the millions to whom the city is model, seems
    hostile to what is best in the world’s work. High-sounding
    phrases of lofty principle are heard in the city. Custom
    provides for this much of concession to the sensibilities
    of others. But the centuries seem to have frayed off
    the last semblance of meaning from the words. To quote
    a remark of a sage official in India which applies to
    the whole of Asia, “Whilst the mouth is proclaiming its
    enlightenment and progress, the body is waddling backward
    as fast as the nature of the ground will permit.” The bane
    of Constantinople is not solely poverty of resources; it
    is poverty of ideals.
                             —HENRY OTIS DWIGHT, LL. D. in
                           “Constantinople and its Problems.”

While the political and commercial importance of Constantinople is
supreme, when considered in relation to the Powers of Europe and the
far East, this is insignificant in comparison with its religious
importance in relation to the Mohammedan world. So far as we can
learn, this fact did not receive large consideration at the time
missions in Turkey were begun. The truth is that it did not then hold
the commanding relations to the Mohammedans of other countries that
it holds to-day. The present reigning sultan, Hamid II, has done
more than any of his predecessors to secure for himself recognition
by all the faithful as the one supreme head, the caliph of Islam.
He has sent presents with messages of sympathy and encouragement to
Mohammedans in India, China, and Africa, and these have been received
as from the great living head of the Moslem faith. When our government
found itself in possession of a country in which a Mohammedan ruler
was enthroned, it found it convenient to carry on negotiations for
submission through the sultan of Constantinople. There are probably
230,000,000 Mohammedans in Turkey, Europe, Persia, Africa, India,
China and other countries, who look upon the sultan of Turkey as the
representative on earth of their revered prophet Mohammed. As such, he
does not possess or assume temporal authority, or even well-defined
spiritual prerogatives, but he does command an influence that has been
secretly discussed in many European cabinets, and which has been taken
into consideration in dealing with Moslem races and in administering
ultimata to the head of the Ottoman empire. The sultan clearly
represents a temporal and a religious power. The strength of the
temporal influence lies in his relations religiously, not only to his
own mediate and immediate subjects, but to all followers of the prophet
Mohammed, whatever language they speak and in whatever land they dwell.

The official title of the sultan is padishah, father of all the
sovereigns of the earth. This is the name exclusively used by the Turks
in official communications. He is also called Imam-ul-Musselmin, the
supreme pontiff of all Mussulmans or Mohammedans; Zilullah, the shadow
of God; and Hunkiar, the slayer of infidels. By these and other similar
titles he is known as far as the Mohammedan religion has gone. No one
else claims such honors and to him they are conceded. Destroy his
religious power and he would be the most impotent of monarchs, but with
it he has defied for three generations the efforts of the Powers of
Europe to secure some degree of justice and freedom for his oppressed
subjects.

The sultan holds his religious power through two important facts. The
first is that the two sacred cities of Islam in Arabia are within his
empire and under his control—Mecca, the birthplace of the prophet, and
Medina, which contains his tomb. This sacred territory is prohibited
to infidels, but is the goal for tens of thousands of Moslem pilgrims
each year. There is no faithful follower of Mohammed who does not dream
of the time when he will be so blessed as to kiss the black stone of
the Kaaba, drink of the well of Zemzem, or have a part in the prolonged
ritual which shall entitle him during the rest of his life to the
honored name of _Haji_.

[Illustration: THE BOSPORUS, CONSTANTINOPLE]

[Illustration: A MOUNTAIN VILLAGE IN EASTERN TURKEY]

The Mohammedans believe that the black stone came down from heaven and
was connected with all the patriarchs and prophets, beginning with
Adam. This is the great destination of all pilgrimages, as well as the
earthly center of the Mohammedan world. To this point all faithful
Moslems turn five times each day when they pray, and the lips which
are permitted to kiss it are thrice blessed. Around this have grown up
the Kaaba, the enclosing mosque, and other accessories too many even
to name, all together constituting the holy temple of Islam where no
infidel foot is permitted to tread, and upon which no vulgar Christian
eye may look.

Medina, which contains a mosque supposed to cover the burial-place of
Mohammed, is some seventy miles away. All faithful Moslems should visit
Mecca once during their lives, but to add a visit to Medina increases
their merit in the world to come. Outside of these sacred precincts all
may travel, but woe be to the bold investigator who seeks to penetrate
to the holy of holies of Islam. For the protection of these sacred
cities the sultan of Turkey makes provision. He guards their sanctity
against infidel invasion, and provides, as occasion may demand, a holy
carpet for the holiest place. His soldiers safeguard the pilgrims, and
his name is constantly appealed to as the slayer of infidels and shadow
of God. The pilgrims from Africa, from Mindanao, from China and India
and Ceylon, all return from these shrines of their faith indelibly
impressed with the mighty power of him who rules at Constantinople.

The other fact which gives the sultan power over all Mohammedans is his
custody of the Hall of the Holy Garment, which is next to the Kaaba,
and perhaps upon a parity with it for sanctity. This hall is in the
seraglio, upon the point of old Byzantium, which projects out into the
Bosporus, dividing it from the Sea of Marmora. In it lie the mantle of
the prophet Mohammed, his staff, his saber, his standard, and other
relics. Among these, enclosed in a casket of gold, are two hairs from
his beard. The sultan is supposed to make an annual visit to these
sacred relics, of which he alone is keeper and guardian. The standard
of Mohammed is the standard of Islam, consisting of a green silk flag
about two feet square, embroidered with the inscription “There is no
God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet.” It is said to have been
carried by Mohammed himself and has since been regarded as the sacred
standard of the entire Moslem world. If publicly borne by the sultan
in the great mosques of Constantinople it would, it is said, be the
signal for a general religious war. It is thought by many that should
the sultan choose to use the power he possesses in this standard he
could with it summon to his assistance all true Moslems and hurl them
in fanatical zeal and fury against any infidel force. It is known
everywhere that this standard and these relics are in the possession of
the ruler of the Ottoman empire, and thus the sultan stands almost in
the place of the prophet himself.

When Moslems pray they pray towards Arabia under the rule of the
sultan, and when they think of their holy prophet their minds turn to
the relics at Constantinople. In the face of these facts, it requires
no demonstration to show that Constantinople and the Turkish empire
constitute the political and religious center of Islam. Other countries
may be important, this is supreme. Mecca and Medina cannot yet be
entered, but Constantinople and all the rest of the Turkish empire is,
by treaty, accessible for residence to the Christian of every race and
name. To begin mission work here was to start at the fountainhead.

The fact that Christian preachers and teachers are permitted to reside
at Constantinople and freely preach their faith, cannot but have
favorable influence over intolerant Moslems in remote parts. They all
have faith in the power of the sultan as well as in his supreme wisdom.
If _he_ permits this, why should _they_ object? In several instances in
India, when the writer was conversing with Mohammedans, it was almost
amusing to see the keen interest they manifested in the progress of
Christianity in Turkey. They were ignorant but were ready to listen,
and undoubtedly went away to ponder upon what they had heard. Evidently
one thing that impressed them was that while the sultan of Turkey is a
mighty ruler he does not prohibit the teaching of Christianity, even
within the Throne City. If he does not prohibit it, perhaps it is not
so bad a religion after all.

It is also of no little value to print and send out from Constantinople
large quantities of Turkish literature, and from Beirut, Arabic
literature, the two languages which are most widely read by the
Mohammedans. Every volume thus printed bears the stamp of approval by
the government of his imperial majesty the sultan, assuring all who
read that the book was issued with his sanction and authority. Under
these circumstances a publishing house at Constantinople is calculated,
by its very location, to reach millions who might otherwise refuse to
read what is printed. In Arabia an Arabic Bible, at first rejected
because it is an infidel book, is later accepted because it bears upon
its title page the authoritative permission of his imperial majesty.
As a strategic center for Christian work, calculated directly and
indirectly to reach the two hundred and thirty million who bear the
name of the prophet of Arabia, there is no place that can compare with
Constantinople, resting upon two continents and swaying the most mighty
religious empire on earth.




X. SOCIAL, MORAL AND RELIGIOUS CONDITIONS


    The second cause of the continuance of the Ottoman
    dominion has been less accidental. Like the early caliphs,
    and indeed all able Mussulman dynasties except the
    Persian, the ruling house of Turkey has for all these
    centuries maintained unbroken the principle that, apart
    from creed, ability is the only qualification for the
    highest service. Outside the navy, a Turkish grandee must
    be a Mussulman; but that granted, there is no obstacle
    of birth, or cultivation, or position standing in any
    man’s path. Even slavery is no barrier. Over and over
    again, a sultan apparently at the end of his resources
    has stooped among the crowd, clutched a soldier, a
    slipper-bearer, a tobacconist, a renegade, given him
    his own limitless power, and asking of him nothing but
    success, has secured it in full measure. Equality within
    the faith, which is a dogma of Islam, and next to its
    belief in a “sultan of the sky,” its grand attraction to
    inferior races, has in Turkey been a reality as it has
    been in no other empire on earth, and has provided its
    sovereigns—who, be it remembered, fear no rival unless
    he be a kinsman, an Arab, or a “prophet”—with an endless
    supply of the kind of ability they need. The history of
    the grand viziers of Turkey, were it ever written, would
    be the history of men who have risen by sheer force of
    ability—that is, by success in war or by statesmanship,
    or, in fewer instances, by that art of mastering an
    Asiatic sovereign and his seraglio in which fools do
    not succeed. The sultans have rarely promoted, rarely
    even used, men of their own house,—which is the Persian
    dynastic policy,—have hated, and at last destroyed, the
    few nobles of their empire; and capricious and cruel as
    they have been, have often shown a power of steadily
    upholding a great servant such as we all attribute to the
    founder of the new German empire. This equality, this
    chance of a career of great opportunities, great renown,
    and great luxury, brings to Constantinople a crowd of
    intriguers, some of them matchless villains; but it also
    brings a great crowd of able and unscrupulous men, who
    understand how to “govern” in the Turkish sense, and who
    have constantly succeeded in restoring a dominion which
    seemed hopelessly broken up. Every pasha is a despot,
    an able despot is soon felt, and he has in carrying
    out the method of Turkish government, which is simply
    the old Tartar method of stamping out resistance, an
    advantage over Europeans which is the third cause of
    the continuance of the Ottoman empire. He is tormented
    with no hesitations in applying force as a cure for all
    things. The man who resists is to die, or purchase life
    by submission.
                  —MEREDITH TOWNSEND in “Asia and Europe.”

The moral and religious condition of the people of Turkey, especially
the non-Moslems, was, and still is, without a parallel in any country
in the world.

Since Mohammedanism never encourages progress and education, and since
the principles of Moslem rule in all countries and in all times have
been based upon force, ignorance and fanaticism, it is not difficult to
judge of the condition of these subject peoples, especially after many
generations of oppression.

The most of the races that refused to embrace Islam and elected to
pay a regular tribute for the privilege of continuing to live, were
Christians, such as the Copts of Egypt, the Syrian Christians of Syria,
the Jacobites of Mesopotamia, the Armenians of Armenia and sections
of northern Syria and Asia Minor, the Greeks of Asia Minor, and the
Bulgarians of European Turkey. While all these were Christians by
profession, they had no ecclesiastical relations with each other. Each
race and Church stood by itself, entirely independent of all the rest,
fostering no sympathy the one with the other except in a common cause
against a dominant race.

Under Moslem rule all education among the so called Rayas was
discouraged, and some of the Moslem customs, like the veiling of their
women, were adopted. The low estimate placed upon womanhood by the
conquerors was accepted in a measure by these races, and some of the
worst of the vices of the Moslems became common among the Christians.

With these surroundings, the Christianity of the earlier days so
deteriorated that little remained except the name and the outward
observances of the Church. Because of the absence of modern literature
and general education, the spoken language of the common people changed
to such a degree that the Bible and the rituals of the Church in the
ancient language in which they were written became an unknown tongue
to the masses. Their religion became a religion of form, and the Bible
a closed and sealed book. Surrounded as they were by all the vices of
a Moslem society, dominated by Moslem rulers, the character of the
Christianity among them did not attract their Mohammedan neighbors,
while there was no hope for reform from within.

Jealousies and discords sprang up between the Christians of various
sects whenever they came into contact, like that between the Greeks and
Bulgarians in Macedonia, and the Greeks and Armenians in Asia Minor,
and the Syrians and Armenians in northern Syria. The reigning sultans
have not been slow to note these jealousies and to take advantage of
them in dealing with the various sects. Had the Christians of Turkey
during the last century been united, they might have accomplished much
by way of securing privileges for themselves. But even the people of a
single national Church have not been able to agree upon many important
questions, so that the sultan and his subordinates have not found it
hard to control these superior races, superior in themselves in many
respects to their masters. If any one seemed to be giving more trouble
than usual, methods were found to divide still more, and so weaken and
subdue them. The same methods have been constantly employed with the
various religious bodies of his empire that have been successfully
used with the European nations who have caused him trouble by
interfering with his peculiar views of government or unjust methods of
administration. He has usually succeeded in playing off the jealousies
and cupidity of one against another so that concerted action became
impossible and he has been left to work his own will in his own way.
While the sultan has learned cunning by these conditions and gained no
little advantage to himself, neither the subject Christian races of his
empire nor the European nations outside have seemed to learn a lesson
which is of service to them in changing existing conditions.

Under these circumstances, religion to most of the people of the
country became but a form and a mark of nationality. No conversion,
in the ordinary sense of the word, was required for admission to the
Greek, Armenian, Bulgarian, or any of the Oriental Churches. All
children were baptized in infancy and so grew up within the Church,
with no religious instruction except as to fast and feast days and the
proper forms to be employed in the ritual observed in the Churches. In
all services the language used was no more understood by the people
as a whole than Latin would be comprehended by an ordinary country
audience in England or America. There was no educational or moral test
for the priests except that they should be able to pronounce the words
of the regular Church services and find the proper places from which
to read. The writer once asked an Armenian priest where he studied.
He said he was a baker and when he decided to become a priest he went
to a monastery and studied for forty days. That comprised all of his
schooling, except that he knew how to read simple narrative when he
began. I asked him if he understood the ritual and the Scriptures
that he read. He replied, “How should I know? This is the ancient
Armenian.” Even as late as fifteen years ago it would have been
difficult to find a Christian priest of any kind or class in the
interior districts who clearly understood the ritual of the Church or
the Scripture read in the service. Ordinarily the selection of priests
was not based upon special ability, education, or moral worth. There
were, of course, noble exceptions to this most general rule.

The priests being such, and some of them most grossly ignorant and
unfit, and there being in the Churches no religious instruction, it is
easy to understand how the moral tone of these Oriental Churches sank
rapidly under the rule of the Turk, with no power in themselves to
rise above these conditions and institute a reform. A Church without a
Bible, with an ignorant priesthood, with a ritual beautiful in itself
but dead to the people, with no religious instruction and no test
for church-membership, could not be expected in any land or in any
age to keep itself unspotted from the world. Under these conditions
Christianity came to be largely a name and the practises of religion
only a form.

The resisting power of the Oriental Churches in Turkey was largely
vitiated by the lack of the true spirit of Christianity within. At
the same time, it was surrounded by evil influences and by open
persecutions heavy to bear even by a living, vitalized Church. The
pressure of the Mohammedans, both individually and as a government,
was directed to force all professing Christians to abandon their
ancestral faith and become Moslems. The heavy hand of the government
was constantly upon them, while faithful Moslems were not slow to
let the persecuted ones know that, should they become Mohammedans,
their burdens would become lighter. Under these conditions there has
constantly been more or less apostatizing from Christianity. In times
of unusual persecution the number of these has increased.

At the same time, in order to avoid attention and thereby avert
conflict, the Christians, in many cases, conformed to the outward
practises of their Moslem masters. Their women veiled themselves when
in public and covered their mouths at all times. Efforts to provide
a general education for their children were largely abandoned and
wide-spread illiteracy prevailed. The vices of the Mohammedans, some of
them the vilest known to men, were practised by many of the Christians,
and falsehood was so common that truth came to be almost a curiosity.
To cheat or deceive a Turk was considered in itself almost a Christian
virtue. In the conflict with Islam, Christianity, in its ignorance, was
driven to the wall and lost nearly everything except its ancient Bible
and most excellent ritual, with houses of worship, a hierarchy and a
form to which it adhered with most commendable tenacity.

These untoward conditions were aggravated by the fact that, in Turkey,
the Church came to be a political organization, presided over by an
appointee of the sultan, who was capable of being dismissed by him
if he chose to exercise his power. Each Church with its political
patriarch at Constantinople constituted a little state within a state.
Every Church represented a separate race or nation whose rights
within the empire were vested in the rights of the Church, directed
by the patriarch. At the patriarchate were recorded—and it is true
to-day—all births, marriages and deaths. Individual existence in the
empire was recognized only through the Church. The Christian’s sole
representative at Constantinople to speak for him in case of injustice,
or to secure a privilege, or to obtain his legal rights, was the
patriarch of his own peculiar Church.

The political organization extended down through the different
provinces and included in its last analysis each individual church.
Under the injustice endured by the Christians of Turkey during the past
five hundred years, it is most natural that not a few of the members of
the Church, if not a great majority, should look upon the organization,
not primarily as a spiritual temple, but as a means of securing redress
for wrongs suffered, or for obtaining privileges from the Porte. Under
the laws of Turkey the Church must exercise political functions. Under
the practise of the people, it came to be primarily political, the
spiritual being relegated to the background.

General education never existed in that country, but under the sway of
the Moslem all education was discouraged. The schools of the Moslems
consisted of classes in reading the Koran in Arabic, accompanied by
traditional stories of Mohammed and comments upon his teachings. Among
the Christians there was little except the instruction of a few youths
in monasterial schools where men were trained for Church orders. It
is true that now and then among the Greeks and Armenians some bright
and inquiring mind far exceeded the ordinary bounds of indigenous
scholarship and became conspicuous for learning. But these were rare
exceptions. The masses of the people of all classes and religions were
in gross ignorance. Even within the last twenty-five years the writer
has been in many Armenian villages in which not a person except the
priest knew how to read and write, and even his accomplishments ceased
with the bare ability to read the ritual of the Church. A leading
priest once asked a student who had studied one year in a mission
school, “What remains for you to learn after studying an entire year?”
Under such a leadership in the Church, and with open opposition to
general education among the Turks, it is not surprising that ignorance
among the masses became almost universal, with little or no impulse to
change.

If the above is true with reference to the education of the men,
what could be expected for the girls and women? It is natural that,
among the Mohammedans, who accord to women a low place in society and
religion, it should have come to be believed in wide areas in the
interior of Turkey that women were incapable of learning to read. Among
them the vital question calling for early discussion was not, “Shall
education be afforded to girls?” but it was, “Can girls learn to read?”
This question has been hotly discussed within the last fifty years in
the interior of Turkey, with the missionary contending that they can,
while leading men of the country have contended with vehemence that the
idea was too preposterous to consider. Conviction came only by actual
demonstration.

Under such circumstances it is not difficult to imagine the general
conditions of society and the deplorable life of the Church. These
conditions were more or less modified in the large coast cities like
Constantinople and Smyrna, but even in these places, while more
educated men were found than in the interior, there was dense ignorance
among the masses, and no provision for the education of girls. The
entire empire had few newspapers or periodicals of any kind in any
language, and the state of education stimulated the production of no
great literature, even had there been those capable of producing it.
The beginning of the nineteenth century, apart from the revival of
learning among the Greeks of the West, may be called the dark age for
literature, learning, and religion in the Turkish empire.

Constantinople and Syria were the two centers for Christian work in
Turkey among the Oriental churches, because these were the centers of
control for all of these churches. The chief patriarch resided at the
Porte and was in close touch with his majesty the sultan, while the
secondary patriarch resided at Jerusalem, cooperating with his superior
at the capital. These churches could best be reached and influenced for
evangelical Christianity from the same points.

Missionaries were sent to the ancient churches, not to attack them
either in their doctrines or in their practises, but to cooperate with
their leaders in organizing a system of education and in creating a
sentiment that should demand for the Church an educated and morally
upright clergy. It was expected that the Church would accept the
modern version of its own Scriptures and encourage its circulation
among the people. For the best conduct of a work of this character,
the missionaries needed to be in close contact with the centers of
ecclesiastical power in all of these churches, that from them the
ordinary lines of communication might be utilized in reaching the
remote interior districts.

In order that misunderstandings may be cleared up, it should be stated
here that missionaries to the Armenians and Greeks were not sent
to divide the churches or to separate out those who should accept
education and read the Bible in the vernacular. Their one supreme
endeavor was to help the Armenians and Greeks work out a quiet but
genuine reform in their respective churches. The missionaries made no
attacks upon the churches, their customs, or beliefs, but strove by
positive, quiet effort to show the leaders how much they lacked and to
help them bring about the necessary changes.

For twenty-six years this quiet work went on with no separation, in
accordance with the desire of the missionaries, as well as in harmony
with the purposes of the Board. When the separation did come, it
was in spite of every effort of the missionaries to prevent it. For
the successful accomplishment of such a purpose only the centers of
ecclesiastical power and influence were available. Only their own
leaders could be expected to inaugurate and carry into execution a
reform movement which would permeate the Church throughout the empire.




XI. CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM


    The mind of the true Eastern is at once lethargic and
    suspicious; he does not want to be reformed, and he is
    convinced that, if the European wishes to reform him,
    the desire springs from sentiments which bode him no
    good. Moreover, his conservatism is due to an instinct
    of self-preservation, and to a dim perception that, if
    he allows himself to be even slightly reformed, all the
    things to which he attaches importance will be not merely
    changed in this or that particular, but will rather be
    swept off the face of the earth. Perhaps he is not far
    wrong. Although there are many highly educated gentlemen
    who profess the Moslem religion, it has yet to be proved
    that Islam can assimilate civilization without succumbing
    in the process. It is, indeed, not improbable that, in
    its passage through the European crucible, many of the
    distinctive features of Islam, the good alike with the
    bad, will be volatilized, and that it will eventually
    issue forth in a form scarcely capable of recognition.
    “The Egyptians,” Moses said, “whom ye have seen to-day, ye
    shall see them again no more for ever.” The prophecy may
    be approaching fulfilment in a sense different from that
    in which it was addressed to the Israelites.

    Look, moreover, not only to the spirit of the lawgivers,
    but to the general principles on which the laws are based.
    The tendency in all civilized European States is to
    separate religious from civil laws. In Moslem States, on
    the other hand, religious and civil laws are inextricably
    interwoven.

    Look to the consequences which result from the degradation
    of women in Mohammedan countries. In respect to two
    points, both of which are of vital importance, there is a
    radical difference between the position of Moslem women
    and that of their European sisters. In the first place,
    the face of the Moslem woman is veiled when she appears
    in public. She lives a life of seclusion. The face of the
    European woman is exposed to view in public. The only
    restraints placed on her movements are those dictated by
    her own sense of propriety. In the second place, the East
    is polygamous, the West is monogamous.

    It cannot be doubted that the seclusion of women exercises
    a baneful effect on Eastern society. The arguments on this
    subject are, indeed, so commonplace that it is unnecessary
    to dwell on them. It will be sufficient to say that
    seclusion, by confining the sphere of woman’s interest to
    a very limited horizon, cramps the intellect and withers
    the mental development of one half of the population
    in Moslem countries. An Englishwoman asked an Egyptian
    lady how she passed her time. “I sit on this sofa,” she
    answered, “and when I am tired, I cross over and sit on
    that.” Moreover, inasmuch as women, in their capacities
    as wives and mothers, exercise a great influence over
    the characters of their husbands and sons, it is obvious
    that the seclusion of women must produce a deteriorating
    effect on the male population, in whose presumed interests
    the custom was originally established, and is still
    maintained.
                              —LORD CROMER in “Modern Egypt.”

From the day of its inception until the beginning of the last century,
Mohammedanism never came into close, continuous contact with a pure
Christianity. Its very beginning was a protest against a Christianity
that, in its worship, had all the appearance, at least, of idolatry.
The Mohammedan leaders then, as well as in subsequent generations, saw
nothing in Christians which made them believe that Christianity could
be better than their own religion. The Christianity with which Islam
was in conflict was not such a manifestation in the lives and practises
of its followers as to compel the intellectual approval of Moslems or
even to command their attention. All the churches of Syria, Armenia,
and Asia Minor had become worldly and formal, from which had departed
the gentle spirit of their Lord, who exalted meekness, truth, purity,
and righteousness. As the Mohammedans passed on towards the north and
west in their victorious progress, not once did they encounter the
strength of Christianity displayed in quiet meekness and forgiving
love. In Europe they met the Church in arms and saw in it nothing to
compel their respect.

Wherever Mohammedanism has penetrated, it has not come into vital touch
with living Christianity. All that the Mohammedan knew of the practical
teaching of Jesus Christ, up to the beginning of the last century,
he had obtained from observing the Christians whom he conquered and
controlled. It is no wonder that he concluded that his own religion
was superior, when he saw the intemperance of even the leaders in
the Church, and when he took note of what seemed to him to be the
worship of pictures and idols. He could not see that the Christian was
more truthful, or honest, or pure, than himself; hence he naturally
concluded that the Christian religion was no better at least than his
own faith.

A traveler in the interior of the empire, and putting up at a
caravansary kept by a Mohammedan, asked him if it would be safe to
leave his luggage in the outer court. The Mohammedan replied with great
earnestness, “Certainly it will be safe, for there is not a Christian
living within a three hours’ journey of here.” This incident reveals
the opinion of at least one Moslem regarding the power of Christianity
to make men honest.

The Mohammedans have never had an adequate opportunity of knowing Jesus
Christ as Redeemer and Lord and of becoming his true disciples. They
have never seen the true Christ in the face and life of his followers.
They have had only a distorted vision of him, dwarfed and disfigured
and marred, and in that vision they have seen no form of comeliness
and no beauty that they should desire him. It is only in comparatively
recent years that an effort has been made to bring to the attention of
Islam the fruits of the true Christian life. It is not possible nor
is it expected that the experiences and prejudices of twelve hundred
years will be overcome in a single generation or even in a century.
Such deep-seated convictions can be changed only by prolonged fasting,
prayer, and sacrifice. Modern missions in Turkey are an attempt to
show to all in that country what true Christianity means in the
individual, in the family, and in society. It is not an attempt to
convince the Mohammedan by argument that Mohammed is the false prophet
and that Jesus Christ is God. Such an attempt would result only in
failure. The Mohammedan must be made to see in the lives of the true
followers of Jesus that which will give him a clear vision of the
Son of man, and lead him to cry out, “My Lord and my God.” I repeat,
Mohammedanism has never yet had an opportunity to accept Christ and
that we may not expect it to become Christian until the Christian world
has demonstrated to it the beauty, love, purity, and power of the true
Christian life.

These facts regarding Turkey and the various peoples who comprise its
population were not fully known to the early missionaries nor to the
officers of the Mission Boards. The country was largely unexplored
and the vast interior was almost a _terra incognita_. Mohammedanism
was vaguely understood. There was a clear knowledge of the conditions
and needs of the Greek Church, but the Armenians and the other races
in the remoter interior were but partially understood and only by a
few. The most of our knowledge of Arabia, Syria, Eastern Turkey, and
the interior of Asia Minor, the customs, beliefs, and lives of the
people who dwell there, is the heritage which has come to us from the
investigations and reports of missionaries who have traversed in every
direction all parts of the country, except sections of Arabia. Many of
these, by living among the people for a generation and mastering their
language, have been able to speak with the highest authority upon what
they have seen and known. We are approaching this question, not with
the doubtful knowledge or even gross ignorance of eighty years ago, but
with all the light that has come to us from fourscore years of mission
operations which now cover practically the entire country.

Never in the history of modern missions has a more difficult and
complicated work been undertaken. The questions which entered into
the mission problems of the Turkish empire were legion, assuming new
phases at every turn and every phase presenting a new difficulty. The
one dominant note that runs through it all is the fact of Mohammedan
rule. This fact in all its length and breadth must be taken into
consideration. Add to this the antiquity of the old churches, the form
of Christianity, from which the spirit has fled, the race hatreds, the
poverty of the country, the uncertainty of everything that pertains to
the government, except that it never fails to be superlatively bad,
the conviction of the Moslems that they have seen true Christianity
and know it to be as bad as their own government, and we have a few
of the difficulties which confronted the early missionaries. On the
other hand, there were the encouraging features of the reverence of
the Oriental churches, all of them, for the Holy Scriptures, their
allegiance to the Church, and their respect for ecclesiastics, to
which must be added their superior intelligence, eagerness to learn,
and capability for great advancement. Surely Turkey presented a varied
scene marked by high lights and dark shadows. Without hesitation, men
and women of unusual intellectual and spiritual capacity and breadth,
and of indomitable courage, entered this country to win it for Christ
and for Christian civilization.




XII. EARLY PIONEERING AND EXPLORATIONS


    The elevating influence of the missionaries in Turkey
    cannot be over-estimated. It is the most hopeful of
    all the influences which are at work in the empire
    to-day. Most people at home think of the missionary as a
    propagandist whose chief endeavor is to win converts to
    his creed, but on the field he appears as a very different
    character; he is an educator, a physician, a scientist,
    a peacemaker, a neighbor, and an example of civilized
    living. Judged by the numbers added to Protestant churches
    from the population of the Turkish empire, missions there
    might be counted a failure, or, at the most, but a partial
    success; but the making of Protestants is the smallest
    part of a missionary’s work. 1. The missionary elevates
    the whole standard of Christian living and thinking. There
    are in Turkey churches hoary with age—Greek, Armenian,
    Syrian—in which ignorance, barbarism, superstition, and
    low morality hold sway. To retain their members in the
    face of the missionary, these churches find intelligence,
    purity, spirituality, and civilization necessary, and have
    been greatly elevated by missionary enterprise. 2. In
    countries like Turkey, where medical skill is beyond the
    reach of the mass of the people, the preventable suffering
    and death are appalling. How eagerly the villagers bring
    their sick to any stranger in the hope that he may be
    a physician, almost every traveler can testify. The
    brightest spots in the country are the missionary medical
    centers, where untold sufferings are allayed. These range
    all the way from the village dispensary to the Medical
    College at Beirut, where one of the world’s best surgeons
    not only helps the suffering, but teaches others to do it
    too. 3. The most important phase of missionary work in
    Turkey is, however, the educational. From humble schools
    scattered widely through the villages to colleges like
    Robert College and the Syrian Protestant College at
    Beirut (which are the fruit of missionary enterprise)
    most successful efforts are being made, by broad-minded,
    undenominational methods, to train the young to think,
    and to induct them into modern science and civilization.
    The effect of this is already widely apparent, and it
    is clear that if the day ever comes when Turkey is able
    to take her place among the nations as a state which
    appreciates the laws of humanity sufficiently to be
    trusted, as Japan is now trusted, to control the lives
    and property of foreigners resident within her limits,
    it will be because of the civilizing influence of these
    educational institutions, combined with the lessons in
    integrity taught by the missionaries’ simple Christian
    lives. Apart from their work for Turkey, the missionaries
    have contributed much to science. Archæology owes them
    large debts in every part of the empire, and, to mention
    no other fields, the only authoritative work on the
    botany of Syria is by a missionary. The missionaries
    are in my opinion working more directly than any other
    class of men to complete the social evolution of mankind,
    and to make possible the peaceable federation of the
    world.
                               —GEORGE A. BARTON, PH. D.,
      Professor of Semitic Languages in Bryn Mawr College,
      Director of the American School of Oriental Study
      and Research in Palestine, 1902-1903.

It was no light task to plant missions in a country so little known
and extensive as was the Turkish empire at the beginning of the last
century. Of the races which made up its large population little was
understood except a general knowledge of the Jews and Greeks, and there
was much less information regarding the Turks. In accordance with the
policy already adopted by the American Board, the early missionaries
were sent out to investigate and explore before deciding upon the
location of missions and stations and before fixing the exact nature
and methods of work.

The instructions given the earlier missionaries to Turkey seldom failed
to emphasize the importance of fully examining the different parts of
the country and becoming acquainted with the character, beliefs, and
characteristics of the different races and peoples which comprise its
population. In some cases particular unexplored regions were named as
demanding immediate attention. All the early missionaries were directed
to report to headquarters, in full detail, the results of their
researches and observations.

In the instructions given in 1819 to Pliny Fisk and Levi Parsons, the
first missionaries appointed to Turkey, the following passage occurs:

      “You will survey with earnest attention the various
    tribes and classes which dwell in that land and in the
    surrounding countries. The two grand inquiries ever
    present in your minds will be, ‘What good can be done?’
    and ‘By what means?’ What can be done for the Jews? What
    for the pagans? What for the Mohammedans? What for the
    Christians? What for the people in Palestine? What for
    those in Egypt, in Syria, in Armenia, in other countries
    to which your inquiry may be extended?”

This single quotation demonstrates the spirit of them all, and reveals
the deliberate and far-seeing policy of the Board in inaugurating its
missions in Turkey as well as in other countries. Men of the highest
ability and broadest vision were selected for missionary appointment
and upon them was placed the responsibility of selecting the location
of the missions and stations, and deciding the policy and methods of
work.

The archives of the Board are rich with the early reports of those
first missionaries, who explored with fearlessness and zeal, and
observed with discriminating care and precision. They were conscious
of the fact that much in the future depended upon the thoroughness of
their work and the accuracy and fulness of their reports.

Messrs. Fisk and Parsons landed at Smyrna early in 1820 and at once
began the study of modern Greek. They explored the sites of the
seven churches of the Apocalypse and noted their conditions and
needs. Careful and minute journals were kept of all their labors and
observations. In order to facilitate the work of exploration, Mr.
Parsons went on alone to Palestine, where he arrived in February,
1821. One of his chief objects there was to get into touch with the
Christian pilgrims who flock to the holy city in great numbers. The
Greek revolution drove him back to Smyrna after several tours in
Palestine, and from there he went to Alexandria, Egypt, where he
died Feb. 10, 1822. Mr. Fisk was joined by Jonas King, who left his
studies in Oriental literature at Paris for that purpose, and early in
January, 1823, the two set out for Jerusalem by way of Alexandria and
Cairo. They ascended the Nile as far as Thebes, distributing everywhere
Bibles and tracts in Arabic. With a caravan made up of Turks, Arabs,
Greeks, and Armenians, they made the overland journey to Jerusalem and
from there went down to Beirut upon the coast. Here they separated, Mr.
King taking up his residence in the Lebanon mountains among the Druses,
where he was most hospitably received, in order that he might the
better study the Arabic language and the people. By this time, these
men were using with much freedom Arabic, modern Greek, and Italian.

The tours of these first missionaries covered Tripoli, the Lebanon,
Baalbec, Jaffa, Hebron, Damascus, Antioch, and Latakia, thus bringing
them into close personal touch with the desert tribes as well as
with the Druses, Maronites, Turks, Greeks, and other races. Mr. King
returned to Smyrna overland from Tarsus, and Mr. Fisk died at Beirut
Oct. 23, 1825, two years after the arrival there of Mr. and Mrs.
William Goodell.

These pioneer operations were accompanied with great hardship and even
peril. The difficulties were increased at this early period by the
efforts of the Roman Catholics to drive all Protestants from Syria. In
1824 the missionaries in Jerusalem were apprehended, at the instigation
of the Catholics, and brought before a Moslem judge, charged with
distributing books which they declared to be neither Jewish, Moslem,
nor Christian. Attacks by robbers were of no infrequent occurrence and
fanatical uprisings were constantly to be expected. The Greco-Turkish
war brought many personal perils and hardships, but did not result in
the loss of missionary lives.

These experiences and subsequent investigations led to the choice of
Beirut as the missionary center for Syria and Palestine, contrary to
the previous expectation that Jerusalem would be chosen. Jerusalem
was carefully tested and its climate was found to be unfit for the
permanent residence of American missionaries. Beirut was upon the sea,
and at the same time in such relation to the Lebanon mountains that,
during the heated time of the year, the missionaries could withdraw
into the mountains without becoming entirely separated from the people
and their work.

The matter of healthfulness was most wisely taken into consideration in
selecting the location for permanent mission stations. Not that this
was the solely decisive feature, but it was given due place in the
weighing of arguments pro and con. Subsequent experience has proven
that it is the poorest and most wasteful policy to permit missionaries
to reside permanently in cities that are found to be unhealthy, or to
plant in such places central institutions. Beirut has been occupied
to the present day as the great mission center for Syria, and the
wisdom of its choice eighty years ago has been abundantly justified. In
selecting other stations in different parts of Turkey the same wise,
careful method was followed.

During the ten years from 1820 to 1830 the explorations made in that
country by missionaries of the Board were extensive, embracing, as has
been stated, the site of the seven churches, the shores of the Nile as
far as Thebes, the whole of Palestine, and the greater part of Syria.
Cappadocia had been entered from Smyrna; while the Peloponnesus, the
more important of the Ionian and Ægean Islands, as well as Tripoli and
Tunis upon the north coast of Africa, had also received missionary
visits. These careful and scientific investigations had brought to the
attention of the Western world the religious beliefs and practises and
the moral condition of the Copts, the Maronite and Greek Churches, as
well as the condition and needs of other races dwelling in that wide
extent of territory.

Vast regions in that empire were still unexplored and peoples like the
Armenians, Nestorians, Chaldeans, as well as Turks, Turkomans, Koords,
and Persians, dwelt in the far east of Turkey and in Persia and about
them little was known. The conditions and needs, and how best to meet
these needs, could not be determined until all parts of the empire, all
its peoples and their interrelations, were fairly well understood.

Owing to the Greco-Turkish war, which involved some of the European
nations, it became necessary in 1828 to withdraw from Beirut, the
center of the Syrian and Palestine work, to Malta, and for two
years Beirut was unoccupied. Towards the close of 1828, Rev. Rufus
Anderson, then Assistant Secretary of the American Board, was sent
to Malta to meet and confer with the brethren and later to make
personal investigations in Greece and the Levant. This conference led
to the location of Mr. Bird in Beirut, and in sending Dr. Goodell to
Constantinople.

At the same time the Prudential Committee decided to send Rev. Eli
Smith and Rev. H. G. O. Dwight upon an extended tour of investigation
across Asia Minor, Armenia, and Koordistan into Georgia and Persia. Mr.
Smith had learned Arabic in Syria and was also somewhat familiar with
the Turkish language, besides being an experienced traveler and a close
and accurate observer. Mr. Dwight was just entering upon his missionary
career and was full of energy and pluck.

These two men proceeded from Malta to Smyrna in March, 1830, and from
there to Constantinople, overland, in April. Before beginning the
journey, they placed themselves under the protection of a chief of
the Tartars, who witnessed the seal of the Tartar guide to a document
acknowledging responsibility for the safe delivery at Constantinople of
the persons and property of the missionaries. Beds, bedding, clothing,
cooking utensils, dishes, writing material, books, food, etc. were
carried in waterproof leather bags upon the backs of horses. They
clothed themselves in the flowing native dress of the country so as to
attract as little annoying attention by the way as possible. They were
also supplied with passports from the government and official letters
of introduction.

While travelers had repeatedly penetrated the regions to which they
were to go, none had made careful, scientific investigation of the
people and of the religious and moral conditions. There was not even a
map in existence upon which dependence could be placed.

After obtaining at Smyrna and Constantinople all the information
possible regarding the Armenians and the country through which they
were to pass, these two missionary explorers set out from the latter
place on the twenty-first of May, 1830, under their Tartar guide, for
the remote interior of the country. The carefully kept journal of this
memorable tour is a classic of its kind. Later accounts and fuller
knowledge of the region traversed by them and of the people they met
give occasion for little change in the story they told to bring it up
to date.

At Tocat they visited the grave of Henry Martyn who gave up his life
there eighteen years before. On the thirteenth of June they entered the
city of Erzerum and found it in the possession of the Russians and the
headquarters of their army. The most of the Armenian population had
fled. After remaining there for a few days, they pushed on eastward,
creating astonishment wherever they went. Their knowledge of Turkish
made it possible for them to converse freely with the people, while
all were puzzled to explain the fact that their own language was known
by foreigners from beyond the sea. None of the inhabitants could
understand the purpose of their inquiries, for to all classes a mission
solely for the sake of the people was incomprehensible. From here they
faced still eastward, visiting Kars, where they met large numbers of
Armenians. They continued on through Tiflis, Shoosha, Nakhchevan,
Echmiadzin, and Khoy, a distance from Constantinople of more than
fifteen hundred miles. When they arrived at Shoosha in the middle of
August they were nearly worn out with the extreme fatigue of a journey,
in itself most trying, while accommodations at night were often unfit
even for a horse. They were also in the midst of cholera which had
recently carried off over seventy thousand people.

They passed two and a half months in Shoosha with some German
missionaries, which gave an opportunity to recuperate and study more
closely the people, country, and languages. On the way to Tabriz,
Persia, Mr. Smith was taken seriously ill when seventy miles from
the city. Had it not been for the prompt and kindly response of the
gentlemen of the English embassy at Tabriz it is doubtful whether he
would have survived to reach the city.

Hitherto they had been studying the Armenian especially. At Tabriz
they were in contact with the Nestorians, to investigate and report
upon whom a special commission had been given them. They were here
nearly two months, and then passed on to Salmas, Persia, where they
came in contact with the Chaldeans, a class of Nestorians who became
Roman Catholics two hundred and fifty years before. From Salmas they
continued to Urumia, still in Persia, and were warmly received by the
Nestorian leaders.

They returned by way of Erzerum and Trebizond, taking ship from there
to Constantinople and Malta, arriving at the latter place July 2,
1831, after an absence of fifteen and a half months. In that time
they had traveled over one thousand miles by water and twenty-five
hundred miles by horse through a wild country beset with robbers and
perils of every kind. Except when entertained by missionaries or
representatives of foreign governments, a rare occurrence upon all
this journey, they were compelled to occupy Oriental stables or even
worse places as caravansaries and endure multifarious privations and
hardships. They returned well, bringing a rich store of accurate
knowledge regarding the country, people, and religions, which later
proved to be of inestimable value in planting missions in all those
regions. Their “Researches,” consisting almost entirely of the journals
they kept, cover every phase of the life and customs of the people
and the conditions of the country. These were printed in two volumes,
aggregating nearly seven hundred pages, and for their scientific value
to the student of races, religions, geography, and language were at
once recognized to be a classic. By this tour and the publication of
their “Researches in Armenia,” all that region was opened to the world
as a proper field of operation for the Christian missionary.

As a direct result of the work of Messrs. Smith and Dwight, Mr. Perkins
was sent to Tabriz in September, 1833, but owing to the unusual
difficulties of the way, among which were various warring tribes of
Koords, he did not arrive until nearly a year after leaving Boston.
In November, 1835, he with Dr. Grant removed from Tabriz to Urumia,
and both these places have been the seat of mission work since. In
1835 Trebizond was occupied as a mission station, and four years later
missionaries were located in Erzerum. Trebizond is upon the Black Sea
and was the port of entry for all that part of the country. It is
at the terminus of the great caravan route from Persia to the West,
and ever since Xenophon took ship there for Constantinople, with his
retreating ten thousand, has held an important place among the ports
upon the coast. Erzerum is a week’s journey inland upon the caravan
route to Persia and is one of the most important cities in Eastern
Turkey. It is situated upon a high plateau nearly six thousand feet
above the sea and in the midst of a large population of Armenians,
Turks, and Koords.

Dr. Asahel Grant was appointed a missionary in 1835 with the
expectation that he would go to Persia. He proceeded to Urumia by way
of Trebizond, Erzerum, and Tabriz. It was expected that Dr. Grant, the
first missionary physician to enter that country, would investigate
the conditions and needs of the mountain Nestorians who occupy the
high lands of Eastern Turkey and western Persia. His allotted task
demanded extensive journeys amid the wildest, least known, and most
dangerous portions of the Ottoman empire. In addition to repeated tours
up and down the country, his most important explorations were made
in Koordistan and among the head waters of the Tigris and Euphrates
rivers. From 1839 to 1845 Dr. Grant visited Van, Diarbekr, Harpoot,
Mardin, Mosul, and many other towns of importance, living among the
people, studying their life, winning them by the depth and sincerity of
his love for them, and planning to reach them by permanently organized
missionary operations. Upon a part of these journeys he was accompanied
by Mr. Holmes, while much of the time, except for native servants, he
was alone.

They reached Diarbekr in July, 1839, and found it in a state of
anarchy. Robbery and murder were the order of the day, with a general
hatred of all Europeans. They withdrew to Mardin, fifty miles south in
Mesopotamia, accompanied by an escort of thirty horsemen sent for their
protection by the Turkish pasha. In Mardin their lives were openly
threatened. Almost by a miracle were they spared, for a mob suddenly
formed and killed the governor in his palace and attacked the lodgings
of the missionaries, who were providentially outside the city at the
time. The city gate, closed to keep them inside for slaughter, barred
them out and so saved their lives.

From here Dr. Grant went on alone to Mosul, upon the Tigris,
two hundred miles below Mardin, while Mr. Holmes returned to
Constantinople. It is an interesting fact that the house in which he
found lodging in this important city of the far interior was but a few
feet from the place that was yet to be his grave.

From Mosul he started alone in the fall of the same year for an
extended tour through the unexplored mountains of Koordistan. He soon
came into contact with the Yezidis, who are worshipers of Satan and
more friendly to the Christians than to the Moslems. He took pains to
call upon the chiefs of the country and make friends with them for the
sake of the missionary work yet to be developed. He found many of the
Koordish chiefs inclined to be friendly.

By means of his medical skill he was able to command the respect if not
the love of all. He attended professionally the emir of a large area
of country in Koordistan, who gave orders a few years previously for
the murder of the scientist Schultz. This tour covered eight months. He
was so much changed by his native dress and rough appearance that he
was not recognized by his associates at Urumia upon his arrival there.

Repeated journeys were made back and forth through that country with
Urumia and Mosul as points to which he occasionally returned. The
work of exploration was made much more hazardous and difficult by
the hostility to each other of the Nestorians, Koords, and Turks, a
hostility often manifesting itself in open war. At one time Dr. Grant
was charged with being an ally of the emir and again with being a
Turkish spy. His great tact, absolute fearlessness, and most winning
Christian character overcame all obstacles, and under the protecting
hand of God preserved him from violence.

The careful journals of Dr. Grant, even though they had to be kept in
absolute secrecy to prevent the arousing of suspicions, contain some
of the very best information extant to-day regarding the character and
conditions of these savage but sturdy people of Eastern Turkey. In
nearly all that wild country to have been caught writing would probably
have resulted in his immediate death. Such an act would have stamped
him as a spy or necromancer, both of which were regarded as worthy
of death. While Dr. Grant was still alive, and largely by him, the
attention of the American Board was emphatically called to the great
needs of that country, and to the possibilities of inaugurating among
the mountain Nestorians a direct evangelistic work. Many of them were
Roman Catholics, nominally, but a large number were not. No special
plans were then made for direct work among the Koords, as attention up
to that time had been directed more to the nominal Christian races. Dr.
Grant, however, pleaded that a mission might be established “to Assyria
and Mesopotamia” rather than to any particular sect or race.

Dr. Grant died in Mosul, April 24, 1844, after a life brief in years
but long in the extent of country covered by its influence, and thereby
opened to his successors for missionary operations. Mr. Layard, the
well-known Assyriologist, who later traversed Koordistan, said he had
heard Mussulmans speak of Dr. Grant in the highest terms of praise,
while the Koords repeatedly referred to him as “the good doctor.” Few
missionaries have done more in so brief a time to open to the world a
country filled with savage, hostile, and warring races, and thus to lay
the foundation for permanent missionary occupation. At least six places
visited by him subsequently became missionary stations, all of which
are now maintained.


EXPLORATIONS ALONG THE UPPER EUPHRATES AND TIGRIS RIVERS

In 1850 Rev. and Mrs. Dunmore were appointed missionaries to the city
of Diarbekr, which had been previously visited by Dr. Grant and others.
This city, known in classic history as Amida, is an ancient walled town
upon the Tigris river located at the northern extremity of Mesopotamia.
It was nearly a year before they reached their destination, having
stopped for a time in Aintab and Urfa to study the Turkish language.
The city was hot with persecution when they arrived, so that repeatedly
the life of Mr. Dunmore was in peril. He was openly refused protection
by Turkish officials and so became the common prey of all who were
opposed to the hated Protestants. Mr. Dunmore was bold but tactful,
and succeeded finally in gaining a foothold in the city, although
dire persecution was meted out to those who identified themselves
with him. After the work had become fairly well established there, he
began explorations into the populous, prosperous, and little known
regions lying to the north. He went as far as Erzerum, visiting Mardin,
Arghuni, Haine, Harpoot, Arabkir and many other towns of importance—in
fact including in his tours nearly every city of influence in all those
extensive regions.

Near the close of 1852 he was at Harpoot, and wrote most
enthusiastically of the character of the Armenians he met there,
and also of the strategic location of the city. He says: “The city
overlooks a vast, rich plain studded with three hundred and sixty-six
villages, of from one hundred to five thousand inhabitants each,
nearly all Armenians, and all within a few hours’ ride of the city.
It presents, therefore, the richest country and the most inviting
and promising missionary field I have seen in Turkey.” He went on at
length to describe the people, the climate, the accessibility of the
vast populations on all sides. He urgently pleaded for missionaries to
occupy the city. He not only reported upon that city, but upon many
other places from twenty-five to one hundred and fifty miles away, all
in the same general Euphrates river basin, presenting such a glowing
account of it all that within two years two new missionary families
were on their way to occupy the field. It is an interesting fact
that every large place visited by Mr. Dunmore became, not many years
later, either the residence of missionaries or a center of Christian
operations under trained native workers.

Mr. Dunmore’s gentle firmness and absolute fearlessness made a profound
impression upon all whom he met. He did much to prepare the minds and
hearts of the people for the coming of those who followed him; as,
for instance, after enduring stonings and revilings and open threats
of assassination at Diarbekr, he went boldly to the Turkish governor
with a complaint against a wealthy Moslem who had greatly wronged him.
The governor gave little heed, and at once exonerated the Moslem. Mr.
Dunmore announced his purpose to appeal to the British Embassy at
Constantinople, even to make the journey in person, in order to secure
justice. The governor, after some deliberation, reversed his decision
and put the Moslem in prison for two days. When he was released he
called upon the missionary, begged his pardon, and announced his
personal friendship. A little later, another Turk threatened Mr.
Dunmore’s life and was put in jail for it. This seemed to be what was
required in order to give the cause standing before the community, for
the attitude of the Turks changed at once, and many began to inquire
about the truth which the missionaries were teaching.

Wherever Mr. Dunmore went, as was also the case with Dr. Grant, the way
was remarkably prepared for the missionaries who were to follow them.
These men opened all Eastern Turkey to its first knowledge of Americans
and for the residence of missionaries.

In the early missionary explorations no attention was given to
Arabia. At that time there seems to have been little thought about
the conversion of the Mohammedans, and even had there been, the other
parts of the Turkish empire afforded a sufficient number upon which to
begin. Arabia seems to have been considered a remote and unknown land
to which no missionary turned his tours of investigation and to which
no committee at home commissioned one to preach. Arabia was indeed a
remote country before the Suez Canal was opened and when Bombay was
reached by sailing-vessels going around the south of Africa. Of the
country itself little was known, and for the most part it has never
come under the full control of the sultan of Turkey or of any other
country. Of the six million inhabitants of Arabia not more than one
million two hundred thousand are confessedly subjects of the sultan.
While he lays claim to the whole country he has not been able, up to
the present time, wholly to make his claims good.

In Hejaz and Yemen, regions under the sultan, no Christian is permitted
to reside or travel, and in the rest of the country the ruling emirs
or imams readily inflict the death penalty upon Moslems for departure
from the faith. Long after the English took control of Aden, at the
extreme southwestern part of the peninsula, a mission was opened there
which is called the Keith-Falconer mission, and which is now carried
on by the United Free Church of Scotland. In 1889 an independent
inter-denominational mission was opened upon the western shore of the
Persian Gulf. Members of this mission have penetrated into the interior
of the country and have given to the world much valuable information
regarding this land of mystery and its inhabitants of ancient name and
fame. This mission was adopted by the Board of the Reformed (Dutch)
Church of America in 1894.

It is remarkable that this cradle of Islam, lying so close to the
great highway between the West and the far East, should still remain
practically untouched by modern education and the fundamental truths of
Christianity. It cannot long maintain its barriers against the onrush
of modern thought and life.




XIII. ESTABLISHED CENTERS


    So far as Americans are concerned, the missionary work in
    European Turkey and Asia Minor is and long has been almost
    exclusively in the hands of the American Board. In no part
    of the world has that Board or any Board had abler or more
    devoted representatives to preach the gospel, to conduct
    schools and colleges or to establish and administer
    hospitals. Their original aim was to infuse new life into
    the native Armenian and Greek churches, to rescue them
    from mere formalism, and to imbue them with the spirit of
    a pure and active Christianity. Circumstances compiled
    them in due time to organize independent churches on which
    the old churches at first looked with unfriendly eyes.
    But of late years in many places a more friendly and
    sympathetic spirit has been manifested towards them by
    the clergy of the old order, and the life of some of the
    native churches has been quickened by the example of the
    missionary churches.

    The excellence of our schools has been so manifest that
    its stimulating effect has been felt by not only the
    Armenian and Greek schools, but also by the Turkish
    schools.

    The medical work of our missionary physicians has also
    widely commended itself to men of all faiths and has
    awakened a decided interest not only in the religion which
    so humanely brings its generous hospital treatment to all
    who desire it, but also in the rational system of medicine
    and surgery which it illustrates. Even the Mohammedans
    who are generally inaccessible to the approaches of our
    missionaries cannot but have some appreciation of the
    benevolent and Christlike work of our physicians.

    Wherever an American mission is established, there is
    a center of alert, enterprising American life, whose
    influence in a hundred ways is felt even by the lethargic
    Oriental life.
                          —PROF. JAMES B. ANGELL, LL. D.,
                                   University of Michigan,
                   Ex. U. S. Minister to Turkey and China.

Smyrna was the first station of the Levant occupied by American
missionaries. This was an important city of Turkey and, until
Constantinople was better understood, was considered the most important
city to hold as the central station of the missions to Turkey. Since
1820 this place has been one of the stations of the American Board and
the residence of one or more missionary families. This was regarded as
a good starting-point for work among the Greeks, as well as other races
centering there in large numbers.

Beirut, after an attempt to locate in Jerusalem, was occupied as a
station three years later. While the original plans for work in Syria
had the Jews most distinctly in mind, attention was quickly diverted to
other races more alert and promising.

It was inevitable that Constantinople should early become the
headquarters of missions in the Ottoman empire as it was the political
capital and commercial metropolis. The climate is healthy, and being
partly in Europe and partly in Asia, the city partakes in part of the
character of both continents.

There was also another strong reason for making Constantinople
the headquarters of work in Turkey, namely, the fact that it was
the headquarters of every important religious sect in the empire.
Opposition to mission work must emanate from that center and
difficulties could best be overcome right at their beginning. As it was
also the seat of government from which governors and civil officers
were sent to every part of the empire, this made it still more
important that a strong mission force should reside here, in order that
these men should not receive the impression that Christian missionaries
are advancing upon the empire only through remote interior districts.
The capital was occupied as a mission station of the Board in 1831,
and has since been the base of operations for the work of the American
Board in the country. Tours of exploration made in Asia Minor and into
Koordistan and Persia started from this center.

Preliminary explorations had been made by various scientific societies,
as for instance that of John M. Parker, F. G. S., F. R. G. S., under
the auspices of the Royal Geographical Society and the Society for
Promoting Christian Knowledge, in 1839-40. They went overland from
Constantinople to Cæsarea, Malatia, Diarbekr, Mosul, Koordistan,
Bitlis, Marash, Erzerum, Trebizond, and thence back to Constantinople.
The report of this extended tour through Asia Minor, northern
Mesopotamia, Koordistan, and Armenia, published in two volumes, under
the title “Travels and Researches in Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Chaldea,
and Armenia,” was of great value to the missionaries in planning
their locations. These researches were made largely from the purely
scientific standpoint and in some cases needed to be supplemented by
missionary observations.

The establishing of mission locations over the vast areas of Asiatic
and European Turkey was not hastily carried out. The country was
well mapped and explored before the stations were opened, and then
only such places were chosen as promised to be central to large
populations and healthful for missionary residences. The policy seems
to have been early adopted to set the stations far apart, with two
or more missionary families in each of them. The success of this
plan has proven its wisdom, and even now the tendency is to greater
consolidation in important centers rather than to a scattering of
forces.

A few, and but a few, places early opened as stations were later
abandoned. Three of these were Mosul, Diarbekr, and Arabkir. The former
place proved to be exceedingly unhealthy and was made an outstation of
Mardin, while the two latter places were within one hundred miles of
Harpoot and were made outstations. The carefulness and foresight with
which the early stations were chosen are proved by the test of over
fifty years of successful occupancy.

Trebizond, upon the southern shore of the Black Sea towards its eastern
extremity, was occupied as a station, as already stated, in 1835. It is
a large city of great influence, with a Greek, Armenian, and Turkish
population.

In 1839 a missionary family was sent to Erzerum, one hundred and ten
miles into the interior to the southeast of Trebizond. As soon as
these stations were opened they became the centers of exploration for
securing and forwarding information to the headquarters of the missions
in Constantinople and to the Board in Boston.

Aintab was opened in what was then called “Southern Armenia,” in
1849, and became the center for operations upon a large population
dwelling in northern Syria, extending from Urfa on the east into the
Tarsus mountains upon the west, and including the important cities
of Marash, opened in 1855, Adana, Aleppo, Tarsus, Hadjin, Antioch,
Kilis, and many other towns of less importance. Later this became the
center of what came to be known as the Central Turkey Mission. This
region is approached from the Mediterranean and is inhabited chiefly
by Armenians and Turks. In this section of country the Armenians
have lost, for the most part, their native tongue, and speak only the
Turkish language. As the Koords and more savage races live in remote
regions, the people have not endured the persecution here that their
brethren in the north and east have been called upon to pass through.

In 1850 an investigation of the condition of the Jews in Salonica
was made, which resulted in the opening of that station for work,
especially among the Jews. There seems to have been no thought of
reaching from that station any other races. They found the Jews there
extremely ignorant, and divided between the Rabbinicals and the
Mohammedans. The unhealthy condition of the city led in 1859 to the
transfer of the station to Smyrna.

The more interior stations, like Marsovan, Cæsarea, Sivas, Harpoot
and Bitlis, were occupied in the ’50s, while Van, the most eastern
mission station in Turkey, was made such in 1872. From Constantinople
the missionaries had been gradually reaching out, Nicomedia and Brusa
having been made stations in 1847 and 1848, respectively.

The languages used in these missions were the Arabic and Syrian in the
Syrian field with its center at Beirut; the Turkish language in the
Central Turkey region with its center at Aintab; the Armenian language
in the Eastern Turkey district with its center at Harpoot; while Arabic
was the language of Mardin, Mosul and Arabia, and the Greek, Armenian,
Bulgarian and Turkish languages in the Western Turkey mission including
Trebizond. Various plans were tried at first of grouping these various
stations for purposes of control and administration. They could not
all be classed together owing to the long distances separating them
and the difficulties of travel in a country with no roads and no public
conveyances. Finally the above outlined arrangement of the stations
was adopted and each separate mission became a little republic in
itself, holding its annual meeting, in which delegates from all the
stations belonging to it met and legislated for it as a whole. In 1872
the European Turkey mission also became separate from the Western
Turkey mission and has since been conducted as an entirely distinct
organization.

The great extent of territory covered by these missions can best be
understood by the fact that but few stations anywhere were less than
one hundred miles apart. The nearest station to Harpoot in Eastern
Turkey was distant one hundred and fifty miles, a six days’ journey
by the ordinary mode of conveyance. To reach some of the interior
stations like Bitlis, Harpoot and Mardin required an overland journey
on horseback of from three to four weeks from the Black Sea coast. Thus
the country was dotted by mission stations which became at once centers
for direct, aggressive, educational, philanthropic and Christian
work. In no case was one opened except upon the urgent invitation of
a large number of the people themselves. A station meant then, as it
means to-day, a center in which missionaries reside. It was understood
also that this residence was permanent, and to make this clear to
all, houses for the missionaries were purchased or erected and other
arrangements completed for a life-work. This fact in itself made a
profound impression upon the people of all classes and religions.
When it was charged that the missionary movement would prove to be
short-lived, no one was able to answer the question, “What mean these
residences owned by the missionaries?” Certainly, if it was the purpose
to carry on only a temporary work, houses would have been leased.
Another fact, which gave the appearance and impression of permanency,
was that the missionaries came with their wives and set up their homes
there. These two facts had much to do in giving stability and strength
to the earlier work. The three men and their wives who occupied the
Harpoot station in 1858 were there together in that same station until
after the massacres of 1895, when owing to broken health and the
destruction of their homes four of them were compelled to come to this
country. Three of the six are still living, two of them at Harpoot. The
policy of married missionaries permanently located in central stations
and from there working together as a unit the large adjacent field,
has proved itself to be a wise and efficient policy for all parts
of Turkey. This policy necessitates the wide use of trained native
pastors, preachers, evangelists and teachers who occupy the outstations
and push the work into the remoter districts.

Each station became a social settlement, in which the Christian home
was the center and from which wholesome Christian influences were
exerted upon all with whom the missionaries came in contact. The plan
involved the elevation and purification of the entire social fabric of
the country, and, judged from our modern standpoint, no more effectual
way of accomplishing this could have been devised. It is no small thing
for devout philanthropists in England and the United States to give up
their comfortable homes and establish their residence, as many have
done and are still doing, among the downtrodden and oppressed in our
great cities. It is well known, however, that this change of residence
is not permanent and that, in cases of sickness, the old home and
friends remain, to which return can be made. With those missionaries
the case was different. Their homes in America were broken up. They
took up their abode in the interior cities of Turkey for life. In times
of sickness they remained. No friends from home visited them, and in
case of their death, their bodies were buried in the soil of the land.
There were their children born, and in multitudes of cases, because
of the severity of the climate and the lack of proper facilities for
safeguarding their health, there also were they buried. Herein lie
many elements of moral strength which appear in the foreign missionary
movement. It is this feature which has made a profound impression upon
the races of Turkey and which is now reshaping its social system.

In 1860, after forty years of exploration and study in the Turkish
empire, so far as her people and their moral and spiritual needs
were concerned, missionary work had been outlined for at least five
different races. Interest in the Jews had been continued, and a
missionary, Dr. Schauffler, intended exclusively for work among them,
had been maintained, not at Jerusalem but at Constantinople. He was
working in harmony with the three English and Scottish societies, each
of whom was maintaining missionaries to the Jews, with headquarters
at Constantinople. The work done was quiet, exciting apparently less
interest among the people of Turkey than among the organizers of
societies in the United States for work among this race. Undoubtedly,
during the first generation of work in the Ottoman empire, the people
of the United States and England were more stirred by appeals for work
among the Jews than by any other appeal which was or could be made.

The work for the Greeks was promising in Smyrna and Constantinople.
Owing to Greece obtaining her freedom from the rule of the sultan,
Greeks still living in Turkey were drawn away in their sympathies and
interest to Greece, and the spirit of patriotism was strong in holding
them to the national Church.

Among the Syrians a hold was obtained in spite of the intense
opposition of the Roman Catholics who claimed all Syrians as belonging
to them. The severest opposition during the first twenty-five years of
mission effort in Turkey came not from the Turks but from the Roman
Catholics, who did not stop at the employment of any measure which
would tend to banish the printing-press and curtail the work of the
Protestant missionaries.

The Mohammedans commanded early attention. They were drawn to the
missionaries by the fact that no pictures or images were used in
Protestant worship nor gaudy display made in any public services.
Repeatedly Turks said to the missionaries, “You are like us, you are
good Moslems.” As acquaintance increased, interest deepened in this
dominant race. Conditions were such that little directly aggressive
effort could be wisely made for their immediate enlightenment. Much was
done in the way of private conversation and through the preparation and
publication of a Christian literature adapted to their needs.

It may be said, however, that the Armenians most completely commanded
both the interest of the missionaries and the attention of the
constituency at home. The most of the stations in the country were
established especially for this race. They were found at every center.
Even in Syria and in all of the interior stations, Armenians and Turks
were the chief people with whom the missionaries constantly came
in contact. Interest in Armenians was strengthened by the intense
persecutions through which the evangelicals passed in the early ’40s,
at the hand of their own ecclesiastics. They were open-minded, able,
and devout, and presented a wide opportunity for sowing the seeds
of intelligent belief. At that time little had been done for the
Bulgarians in European Turkey and Macedonia. The more remote Asiatic
field had proved to be so large and so interesting that there had been
scant pause to look into the conditions and needs of the people so near
at hand, occupying the southeastern corner of Europe.

Levi Parsons and Pliny Fisk, writing from Smyrna to the Board rooms
in February, 1820, said, “In all the populous Catholic and Mohammedan
countries on the north and south side of the Mediterranean there is not
a single Protestant missionary. In all the Turkish empire, containing
perhaps twenty million souls, not one missionary station is permanently
occupied and but a single missionary besides ourselves.” This one man
did not long remain. Besides the English work among the Jews and Turks
in Constantinople and Palestine, the evangelization of the Turkish
empire was left from the first to the American Board. In later years
the Disciples of Christ and the Seventh Day Adventists have sent a
few missionaries into the country, but their work has been almost
exclusively among the Protestants and has resulted only in dividing
churches already organized. The Church Missionary Society of England
has had some work in Bagdad, and a Scotch society in Aden and the
Reformed Church of the United States has recently begun operations upon
the southern coast of Arabia. With a few other minor exceptions, the
Turkish empire north of Syria has been generally conceded to be the
distinctive mission field of the American Board of Missions.

When the division of fields took place in 1870 between the American
Board and the newly organized Presbyterian Board of Missions, southern
Syria and Persia were assigned to that Board, while the American Board
retained northern Syria and all the rest of Turkey. In European Turkey
the same Board is in sole charge of all the evangelical work for and
among the Bulgarians south of the Balkans, the Methodist Episcopal
Board of the United States having a work among the same people north
of the Balkans. Thus Macedonia and Bulgaria south of the Balkans, Asia
Minor, Armenia, Koordistan, northern Syria and northern Mesopotamia
are left the sole field of the American Board, with the few exceptions
mentioned above. This has put upon it a responsibility and placed
before it an opportunity such as few mission agencies in modern times
have had to face.




XIV. BEGINNINGS IN REFORM


    I had occasion some years ago to visit a considerable
    part of Turkey, from Constantinople and Beirut to Mosul
    and Bagdad, and everywhere I paid particular attention
    to missionary conditions and the influence of mission
    work upon the people. This is a land assigned almost
    wholly to American Missionary Boards, and the influence
    is everywhere marked and excellent. The late Premier
    Stviloff told me in Sofia that but for young men educated
    by American teachers in Constantinople, Bulgaria when it
    became independent would have had to depend on Russians
    for administrative officers. He was himself, like so many
    other distinguished Bulgarians, a graduate of Robert
    College. In Syria a native physician, graduated at the
    Syrian Protestant College, said to me, “We say, ‘After
    God, van Dyke.’” In the interior cities, such as Marash,
    Aintab, Urfa, Mardin and Diarbekr, the American schools
    and the large self-supporting churches were evidences
    of the new evangelic spirit and culture which had put
    new heart into those ancient seats of intellectual
    decay. About Harpoot there were thousands who had
    learned English, and hundreds have come from there to
    this country believing it to be a very paradise. The
    contrast was sad enough when I came into the towns south
    from Mosul where American missionary influence had not
    reached, and scarce any signs of intellectual or material
    improvement were to be found. I am convinced that the work
    of devoted, intelligent, broad-minded missionaries is
    far more effective in lifting a people out of ignorance
    and social decay into enlightened civilization, than
    all the influences of commerce or mere governmental
    policy. Our missionaries bring the motive of faith as the
    example of unselfish service which nothing else can supply.
                                 —WILLIAM HAYES WARD, LL. D.,
                                 Editor “New York Independent.”

During the first generation of missionary operations in Turkey there
were few tangible results except among the Armenians. The Mohammedans
were by no means entirely hostile and revealed much friendliness and
often open sympathy. The Jews presented almost a solid wall of stolid
opposition to the effort for reform among them, while the Syrians and
Greeks, under the leadership of the Roman Catholics, were often violent
in their open attacks and secret plottings to thwart every attempt
of the missionaries to gain a foothold in the country. The people in
all the empire who seemed to have been especially prepared to receive
and profit by evangelical teaching were the Armenians, who were not
distinctly in mind when mission work in Turkey was first contemplated.
In fact, almost nothing was then known of these people in the world at
large and among the Christians of the United States who were supporting
the cause of foreign missions.

While the American Board contemplated extending its missions in the
Levant to the shores of the Black Sea and especially into Armenia, no
mention whatever seems to have been made of the Armenians in connection
with the beginning of the first “mission to Palestine.”

Not long after Rev. Levi Parsons arrived at Jerusalem in 1821 and
upon his first visit there, he came into contact with some Armenian
pilgrims with whom he had conversation upon the subject of missions to
their people and country. These expressed themselves as eager to have
missionaries sent to them. Mr. Fisk at about the same time, writing
to Boston from Smyrna, recommended the appointment of missionaries to
Armenia. From this time the idea of work among the Armenians enlarged
and deepened, although the “mission to the Jews” was kept persistently
at the front.

There had been a vast deal of preparation of the Armenian people for a
work of reform, emanating from sources quite outside of the Board and,
in fact, considerably anterior to its organization. Somewhere about
1760, an Armenian priest, who was burning with the desire to reform the
Armenian Church, appeared in Constantinople. He saw and deeply felt the
gross errors of the Gregorian Church, and wrote a book exposing them.
He was an educated man and seems to have been more or less familiar
with the work of Martin Luther, of whose Reformation he heartily
approved. He constantly referred to the Bible and to this high standard
he mercilessly brought his Church and its clergy. The inconsistent life
of the priests and bishops, and the gross superstitions of the people
at large, greatly troubled him. He lacked, however, true spiritual
enlightenment and power, and failed to see divine truth in its breadth
and purity. His book was never printed, but copies were kept in various
places which were brought to light and repeatedly referred to later.
This effort had wide influence in revealing the errors of the Armenian
Church, and did much to prepare the way for the genuine reformatory
movement.

In 1813, six years before the American Board appointed its first
missionary to Palestine, the British and Russian Bible Societies made
strenuous efforts to provide for the Armenian people a Bible in their
own tongue. An edition of an old fourth century Armenian version of
the entire Bible was commenced in that year at St. Petersburg by the
Russian Bible Society, and at about the same time another edition of
the same Bible was put on the press by the Calcutta Auxiliary of the
British and Foreign Bible Society. The Russian edition of five thousand
copies was out in 1815, and the British edition of two thousand copies
appeared two years later. The Russian Society issued a separate edition
of two thousand copies of the Ancient Armenian New Testament.

In their report of 1814 the British and Foreign Bible Society said
that the printing of the Armenian Testament had aroused much interest
among the Armenians, especially those in Russia. Emperor Alexander at
that time took a keen interest in the work of the Russian Bible Society
and therefore the cause itself became popular among all classes. The
Armenian Catholicos, the spiritual head of that Church, with residence
at Etchmiadzin, now in Russia, bordering upon Armenia, was elected
one of the vice-presidents of the society. He wrote a letter to its
president commending the work of the society, and approving of the plan
to supply his own people with the Word of God. The Armenian archbishop
of Tiflis contributed six hundred roubles for that purpose.

In 1818 the British and Foreign Bible Society purchased one thousand
five hundred copies of the Armenian New Testament from the Armenian
Catholic College located on the Island of St. Lazarus, Venice, for
distribution among the Armenians. Later, a still larger number was
purchased and distributed in the same way. In 1823 the same Bible
Society published at Constantinople an edition of five thousand copies
of the Armenian New Testament and three thousand copies of the four
Gospels alone. These books were rapidly distributed by agents of the
British and Foreign Bible Society and by Mr. Connor of the Church
Missionary Society, at that time in Constantinople, among the Armenians
of the Trans-Caucasian provinces in Russia and in Turkey.

These facts have an important bearing upon the preparation of the
Armenians for a reform movement. Hitherto, while they had the Bible in
its entirety, it was mostly in manuscript form, and inaccessible to the
people. These valuable copies of the Holy Scriptures were kept in the
monasteries or in the larger churches, carefully guarded by the priests
or other custodians, who usually were themselves unable to read or
understand the writing. All the Armenians everywhere accepted the Bible
as the divine and inspired Word of God.

The name of the Bible is Astvadsashoonch, or “_The breath of God_.”
With joy they welcomed the printed word that could be kept in their
houses, handled with their own hands, and perused at their leisure.
Hitherto they had been permitted only to kiss its silver adorned covers
at the close of the formal services of their churches.

It was soon found, however, that the ancient Armenian, the language
of all the manuscripts of the Bible and rituals of the Old Church and
also of the Bibles and Testaments recently printed, was not understood
by the common, uneducated people. As the educated were few, the number
of intelligent readers was greatly limited. This number was confined
practically to the higher clergy, a few priests and vartabeds, and
the teachers in the schools. In order to reach the common people,
the Russian Bible Society issued in 1822 and 1823 a New Testament
translated into Turkish and printed with the Armenian character. As
a large proportion of the Armenians understood Turkish this version
brought to them the Word of God.

Hitherto the Armenian ecclesiastics had made little or no opposition
to the circulation of the Bible among the people, while some of the
most prominent seemed to favor the work. In 1823 the agents of the
British and Foreign Bible Society at Constantinople endeavored to
secure the sanction of the Armenian patriarch for the printing and
circulation of the New Testament in the modern, spoken Armenian tongue,
the home language of most of the Armenians in Turkey. They were met
with the severest opposition, and with threats of prohibiting the
reading of the book if it should be issued.

Without attempting to follow the course of Bible publication, upon
which depended the plan of reform for both the Armenian and Greek
churches as well as for all the other races dwelling in the empire,
suffice it to say that the hostility of the Armenian clergy, called
forth by the publication of the modern Armenian version of the
Scriptures, started a conflict, which waged throughout the country
for more than a generation, as to whether that version was the true
Word of God. The ancient Armenian Scriptures were translated from
the Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate while the modern versions were
made from the Hebrew and Greek. For this reason there were many
discrepancies between the two versions which were discussed everywhere.
This drove the people to a careful study of the Bible. If it could
be once established that the modern version was also the “Word of
God,” there could be no hesitation upon the part of the Armenians in
accepting it as such. This phase of the controversy passed fully forty
years ago, and throughout the country this version is now accepted as
_Astvadsashoonch_ or the _veritable Word of God_. It was, however, for
many years a vital question which commanded the attention and energy of
the strongest men of the race.

The work of Bible translation and publication has continued under
the patronage of the British and Foreign Bible Society and the
American Bible Society until the entire Bible is now available for
all Turkish, Arabic, Syrian, Persian, Armenian, Bulgarian, and
Greek speaking peoples, and parts of the same are available for the
Koords and Albanians. Nothing in the line of reform in Turkey has
been more potent than the Word of God in the spoken languages of its
many-tongued people, put up in cheap form and in convenient sizes and
widely distributed in all parts of the empire. The Bible is not only
welcomed by nearly all classes, but it is eagerly sought by many who
are remotely informed of its contents but who are eager to investigate
for themselves. It is an interesting fact that wherever the Bible,
and especially the New Testament, has been most widely read, there
the people have been the more determined to have modern educational
facilities for their children and better prepared to welcome the better
forms of Western civilization.




XV. LEADERS, METHODS, AND ANATHEMAS


    I must frankly confess that when I first went to Turkey I
    was somewhat prejudiced against the missionaries there and
    missionary work, to this extent: As what, I suppose, you
    might call a high Anglican, I looked with a certain esteem
    and regard upon the old churches of the East and it seemed
    to me theoretically that the proper method of missionary
    enterprise was to try to cooperate with those churches,
    helping them to educate and evangelize themselves.
    As a result of contact first with the Congregational
    missionaries of the A. B. C. F. M., this prejudice very
    speedily vanished. I found those men not only most earnest
    and devout Christians, but, so to speak, thoroughly
    Catholic and non-partisan, and I found that they had
    profoundly influenced for good the ancient Christian
    churches where they had come in contact with them and, in
    fact, regenerated (I think the term is not too strong)
    the Armenian Church. They themselves were men not only of
    culture and refinement and earnest religious devotion, but
    of broad, statesmanlike views, an unusual group.

    At Constantinople I was also brought into close contact
    with the men and women conducting the two great colleges,
    Robert College at Roumelia Hissar and the Woman’s College
    at Scutari, and had some opportunity to estimate the
    value of that work and its profound influence as a
    civilizing agent on the community at large. Later I was
    brought into contact with the Syrian Protestant College
    at Beirut, and with the Congregational and Presbyterian
    missionaries through Syria, and the favorable impressions
    made at Constantinople were confirmed and strengthened.
    My travels into regions touched by American missionaries,
    and beyond the confines of those regions, enabled me to
    form an estimate of the real influence of the missionaries
    on the country at large. It has been enormous. One thing,
    especially, the missionaries have given honor everywhere
    to the American name, so that to be known as an American
    almost anywhere in Turkey, is to ensure the confidence
    of the people. That name is the synonym of honest and
    disinterested service of one’s fellow men. I wish that the
    name American carried in every country the meaning which
    American missionaries have caused it to bear in Turkey,
    and I may add in Bulgaria.

    But I must not be too lengthy. I am apt to wax
    enthusiastic when I speak on this subject, and am
    sometimes afraid my language may seem extravagant. It
    is difficult to comprehend how such a relatively small
    body of men, with such a relatively small expenditure of
    money, has made so profound an impression on the life of
    the people of the empire as has been made by the American
    missionaries and the American schools and colleges. They
    have been the great means of uplift, both directly and
    also indirectly, in causing the establishment by other
    nations and by the Turks themselves, of schools and the
    like, thus diffusing still further education.

    I wish I had time and space to speak further of the
    great needs of the people of Turkey which must be met,
    if at all, through missionary agencies and of the great
    opportunities which the field presents in spite of all
    hindrances and difficulties.
            —PROF. JOHN P. PETERS, D. D., SCD., Explorer.

It should be stated at the outset that the purpose of the American
Board in its efforts for the Armenians was not to weaken the old
Gregorian Church or to proselyte from it. There was no desire to form
among the Armenians an evangelical or Protestant Church. There was no
purpose to form any organization among them, but simply to introduce
the New Testament in the spoken tongue of the people and to assist them
in working out reforms in their old Church and under their own leaders.

The first missionary sent to Constantinople by the Board was the
Rev. William Goodell, transferred from Beirut by way of Malta to
open a mission at the capital of the empire with a view to reaching
the Armenians there. In his work of translating the Bible into
Armeno-Turkish at Beirut he had been ably assisted by two prominent
Armenians, one a bishop and one a learned vartabed, who had fully
accepted the modern Bible and were firm believers in the necessity
of reform for the Armenian Church. Dr. Goodell may be called the
father of the Armenian mission and the shaper of its policy. He was
a man of great intellectual ability, clear spiritual insight and
practical wisdom. After familiarizing himself with the situation at
Constantinople he wrote:

    “In almost every place individuals are found who are so
    far enlightened as to see and feel that their churches are
    abominably corrupt, and who do sincerely desire a reform.
    We ourselves at this place have nothing to do with the
    Church, its dogmas, ceremonies and superstitions, nor do
    we ever think of meddling with the convents, the priests,
    the celibacy of the clergy, etc. In fact, we stand nearly
    as far aloof from ecclesiastical matters as we do from
    political matters. We find no occasion to touch them. We
    direct men to their own hearts and to the Bible. Nor do we
    make any attempt to establish a new Church or raise up a
    new party. We disdain everything of the kind. We tell them
    frankly, ‘You have sects enough among you already, and
    we have no design of setting up a new one, or of pulling
    down your churches, or drawing away members from them in
    order to build up our own.’ No, let him who is a Greek be
    a Greek still, and him who is an Armenian be an Armenian
    still.”

In another place he wrote, “The less that is said and known about our
operations so much the better. A great deal can be done in a silent,
harmless, inoffensive way in these countries, but nothing in a storm.”
Again he said, “Our kingdom is not of this world, we are building up
no Church here, nor forming any ecclesiastical organization whatever.”

These utterances of Dr. Goodell, which might be greatly multiplied,
are enough to show the plan he had worked out for mission operations
among the Oriental churches. The attitude of the officers of the Board
in Boston was in full accord with this purpose and method. In a word,
the aim of missions to the Oriental churches was not to organize a
separate Church but to give them the Word of God in their own spoken
tongue, help them to understand its teachings, and then to cooperate
with them in organizing and carrying out such measures of reform as
might seem wise and practicable to their own leaders. In carrying out
this plan no separate meetings were begun. The only distinct religious
services carried on in Constantinople by the missionaries in all these
years of beginnings were private worship in English for themselves,
their children, and other English speaking people in the city who
chose to join them. Apart from this, their time was given to personal
conversation with individuals, dwelling largely upon the interpretation
of the Scriptures. Men who felt they must separate from the old Church
were persuaded to remain within the Church and to work there for
gradual reforms. These purposes and plans were talked over freely with
the patriarch, with the priests, bishops, and leaders of the Church,
and met with their hearty approval. The missionaries attended the
services of the old Church upon the Sabbath and on special occasions
at other times, and frequently took part, as they were invited so to
do. The contemplated reforms had nothing to do with the ecclesiastical
systems or ritual then dominating. There was no desire to change these.
The one aim was as declared in the expression frequently used, “_To
build up truth_.” When truth prevails error will depart.

It was plain to all, and to none more than to the Armenian leaders,
that no permanent reforms could be wrought out within the Church
without schools for the education of priests. It was apparent that, so
long as the ministers in the churches were for the most part untaught,
ignorant, and often coarse, the Church could never be lifted from its
low intellectual, moral, and spiritual plane. Because of the general
ignorance of so many of the clergy, the cause of education among the
Armenians had everywhere gone into decadence. Fully recognizing these
conditions and needs, and at the same time aware that the situation was
delicate, Dr. Goodell and his associates, instead of starting mission
schools, persuaded the Greeks and the Armenians to establish schools of
their own, proffering missionary assistance as it might be called for.

At about the time mission work began in Turkey, the system of schools
organized by Joseph Lancaster of England was attracting much attention,
not only in that country but in the United States. This was a monitor
system requiring few trained teachers, no text-books, and seemed to
command popular interest wherever tried, and undoubtedly afforded a
quick and superficial exhibit of progress in the pupils. Lancasterian
schools were having a period of great popularity in Greece. They spread
to Constantinople and were at once adopted by Greeks, Armenians, and
Turks. These had the effect of arousing the popular mind, and awaking
a desire for an education. These schools were, for the most part,
religious, but not sectarian. They were not long continued by either
the Turks or the Greeks, but the seed of learning fell into especially
fruitful soil among the Armenians.

Another influence had been operating at the capital leading towards
this same end. When Jonas King left Syria he wrote a farewell letter
dwelling at length upon the needs of reform in the Oriental churches,
with many Scriptural references to prove his position. An Armenian
bishop, Dionysius, translated this letter into Armenian, and in 1827
a manuscript copy was sent by him to some of the more influential
Armenians in Constantinople. The effect of it was remarkable. A meeting
was called in the Armenian Patriarchal Church at which the letter was
read and the Scriptures referred to examined. By common consent it was
there agreed that the Church needed reforming. The well known school of
Pashtimaljian was the direct outgrowth of that meeting. It was there
decided that no Armenian priest should be ordained in Constantinople
who had not completed a regular course of study in that school.

This school exerted a strong influence in preparing the minds of a
large body of young men to receive the truth and later to become
leaders in the movement towards reform. Pashtimaljian himself was an
Armenian of remarkable ability and strength. He was an accurate scholar
and a critical student of the Armenian language and literature, and,
although a layman, was well versed in Eastern theology and Church
history. He was equally accurate and thorough in his study of the
Bible. His leadership was recognized by the Armenians. He was a friend
of the missionaries, but for fear of exciting the suspicions of his
race carried on his work independently of them. While evangelical in
his beliefs and thoughts he did not, to the day of his death, in 1837,
openly declare himself to be an evangelical. But up to that time there
had been no break with the old Church and no persecution of those who
were studying the Word of God.

In all cases where the word “Evangelical” is used in connection with
the Armenians, Greeks or Syrians it refers to those who are recognized
as regular readers of the New Testament in the vernacular. The
“Evangelicals” among the Armenians were those who persisted in adhering
to their right to read the New Testament and to follow its manifest
teachings even in the face of the disapproval of their ecclesiastics.
Under the fire of anathemas and persecution the word came to be applied
to those who were cast out of the Gregorian Church because they would
not discontinue the practise. In Turkey the word has only its original
meaning, derived from the “Evangel” of Christ.

In 1833 the missionaries at Constantinople were invited to be present
in the Patriarchal Church at the ordination of fifteen Armenian
priests, trained in Pashtimaljian’s school. These men were largely
emancipated from the superstitions of the old Church and alert to
the needs of radical reform. When the break between the Gregorians
and the Evangelicals actually took place, several years later, the
leaders of the Protestants were for the most part men who had received
their training under Pashtimaljian, who was always independent of
missionary supervision and who was highly esteemed and honored by the
ecclesiastics of the Gregorian Church.

With all these forces at work upon this able and alert people, advanced
ideas rapidly spread among all classes at the capital, and through
constant intercourse with the chief cities in the interior, aroused
there also the spirit of inquiry. The patriarch at Constantinople and
some of the bishops in interior towns seemed in hearty accord with
the revival of Biblical study and of true learning. The missionaries
endeavored to have the Armenians themselves open and conduct all the
schools, and ventured themselves to do anything of the kind only when
they failed to get the people to act.

The steady progress of the reform movement was hindered by great fires
in the city, by cholera and plague, and by civil war. Even to the
present these distracting and disintegrating forces have always been
present in some parts of the Turkish fields, presenting many obstacles
to continuous advance.

The Roman Catholics were openly opposed to the circulation of the
Bible among the people, and used their influence to check the movement
for a revival of righteousness and learning. By constant effort, even
in the days of Pashtimaljian, they cast suspicion upon the movement
into the minds of some of the leaders among the old Church people.
An anti-reform party was gradually formed, led largely by uneducated
ecclesiastics, who saw that if only educated men were to be ordained to
the priesthood and were to exercise a leading influence in the Church,
their power would soon be destroyed. They succeeded in exalting to
patriarchal power in 1839 an astute and bigoted man from the interior
of the country. He began at once to arrest and throw into prison some
of the leading men in the evangelical movement. Some even were banished
into the interior for the sole crime of reading the Bible.

The Armenian Evangelical Union, a secret organization, had in 1839
some twenty-two members. It was an organized company of intelligent,
advanced thinkers, who came together to plan and pray for the
reformation of their Church and of the country, and for Bible study.
They carried on secret correspondence with men of enlightenment
throughout the empire. None of them were separated from the Church nor
did they contemplate such a step nor encourage it in others. They were
planning solely for the salvation of the Gregorian Church. These unions
were continued and multiplied in the country, but not as a secret
society after the organization of the Protestant churches.

On the third of March, 1839, a patriarchal bull was issued by Hagopos,
adjunct patriarch, forbidding the reading of all books printed or
circulated by the missionaries, and all who possessed such books were
ordered to deliver them up. A few days later the sympathetic and
gentle patriarch Stepan was deposed and Hagopos was installed in his
place. Spurred on by the same Romanists, the Greek patriarch issued a
similar bull to all Greeks against the books of the missionaries. The
reign of terror thus begun raged in the capital and throughout the
interior of the country for many years. April 28th, 1839, the Armenian
patriarch issued a new bull threatening terrible anathemas, in the name
of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, against all who should be found
communicating with the missionaries or reading their books. Arrests and
imprisonments were of constant occurrence. The native evangelicals were
at their wits’ end and the missionaries could see no way of deliverance.

Most fortunately for them, at that time the sultan was at war with
Mohammed Ali of Egypt, and he called upon all the patriarchs to provide
him with recruits for his broken army. The defeat of the sultan, his
death, and the succession of his son, Abdul Medjid, with the loss of
the Turkish fleet, threw all into consternation and made the most
violent bigots forget for the moment to persecute. A fire in Pera which
destroyed between three thousand and four thousand Armenian houses
tended to produce a softening of heart against the persecuted.

While this condition of affairs prevailed at the capital the mission
was pushing its advanced posts into the interior of the country where
considerable numbers were found eager to procure copies of the Bible.
Ecclesiastical warnings sent from Constantinople to the Armenians
remote from the capital were given little heed. Violence had so
subsided at Constantinople that the evangelical movement again began to
accumulate momentum and force. A boarding-school for boys was opened
in November, 1840, at Bebek upon the Bosporus, some five miles above
Constantinople. This was under the superintendence of Cyrus Hamlin,
against whom and his school all the fury of the papists and the Greek
patriarch was directed, the Armenian patriarch refusing to join them.
The demand for books increased. By 1841 it was evident that a great
reform movement was in progress which was destined to spread over the
empire. Some of the leading persecutors were astute enough to see that
an invisible but irresistible force was moving the Armenian nation. The
spirit of reform swept over the country, awakening intellects, arousing
consciences, and demanding intellectual freedom.

This continued for five or six years, during which time there was
no separation of the “Evangelicals,” as they were called, from the
old Church. The missionaries always urged them to remain, exerting
their influence not against the Church but against its abuses and
superstitions. For the most part they attended public services in
the old Church, and were recognized as members in good standing. The
missionaries had no thought of changing these conditions, had they
imagined it was in their power to do so. Hitherto the movement had
been one towards reform within the Armenian Church and largely led by
Armenians who were themselves loyal members. In persecuting, the Church
was doing violence to its own.

In the beginning of 1846 the patriarch, alarmed at the extent as
well as the power of the reform movement, inaugurated more coercive
measures. On Sunday morning, January 25, at the close of the regular
service in the Patriarchal Church, darkening the house and drawing a
great veil in front of the main altar, a bull of excision was read
against Priest Vartanes, an evangelical, and all of the followers
of the “modern sectaries.” Heaping every conceivable epithet of
condemnation upon him he was expelled from the Church and forbidden
as “a devil and the child of the devil to enter into the company of
believers.” All the faithful were forbidden to admit him into their
dwellings or to receive his salutation or to look upon his face.

A wild spirit of fanaticism reigned. This most thorough and fanatical
persecution began to search out the evangelicals, who were ordered
to repair to the patriarchate and recant, or be forever cast out
from society, from every social privilege, and from the Church. On
the following Sabbath, with passions still more inflamed, a second
anathema was read in all the churches, accompanied by the most violent
denunciations by the patriarch, the bishop and the vartabeds. All of
the evangelicals were pronounced “accursed, and excommunicated, and
anathematized by God, and by all his saints, and by Matteos Patriarch.”
The patriarch not only cursed those who were readers of the Bible and
believers in its teachings, but grave malediction was hurled against
all who should harbor them or communicate with them. Printed copies of
the last two anathemas were sent to every part of Turkey to be read in
all the churches. Even to this point the evangelical Armenians had made
no move to form a community separate from the old Church.

On the 21st of June, 1846, a day of solemn festival in the Church, the
patriarch issued a new bull of excommunication and anathema against all
who remained firm to their evangelical principles, decreeing that it
should be publicly read at each annual return of this festival in all
the Armenian churches throughout the Ottoman empire. By this act the
Protestant or evangelical Armenians were completely cut off from any
lot or part in the Gregorian Church. There was no hope of their being
received back again except by their repudiating every principle of
reform. This, of course, they could not do.

These excommunicated brethren immediately requested help from the
missionaries. A meeting was held in Constantinople, made up of
delegates from the different mission stations in Turkey, at which
Dr. Pomeroy, later one of the secretaries of the American Board, was
present. At that meeting, plans were drawn up for an organization among
the evangelical Armenians of Constantinople. Consequently, on the first
day of July, 1846, they came together and were organized into the
First Evangelical Armenian Church. The church numbered forty members,
of which thirty-seven were men. One week later an Armenian pastor, a
former student in the school of Pashtimaljian, was ordained over the
church. A pamphlet in Armenian was issued, containing their confession
of faith and setting forth the reasons why, through the compulsory
measures of the patriarch, they had been compelled to organize
themselves into a separate body.

During the same summer, similar Armenian churches were formed in
Nicomedia, Adabazar and Trebizond. The Mohammedans showed themselves
sympathetic. A Moslem judge before whom some of the evangelicals
had been hauled, said, “We cannot interfere to protect you from
excommunication, but so long as you abide by the declaration you have
made we will protect you civilly. Your goods shall be as our goods;
your houses as our houses; and your persons as our persons. Go in
peace.”

All subjects of the Turkish empire were registered as members of some
recognized religious community. Each various Christian community like
the Armenian, the Greek, and the Roman Catholic, had its recognized
head at the Porte and through this head individual rights were
protected. Every non-Moslem was compelled to claim his rights at the
hand of his religious political head. If his claim were there denied,
he had no redress. The Armenian patriarch was the recognized political
superior of the Armenians. He had violently excluded all evangelicals
from the Church and from all their inherited rights as Armenians. He
no longer recognized such as members of his race, and not only refused
to protect them and secure for them justice but he devised methods
to direct a bitter persecution against them. These excommunicated
“Protestants,” as they were sometimes called, were the legal possessors
of no rights or privileges in the empire that any one was bound to
respect.

Conditions became intolerable, when through the intervention of the
British legation the grand vizier issued in November, 1847, a firman
recognizing the separate Protestant community with all the rights
and privileges belonging to others in the empire, and declaring that
“no interference whatever shall be permitted in their temporal and
spiritual concerns on the part of the patriarch, monks, or priests of
other sects.” This firman protected the evangelical Greeks and Jews
as well as the Armenians. As this charter was only ministerial in its
scope and authority, in 1850 a new charter was granted the Protestants
by Sultan Abdul Medjid, “completing and confirming their distinct
organization as a civil community, etc.”

This phase of mission work in Turkey has been dwelt upon at length in
order to correct the impression which prevails in many quarters that
the missionaries in Turkey aimed to divide the old Churches there and
to separate out therefrom a body of Protestants. History makes it clear
that every effort was made to prevent separation, and only after this
had taken place, by the repeated and official action of the highest
ecclesiastical authority, were any steps taken to organize a separate
community, and even then this was done primarily to secure protection
for the excommunicated Christians.




XVI. RESULTS


    I have had occasion to revert to the work of the
    accomplished and devoted band of American missionaries
    and teachers settled in these districts. In a thousand
    ways they are raising the standard of morality, of
    intelligence, of education, of material well-being, of
    industrial enterprise. Directly or indirectly every
    phase of their work is rapidly paving the way for
    American commerce. Special stress should be laid upon the
    remarkable work of the physicians, ordained or unordained,
    who are attached to the various stations. They form a
    steadily growing network, dotting the map of Asia Minor at
    Cæsarea, Marsovan, Sivas, Adana, Aintab, Mardin, Harpoot,
    Bitlis, and Van. At most of these points well-equipped
    hospitals are in active operation. From the very nature of
    their occupation they come more easily and rapidly into
    touch with the Turkish population and quickly gain their
    confidence.

    Taking all in all, I regard the results following the
    foundation of this institution (Euphrates College)
    as among the most important and noteworthy secured
    by American effort in foreign lands. The whole work
    appeals most strongly to one whose chief duty is to
    aid and further the entrance of American wares in this
    land. I know of no import better adapted to secure the
    future commercial supremacy of the United States in
    this land of such wonderful potential possibilities
    than the introduction of American teachers, of American
    educational appliances and books of American methods and ideas.
                                  —PROF. THOMAS H. NORTON, PH. D.,
                United States Consul at Harpoot and Smyrna, Turkey.

While those troublous scenes were being enacted, the missionaries
were engaged in preparing and sending out evangelical Christian
literature in the form of the Bible in the vernacular Armenian,
Armeno-Turkish and Greek languages, and by fostering educational
operations. As early as 1836 a school for Armenian girls was opened in
Smyrna. A boarding-school for Armenian boys opened in Bebek in 1840
was so promising that in 1843-44 Secretary Anderson, upon a visit to
Constantinople, recommended that this institution be strengthened. At
that time it was decided to discontinue the special work to the Greeks
and to open a high school for girls at the capital. The purpose of the
seminary at Bebek was to train able and devout young men for the gospel
ministry, that the newly organized churches might have proper leaders.
In 1848 the seminary contained forty-seven students.

In 1847 some Christian literature found its way into Aintab in northern
Syria. During that year and the next, missionary visits were made to
the place. In 1849 Mr. Schneider took up his residence there, and
Aintab became a regular mission station. In the midst of persecution
the work spread with great rapidity. Preachers and colporters were
forbidden by the Armenian primates to visit the neighboring towns, so
evangelical tradesmen began a systematic visitation to outside places,
plying their trade and preaching the gospel. The spirit of intelligent
faith and religious liberty spread in all directions until the entire
region was affected. In 1861 the church in Aintab had nearly three
hundred members and the Sabbath congregation often numbered more than
one thousand souls. The Sabbath-school then had nearly two thousand
members. In 1855 Marash was occupied as a mission station, and these
two places have since been the two central stations of that mission.

For nearly a generation after the separation of the Protestants took
place there was more or less hostile feeling between the two bodies,
although the number of the evangelicals rapidly increased. The
spirit of inquiry was abroad among the Armenians and nothing could
satisfy it but the truth. Travelers into the interior and visitors
to Constantinople from the interior carried this spirit into the
most remote sections of the country. The anathemas which had been
communicated to the churches of the inland towns and cities had
stirred up many questions and aroused alert minds to seek the cause.
On the whole, the evangelical movement was most materially helped
by these rude and bungling endeavors to suppress it by brute force.
Wherever missionaries went they were met by a group of men, naturally
among the most enlightened in all the community, who sought aid in
the interpretation of the Scriptures, and who were eager to receive
literature explaining evangelical truth.

Mission stations all over the country rapidly multiplied, and the
number of Protestant churches increased. In 1860 forty Protestant
churches had been organized, mostly among the Armenians, and twenty-two
stations at which missionaries resided were in full operation. At
nearly all of these stations, schools for boys and, in cases not a few,
schools for girls, had been opened and these were well patronized.
The printing-press was moved from Malta to Smyrna in 1833. The press
always has been and is still one of the most active and effectual
agents for reform in the empire. During the first forty years of the
work, from five to ten million pages of Christian literature were
issued from the press each year, in five different languages.

In no part of the Turkish empire has the work of the missionary been
more difficult than in Syria. Owing to papal supremacy there, which
called to its service both Turkish and French political aid in its
endeavor to thwart the missionaries and the evangelicals, no separate
church of native Christians was organized until 1848 at Beirut, two
years after the formation of the Evangelical Armenian Church at
Constantinople. There was in that field no intellectually and morally
dominant race to receive and extend the gospel as there was in Asia
Minor and the greater part of the Turkish empire, while the races
occupying Syria were for the most part hostile to each other and always
mutually suspicious.

In 1858 direct work for the Bulgarians was begun by opening a station
at Adrianople, which was followed by a station at Philippopolis and
Eski-Zagra within the next two years. The Bulgarians were longing
for political freedom and welcomed the missionaries with their new
literature and education as calculated to strengthen them as a nation.
For fourteen years the work among the Bulgarians was considered a part
of the Armenian mission. In 1872 the European work was set off by
itself as the European Turkey mission, which is almost exclusively for
the Bulgarians. The condition of the old Bulgarian Church was similar
to the Armenian Church, so far as need of reform was concerned.

The churches which were organized in 1846, among those cast out from
the old Gregorian Church, were severely plain and simple in their form
and ritual, as well as in their articles of faith. In the reaction from
the rigid ritualism of the Church from which they had been driven,
these evangelical Christians went to the other extreme, putting the
emphasis of the service upon the sermon. Prevailing conditions demanded
direct positive instruction in Christian living rather than new forms
of worship. Had these people not been rudely excommunicated from the
Church there is no doubt that they would have clung fondly to much if
not all of the rich service of the old Church. Much place was also
given to the reading of the Scriptures in the modern spoken language
of the people and to congregational singing. The people were so eager
for the sermon, and especially in the expository form, that large
numbers who repudiated the name of evangelical, and who were among the
persecutors of the Protestants began to demand that the priests of
the old Church also expound the Scriptures. Few of them were able to
accomplish this with any degree of success. Dr. Goodell published a
volume of sermons in Armenian which were eagerly bought by the priests
and preached by them to their people. Although the evangelicals had
been violently thrust out of the Church, the spirit of reform in
considerable measure remained.

During the first bitter years, when feelings were stirred up and
controversy was rife, there was a wide breach between the Gregorian and
Protestant Churches. After discussions all over the country, extending
to nearly every village of importance, had settled the question that
the modern version of the Bible in the vernacular was the unquestioned
Word of God, there was actually no ground for continued separate
existence. All Armenians accepted the modern Scriptures as the
revelation of God to men and an infallible guide to faith and practise.
Neither did they have any scruples against the Bible being put into the
hands of the people. Hence, as one might expect, the breach between
the old and the new began gradually to heal. The spirit of bitterness,
little by little, passed away until now it does not exist upon the old
grounds which led to the separation.

In many places the Protestant pastors are now asked to speak in the old
churches, and the children of both Gregorian and Protestant parents
meet in the same Christian schools and upon exactly the same footing.
In the theological seminaries of the missions there have been and
now are students who are not Protestants and who are preparing for
ordination as priests in the old Church. Many ecclesiastics of the
Gregorian Church received the major part of their training for that
service in the mission schools. During the last twenty years there
has been little separation from the old Church. The missionaries have
generally exerted their influence against it. Some Gregorians have
tried to keep the controversy alive by claiming that the Protestants
are not loyal to the race, but that charge has been so fully proven
untrue that it is now little used.

In no instance have the missionaries for any length of time been the
pastors of the native churches. At the first the policy was clearly
settled that the only true and effective pastor of an Armenian church
is an Armenian. The missionaries preach, and they have always been
preachers, and some of them of great power, but this is quite different
from being the settled pastor of a church. The rapid increase in the
number of evangelical churches, each one of which demanded its own
native pastor, compelled the missionaries to redouble their efforts to
raise up and train an adequate number of worthy young men for these
high offices. The seminary at Bebek produced men who have left the
stamp of their piety, earnestness and ability upon the reform movement
in Turkey. Some of these men came from the far interior of the country,
and returning became the leaders in the new movement.

This seminary was ultimately moved to Marsovan, while other similar
institutions sprang up at Marash and at Harpoot, in the eastern part
of the country. A similar training-school became necessary also at
Mardin, where the spoken language is Arabic, while in Beirut, Syria, a
large training-school flourished. A whole educational system grew up
out of the necessities of the work. This will be considered later when
discussing the work of education in the empire.

The evangelical Churches were not denominational in any ordinary sense
of that word. Their creed was the Bible in the language of the people
and this was taken as the guide of their life. While the missionaries,
because of their superior knowledge and experience in such matters,
were constantly sought for advice, they did not exercise ecclesiastical
control. These Churches were early advised to form themselves into
Associations or _Unions_, as they were more generally called, for the
purpose of mutual help. One such union was formed in the vicinity of
Constantinople, and later one in Aintab and vicinity and at Harpoot and
elsewhere. In these organizations missionaries could be only honorary
members without a vote. They were composed of pastors and delegates
from the churches, and held an annual meeting, with more frequent
meetings of standing committees with varying functions. In some parts
of the country these unions ordain to the gospel ministry and examine
worthy candidates and grant them licenses to preach. It is not a
Congregational system, neither is it Presbyterian, but it has worked
well in developing native talent and directing it into right channels
of action.

The development and strength in the evangelistic work in Turkey is
due perhaps more to the leadership of a few individuals who seem to
have been sent into the empire at a time most opportune. Dr. William
Goodell, the first missionary of the Board to Constantinople, lived and
labored there for forty-three years, or until 1865. With rare wisdom,
patience and firmness did he direct the work through the period of
fiery persecution and of organization of the Church and the Protestant
community. Men are now there in the work, both missionaries and others,
who were colaborers with him and who have helped to carry out the wise
measures devised by him for the true reform of that people. Time would
fail us to speak of Schneider, Dwight, Thompson and Riggs, of Post and
the Blisses, of Wheeler, Farnsworth and a great multitude besides who
gave their lives to build in the Turkish empire the pure, intelligent
Church of Jesus Christ, to say nothing of the equally faithful and able
company who are still there among perils and difficulties not less
severe, but who know they are doing the Lord’s work, and that they are
in the place where he has called them.

At the present time the nearly two hundred evangelical Protestant
churches in the empire, with some twenty thousand church-members, do
not begin to tell the tale of what has been accomplished. The story
is written in the awakened intellect of all classes and races, in new
conceptions of what Christianity demands of its followers, and in a
changed atmosphere affecting the life and character of nearly all the
youth born in the last generation, and is destined to affect the empire
still more vitally as the years go on. The seed of intelligent belief
and of right living has been sown and it is finding soil in which to
germinate. The fruit thereof shall be for the healing of the nation.




XVII. INTELLECTUAL RENAISSANCE


    Education has accomplished more toward the regeneration
    of these lands than anything else. While it has been very
    broad, especially in the higher institutions, it has
    likewise been thoroughly permeated with Christianity.
    Though Robert College is not directly connected with
    any missionary society it “has exerted an incalculable
    influence for Christian life all over the empire. Among
    its graduates are many of the most prominent men in
    Bulgaria, and it is perhaps not too much to say that
    the nation really owes its existence to the influence
    exerted by President George Washburn and his associates.
    Its students have included representatives of twenty
    nationalities, and its Young Men’s Christian Association
    is unique among the college associations of the world in
    that it is divided into four departments according to the
    prevailing language spoken,—English, Greek, Armenian
    and Bulgarian.” The Syrian Protestant College at Beirut
    is likewise independent, though in closest sympathy
    and cooperation with the Presbyterian Board, North.
    Concerning the college, Mr. John R. Mott writes: “This
    is one of the three most important institutions in all
    Asia. In fact there is no college which has within one
    generation accomplished a greater work and which to-day
    has a larger opportunity. It has practically created the
    medical profession of the Levant. It has been the most
    influential factor of the East. It has been and is the
    center for genuine Christian and scientific literature in
    all that region. Fully one-fourth of the graduates of the
    collegiate department have entered Christian work either
    as preachers or as teachers in Christian schools.” In
    less degree the same results noted in the case of these
    two institutions are furnished by the records of the
    American Board’s colleges at Aintab, Harpoot, Samakov,
    Marsovan, and of its colleges for girls at Marash and
    Constantinople, as well as of the less ambitious Bishop
    Gobat School of the Church Missionary Society and the
    Beirut Female Seminary of the Presbyterians.
                 —PROF. HARLAN P. BEACH, F. R. G. S. etc.,
            in “Geography and Atlas of Protestant Missions.”

It has already been stated that in 1820 throughout the Turkish empire
there was practically no modern education. The few schools which did
exist were almost entirely ecclesiastical, maintained for the purpose
of teaching a few men to conduct religious services. This was largely
true of all schools, whether Armenian, Greek, or Turkish. Nowhere in
the country were there schools for girls, the idea prevailing generally
that girls could not learn to read, even if they were worth educating.
The great mass of the people were unable either to read or to write.
Ignorance even in the capital was dense, but it was much greater in the
interior cities and towns. Often a large group of villages possessed
not one person who could write or read a letter.

Argument is not required to show that no real reform could be
introduced into the country without inaugurating some system of
education. There must be produced readers and a literature if the
intellectual and moral life of the people was to be raised. If the
old Gregorian Church was to become enlightened in its belief and
practise, there must be educated leaders as well as an intelligent
laity. For this reason the missionaries began with an effort to awaken
the intellects of the people. The Lancasterian schools that were so
popular for a period in the capital had their value and exerted a
good influence. The school of Pashtimaljian sprang from the aroused
desire of the people for education and the conviction of the leaders
of the Church that only educated leaders could be wisely trusted
and followed. There were other schools supported and directed by
the Armenians themselves, but springing largely from the persistent
effort of the missionaries. Until 1839 it was hoped that all the work
of modern education among the Armenians would be carried on by the
Armenians themselves, so that the missionaries need not open schools of
any kind.

As the zealous ecclesiastics became more and more suspicious,
restrictive measures were applied. It was observed that those who
studied in the schools were among the leaders seeking to reform the
errors which were destroying the spiritual influence of the Church. It
soon became evident to the missionaries that they must take a direct
part in the work of education. In 1840 Bebek Seminary for training the
young men was opened. The head of this school was Cyrus Hamlin, who the
year before had arrived at Constantinople, designated to this work. He
was a man of rare qualifications for the task assigned him, knowing
no fear, never disheartened in the face of insuperable obstacles, of
tireless industry, practical wisdom and unbounded resourcefulness and
devotion to the cause to which he had given his life.

The seminary at Bebek was begun just as the persecution of the
evangelicals at the capital was becoming acute. Early in his career Dr.
Hamlin was impressed with the fact that the school must succeed in the
face of direct opposition from Russia. During his first year in the
mission, while he was learning the Armenian language, his teacher was
suddenly seized at the order of the Russian ambassador and deported to
Siberia. Dr. Hamlin and Dr. Schauffler repaired to the Russian embassy
and protested against the high-handed proceeding. The ambassador
haughtily replied, “My master, the emperor of Russia, will never allow
Protestantism to set its foot in Turkey.” Dr. Schauffler, bowing low
to the ambassador, gave the reply which has become historic, “Your
excellency, the kingdom of Christ, who is my Master, will never ask the
emperor of all the Russias where it may set its foot.” From that day
to this, the covert as well as open opposition of Russia to missionary
work in Turkey and, most especially, to all educational work, has been
unremittingly experienced. Consistently has Russia adhered to the
policy thus outlined and the opposition from that source to-day is as
bitter as at any other period.

Dr. Hamlin threw himself into the work of the seminary with all his
intense and resourceful energy. Thwarted at a hundred points, he
immediately changed his plans and appeared even to his persecutors
to have gained the victory. For twenty years the work proceeded with
emphasis upon industries when industrial persecutions were crushing
the people, but always strenuous, and always supremely Christian and
evangelical. He saw that a vernacular training was not sufficient for
the full equipment of the young men under his care to prepare them for
positions of largest leadership. The Jesuit schools taught their pupils
French so that all their graduates knew a European language. As yet the
Armenian literature was very circumscribed and most inadequate to meet
the intellectual and spiritual requirements of intelligent directors of
a great national reform movement.

This was the opinion of Dr. Hamlin, shared, as he felt, by the great
mass of the Armenian people. But he was not fully sustained in it by
his colleagues in the mission. The American Board, under the leadership
of its secretary, Dr. Anderson, had declared as its policy that mission
schools should not teach English or any other language than the
vernacular to their pupils. To Dr. Hamlin this seemed such a backward
step that he resigned from the Board and began to work and plan for
higher education among young men. The story of the building of the now
famous Robert College under an imperial _irade_ from the sultan, and
upon the most commanding site along the entire length of the Bosporus,
is now so well known that it need not be repeated.

The college became a reality and the scheme of education conceived by
Dr. Hamlin and carried out in Robert College represented, within forty
years of the time of his resignation from the Board, the fundamental
policy of all the higher educational work in the empire carried on in
both missionary and independent institutions. For nearly a generation,
however, in mission schools little was done in European languages, and
most of the education given was imparted through the spoken language of
the people.

As early as 1836, four years before the seminary at Bebek was begun,
a high school was opened in Beirut in which both Arabic and English
were taught. This school was apparently a great success, but four years
later the pupils, because of their practical knowledge of English,
became so useful to the English officers, then quartered in Beirut on
account of political troubles, that the school was broken up. No doubt
this unfortunate experience had much influence in leading the Board to
endeavor to exclude English from mission schools. In 1848, a seminary
upon the purely vernacular basis was opened in Beirut with a view
to training its students for useful service among their own people.
This school was continued until the change in policy by the Board and
the mission, when the English language again took its place in the
curriculum.

[Illustration: ROBERT COLLEGE, CONSTANTINOPLE]

[Illustration: SYRIAN PROTESTANT COLLEGE, BEIRUT, SYRIA]

Whatever differences of opinion existed as to the place of English in
the educational system of Turkey, there was practical unanimity in the
belief that reform in the empire demanded the creation and maintenance
of a system of schools which should include all grades, beginning
with the primary. It was necessary to begin with the most rudimentary
teaching before higher institutions could be sustained. The seminaries
already referred to were not by any means colleges. They taught many
studies of the lowest grades. As most of the pupils were mature in
years, they made speedy progress and often astonished their teachers by
their rapid advancement and clear grasp of abstruse subjects.

At every station where missionaries settled, schools sprang up and were
at once widely patronized. In the large centers like Erzerum, Harpoot,
Aintab and Marsovan, where the people were unusually intelligent and
eager for an education, there was marked development and a rapid
rise in the grade of the central schools. Colleges were not then
developed, for there were no natives qualified to teach the studies of
college grade, while there were no preparatory schools fitted to train
students for college work. At that time the country itself was not
in a condition to demand a college education. In the meantime Robert
College was taking the lead in the higher education of men, although
its work was then far inferior to the courses it now offers. Educators
throughout the empire were closely watching the new institution upon
the Bosporus, which became the pioneer and leader for the entire
country.

When Dr. Hamlin was in the midst of his efforts to organize and
construct a college for Turkey, the Rev. Crosby H. Wheeler, also from
the state of Maine, was sent into Eastern Turkey as a missionary,
and with designation to Harpoot. Dr. Wheeler, with energy similar to
that of his fellow laborer, stopped upon his way at Constantinople
and became acquainted with the educational work there developing. He
took direct issue with Dr. Hamlin upon the subject of the value of
English, but agreed with him upon the place of education in the work of
reform. Some years later, when the educational work at Harpoot was well
established, Dr. Wheeler felt so keenly upon this subject that he gave
public notice in the seminary, of which he was the principal, that any
student who was known to be studying English, even by himself or by the
aid of one or two resident Armenians who had studied at Constantinople
under Dr. Hamlin, would be summarily expelled from the school.

Dr. Wheeler, with his keen vision and unconquerable energy, while
an evangelistic missionary of unusual power, became the pioneer of
education at Harpoot. Under his leadership, strongly seconded by Rev.
Dr. H. N. Barnum, the seminary for young men at that place rapidly
developed until in 1878 it was merged into Armenia College, afterwards
changed to Euphrates College. It did not require many years for Dr.
Wheeler to see that no broad education could be given in Turkey without
the use of the English language, so that he became one of the most
energetic and enthusiastic supporters of an English education for all
students in the higher institutions of learning in the country. The
other high schools in the eastern part of Turkey became preparatory
schools for the college, which was heartily endorsed by the people
themselves, as appears from the wide patronage it received.

The same process of growth that has been noted at Harpoot took place
also at Aintab, which is distant some eight days’ journey from Harpoot,
upon the south side of the Taurus Mountains. In the meantime, the
educational work at Beirut had made rapid strides, developing into a
college which later became the largest and most influential educational
institution in Syria and one of the most important in the Levant. This
school early in its growth became detached from the mission Board and
came under the control of a separate Board of Trustees in New York, and
assumed the name of the Syrian Protestant College.

Space will not permit the mention in detail of Anatolia College at
Marsovan, St. Paul’s Institute at Tarsus, and the International College
at Smyrna. The last two named are of comparatively recent elevation
to the grade of college, while the former has had a record of college
work of a quarter of a century. The school for the Bulgarians was
established at Samakov, which is now in Bulgaria. It is called the
Collegiate and Theological Institute, and is calculated to do for the
young men of Bulgaria and Macedonia what these other institutions are
doing for Asiatic Turkey.

The Syrian Protestant College at Beirut was begun as an institution of
higher learning in 1866 by Rev. Daniel Bliss. What Dr. Hamlin was to
Robert College and Dr. Wheeler to Euphrates College, and Dr. Tracy to
Anatolia College, Dr. Bliss has been to this college in Syria. To-day
with a campus of over forty acres, with five departments including
medicine, pharmacy and a commercial course, and some seven hundred
students in attendance from not less than fourteen nationalities,
including Druses, Jews and Moslems, drawn from all parts of the Levant,
from Persia and the Sudan, this college stands among the first in the
empire for equipment and influence.

Educational work for girls started more slowly and did not make
such rapid progress as the work among young men. There was not at
the beginning a manifest demand for the education of girls. Among
all classes in the country was an inherent prejudice against the
intellectual or social advancement of women. Intelligent men, not a
few, were ready to argue that girls were incapable of learning to
read, much less of acquiring a general education. It became necessary,
therefore, to educate the men up to the idea that girls could learn and
that it was worth while to educate them. In 1836 a school for girls
was opened by the missionaries at Smyrna, then the most enlightened
and advanced city in the empire. This passed out of the hands of the
mission very quickly, being taken over with its forty pupils by the
Armenian community. It was soon disbanded. In Constantinople, while no
regular school had been opened for girls, a few of the most enlightened
parents were providing instruction for their daughters by engaging as
teacher for them one of the evangelical Armenians.

Under the impulse of the reform movement it was impossible to keep out
schools for girls. These multiplied in the large cities first and then
extended into the interior until they became almost as popular as the
schools for young men. The Mission School for girls in Constantinople
became the foremost institution of its kind in the empire. After
passing through several changes, all in the line of progress, it
became, nearly twenty years ago, the American College for Girls in
Constantinople. It is to-day the most advanced school for the education
of women in the Levant. Euphrates College at Harpoot has also a female
department, while in Central Turkey at Marash there is now a collegiate
school for young women as well as a similar institution at Smyrna.
These schools, for both boys and girls, are overcrowded with students
and have been from the beginning. It has been impossible to keep pace
by enlargement with the increasing desire on the part of the people for
the education of their children.

The collegiate institutions are well scattered over the length and
breadth of the country. The two colleges for boys which are the
nearest together are St. Paul’s Institute at Tarsus and Central Turkey
College at Aintab, and yet these are some four days’ journey apart.
The students in Beirut speak Arabic for the most part; those in Marash
and Aintab use Turkish; those at Harpoot, Armenian; at Marsovan and
Smyrna, Armenian, Greek and Turkish; and those at the American College
for Girls and at Robert College, both in Constantinople, use about all
the languages of the empire. English is taught in all, and constitutes,
in some of the institutions, the only common tongue; as, for instance,
in Robert College there are seldom less than a dozen nationalities and
languages represented among the students. The only language they all
wish to master is English. This becomes, then, the common linguistic
meeting-place of scholars in the Ottoman empire.

All but three of the American colleges here mentioned are incorporated
under the laws of either New York or Massachusetts, and so are
distinctively and legally American institutions. All of them have some
kind of official recognition from the Sublime Porte or from the sultan
himself. Below the colleges are schools for both boys and girls of a
grade which admits to the collegiate courses. This is true of schools
remote from any college where the pupils who cannot go to a distant
part of the country for an education are numerous.

Including the preparatory departments, there are not less than
six thousand pupils studying in connection with these collegiate
institutions, and all under Christian training. The grade in many
respects, if not in all, is equal to that of the ordinary American
college. In languages they all give the broadest courses. In Euphrates
College, for instance, there are from six to eight languages taught, at
least six of which are compulsory. The courses of study are adapted to
the needs of the country and with a view to training the students for
the highest service to their own people. The college at Beirut has a
medical department which is of great value to the country, drawing its
students from every race.

When the direct collegiate work was entered upon, in every instance the
theological schools were made separate departments or were entirely
set apart by themselves. There are at the present time six distinct
training-schools in Turkey which have for their object the preparation
of young men for the gospel ministry. Two of these, namely the schools
at Beirut, and at Mardin, in northern Mesopotamia, train their pupils
for work among Arabic speaking peoples; the one at Harpoot, for work
among the Armenians, where the Armenian language is chiefly used,
although some of its pupils speak Turkish; the one at Marash for
Turkish speaking peoples; the one at Marsovan for those who speak
Armenian, Turkish and Greek; and the one at Samakov, Bulgaria, for
Bulgarians alone. Attempts have been made to unite this theological
work, but the long distance separating the schools and the time and
cost of the journey to and from them, the barriers of the different
languages, and the restrictions put upon all native students in travel,
have made it impracticable to do so up to the present time.

In these institutions, by far the largest number of teachers are
natives of Turkey, some of whom, after taking a course of study in
their own country, have had postgraduate work in Europe or the United
States. In each case, the president is an American who is usually
assisted by one or more Americans. It is the policy of all these
institutions to employ as many thoroughly equipped native teachers
and professors as can be secured consistent with maintaining the high
intellectual and moral tone of the schools.

In no case are these free schools. The students are charged tuition,
room rent, and board, and they also purchase their own books and
supplies. Some of these colleges secure from fees and payments by
the pupils nearly three-fourths of the entire cost of conducting the
institution. This is true of Robert College at Constantinople and
Anatolia College at Marsovan, and others. In addition to the fees paid,
the people of the country have contributed in some cases most liberally
for the college plant. Aintab College is a marked instance of this. In
recent years the early students who have prospered in business have
given freely for the endowment of their Alma Mater, as in the case
of Euphrates College at Harpoot. The willingness of the people to
contribute for the support of these higher educational institutions
demonstrates most unmistakably belief in their value.

Such numerous collegiate and theological institutions necessitate a
large and ever increasing number of schools of lower grade all over the
country. These have sprung up in nearly every village and are found in
every town of size. They are for the most part entirely supported by
the people themselves. The great value of the educational work done
in Turkey by the missionaries does not lie alone in the schools of
different grades now controlled and directed by them; it also appears
in the thirst for education which manifests itself in independent
village, parochial, and city schools, with more or less modern
equipment, and stretching from Persia to the Bosporus, from the Black
Sea to Arabia. There is much yet to be desired in this respect, but
much has already been accomplished.

This educational work has made no perceptible impression upon the
Jews, for whose special awakening mission work in Turkey was first
undertaken. The Greeks have slowly responded and many young men from
that race are found in Robert College at Constantinople, in the
International College at Smyrna and in Anatolia College in Marsovan.
The race as a race, however, in Turkey has not taken up the cause of
modern education with vigor and pressed it with moral earnestness.
It is the Armenian race that has responded most fully to the call of
modern learning. By far the largest number of students of any one race
in the schools in Turkey are Armenians. They constitute as large a
proportion of the pupils of Robert College as that of any other race.
While they number probably less than one-tenth of the inhabitants of
the empire, they furnish a large proportion of its student body.

These modern educational institutions in Turkey are a mighty force
in reshaping the life, thought, customs and practises of the people
of that country. Men and women from these schools are taking leading
positions there in the learned professions as well as in commerce
and trade. Large numbers of former students in the mission schools
are now prosperous merchants and business men in Europe and America.
Through these men of modern ideas Western machinery and the products
of our factories are finding their way into that part of the East in
increasing quantities while the products of Turkey are in exchange
brought to us. It is probably true, as has been frequently stated,
that the money given from America for the establishment and support
of American colleges in Turkey is far more than returned, with large
interest, in the form of increased trade with that country.

While the Turks have not largely attended any of the schools mentioned,
nor have they seemed awake to the needs of a modern education,
nevertheless, through the influence of so many advanced schools in the
country they have been compelled to improve their own schools. It is
an interesting fact that recently a far greater number of Mohammedan
pupils are applying for admission to these schools. Few of the Turkish
schools have as yet been thoroughly modernized; still, their entire
educational system, if system it may be called, has felt the influence
of the foreign schools. There have now and then been attempts at the
organization of a Mohammedan college. These have for the most part
proven egregious failures from the lack of preparatory schools to
train students for the college and of teachers with proper training
to carry on college work. They have also in cases, not a few, opened
and conducted schools for girls, thus demonstrating their acceptance,
in a measure at least, of the Christian doctrine of the equality of
the sexes and the worth of womanhood. Many Moslem young men have been
aroused to seek education in England or France.




XVIII. THE PRINTING-PRESS


    I cannot mention the American missionaries without a
    tribute to the admirable work they have done. They have
    been the only good influence that has worked from abroad
    upon the Turkish empire. They have shown great judgment
    and tact in their relations with the ancient churches
    of the land, Orthodox, Gregorian, Jacobite, Nestorian,
    and Catholic. They have lived cheerfully in the midst,
    not only of hardships, but latterly of serious dangers
    also. They have been the first to bring the light of
    education and learning into these dark places, and have
    rightly judged that it was far better to diffuse that
    light through their schools than to aim at a swollen roll
    of converts. From them alone, if we except the British
    consuls, has it been possible during the last thirty years
    to obtain trustworthy information regarding what passes
    in the interior.
                                          —HON. JAMES BRYCE,
                     British Ambassador to the United States.

The entire plan and purpose of missionary work in Turkey involved the
printing-press. Only a little more than two years after the first
missionaries to Turkey arrived upon the field, a press under the
care of a missionary of the Board arrived at Malta, commissioned to
print for the use of the Palestine and Turkish missions. At that time
hostilities between Greece and Turkey were in progress and no port upon
the Mediterranean was safe for the American press. Malta was under the
English flag, and so proved for the time the best base for the literary
operations of the mission.

Undoubtedly the earlier publications were too impracticable to meet
the needs of the people of Turkey. The missionaries assumed ability
in the untrained Oriental mind to grasp the thoughts of the West. In
the list of what was printed at Malta during the first ten years are
found such works as “Serious Thoughts on Eternity,” “Guilt and Danger
of Neglecting the Saviour,” “Scott’s Force of Truth,” “Content and
Discontent,” “Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures.” A great variety of
books was prepared, for the most part, by those who knew practically
nothing of the thought and life of the people who were supposed to read
them.

In 1833 the political atmosphere had so cleared that the press was
removed from Malta, the Arabic equipment going to Beirut in Syria,
while the Greek, Turkish, and Armenian outfit was set up in Smyrna.
During the ten years at Malta, over twenty-one million pages were
printed in four different languages, namely modern Greek, Italian,
Armeno-Turkish, and Arabic. The largest amount by far was in Greek.
No printing in Armenian was done until the press was set up in Smyrna
and, previous to 1837, less than 175,000 pages had been printed in that
language.

In 1829 it was decided to do more in the way of providing much needed
books for elementary schools. One of these books was so popular that
27,000 copies were sold in Greece alone. In 1831 the Armeno-Turkish New
Testament, translated by Dr. Goodell, was printed. That same year over
five million pages of modern Greek were put out from the press. Nearly
all of this was circulated about as rapidly as it could be run off.

The publication work in the Turkish missions outside Syria was carried
on at Smyrna until 1853, or for about twenty years. The last and one of
the most important works published there was the modern Armenian Bible
translated by Dr. Elias Riggs. This one book has accomplished more to
fix, unify, and simplify the modern spoken Armenian language than all
other influences combined. What the King James version has done for
the English speaking peoples, and Luther’s Bible for the Germans, this
scholarly and accurate translation has done for the Armenians all over
the world.

Besides the Bible and strictly Biblical works, a large number of
school-books of almost every grade as well as translations of choice
parts of English literature were printed and sold. The eagerness of
the Greeks and Armenians, and especially the latter, for a literature
suited to their aroused intellectual condition made it possible to
sell at cost much that was published. After the organization of the
Evangelical Protestant Church, hymn-books in various languages were
prepared and printed. It would be impossible in the limits of this
discussion to give even a classified list of the publications issued
from the mission presses of Turkey since printing began. The output
upon the average from 1833, even to the present time, has been at the
rate of from twelve to fifty million pages each year in not less than
ten languages, including Bulgarian and Koordish. In some years this has
been exceeded.

At Beirut in 1906 there were printed on the American press 152,500
volumes of distinctively Biblical literature, with a total of
47,278,000 pages. To this was added nearly 9,000,000 pages of other
Christian and educational books, making a total of 56,000,000 pages of
literature from this one press alone in a single year.

For the Bulgarians and the Armenians the missionaries practically
created their new literature in the spoken tongue. Of the first one
hundred books printed in the modern Bulgarian, some seventy were the
product of the missionary press. The first grammar of the modern
Armenian language was printed by the missionaries. The Koords had no
literature of any kind, while their language is even yet unclassified.
The New Testament was translated into that tongue, written with the
Armenian characters, and in that language it was printed. Parts of the
Bible have also been printed in the Albanian tongue.

The Bible has been translated into Arabo-Turkish, the language read by
all the educated Moslems in Turkey north of Syria and is printed and
widely circulated. This, with the Arabic and Syriac versions printed at
Beirut, puts the Bible into the language of all the Moslems of Turkey,
except the Koords and Albanians. As yet the former have only a part of
the Bible, and the latter a very poor and fragmentary version, in their
own language.

However great the influence of the press has been in the preparation
of books and tracts, it has probably reached and permanently moved
more people still by its periodical publications. Papers have been
printed for more than a generation in Armenian, Greek, Armeno-Turkish,
Greco-Turkish, Bulgarian, and Arabic which have had wide circulation
among all classes, but especially among the evangelicals. These papers
while religious, have also been newspapers, carrying into the remote
hamlets of the interior information of the great outside world of
which the masses were profoundly ignorant when mission work began.
The influence of these papers can best be measured by the fact that
when the cholera was approaching any section of the country, the
missionaries were accustomed to publish detailed instructions regarding
the best methods to prevent contracting the dread disease and what to
do as soon as the symptoms appeared. Those who read the papers took
great care to follow directions, and so the Protestants who usually
knew how to read seldom suffered from the scourge.

When the cholera was raging with unusual virulence in Aintab, taking
for the most part the Moslems and ignorant Gregorians and leaving the
Protestants almost unscathed, a learned Moslem asked a missionary
if God spread a tent over the Protestants that the cholera should
pass them by. Through the periodicals in the various languages, the
missionaries and leading Armenians have been able constantly to speak
directly to the most intelligent classes of people in the entire empire.

When the missionaries began work in Turkey in 1820 there was no
newspaper worthy the name in the country in any language and the
number of books was but few. Printing was not left, however, entirely
in the hands of the missionaries, for, after a time, to meet the
demands of the different religious communities other presses were
started. These were small in output and power and did not amount to
much until within the last twenty-five years. During this time the
Armenians have prepared and published some excellent text-books, many
of which have been and still are in constant use in Protestant schools.
They also have started a few periodicals that for the most part have
little permanent value. The Moslems have done but little in the way
of printing books or periodicals of any kind. They do not allow the
Koran to be translated into the vernacular of the people, and it is
their policy to exclude from their subjects, as far as possible, all
knowledge of the outside world. The Moslem press has produced little of
real value to the people.

Great freedom to the work of the press was given in the earlier days,
all of which has changed during the last thirty years. While the Turks
were never favorable to it, they tolerated it under a silent protest.
Gradually the opposition became more and more open and violent.
Undoubtedly all this originated among the Roman Catholics and the
Jesuits, who even in the early days of the mission fought against the
circulation of the Bible and Protestant books. They did much to stir
up opposition to Protestant books, among the Greeks first and later
among the Armenians, always assuming that the Bible is a Protestant
book. There is no doubt that this hostility was helped on also by the
representatives at the Porte from Russia. The Turks were not so much
concerned with what they regarded as squabbles between the various
Christian sects.

About 1878 Dr. Wheeler, President of Euphrates College, imported a
printing-press into Harpoot, where he set it up and ran it with great
industry for several years. Only a local work was done there, while
the general publication operations of the missions were carried on
at Beirut and Constantinople. In the eighties the Turkish government
began to put severe restrictions upon the press. The one at Harpoot
was silenced and has so remained to this day.[1] Strict rules were
promulgated to restrict printing in the empire. Formal permission
must be procured in order to own a printing outfit, and strict rules
were formulated for its conduct. All matter to be printed must first
be submitted to a royal censor whose stamp of approval upon every
article is necessary before it is put upon the press. The same stamp
of approval which carries with it the sanction of the sultan must
be printed upon the first page of every book, otherwise its issue,
circulation, or even possession by a subject of the empire constitutes
a crime. This approval must be obtained for every edition of the same
book. It is almost as difficult to secure permission to-day to print a
new edition of the Bible as it was after the appointment of the first
censorship to print the first edition. Permission to print a book like
the Bible carries with it no authority to print separately any part of
the same. These rules have greatly hampered the work of the press, but
have not by any means been able to stop the constant output of useful
books and periodicals in the leading languages of the country.

There is no department of missionary effort which has done more to
open the eyes of the people and stir in them new desires and ambitions
than this work of publication, taken in connection with the general
educational operations. Many English books and periodicals find their
way into these schools and are included in the libraries of the
teachers and students. These too are subject to all the restrictive
laws which hamper the press. The tendency is more and more to exclude
all foreign books and periodicals and to have it almost a crime for a
subject of Turkey to have in his possession a library of any kind. Many
an Armenian has been arrested and thrown into prison for no other crime
than the possession of a few harmless English books. No one has yet
been bold enough to confiscate from the libraries of the missionaries
the books which they possess, but this step has been repeatedly
threatened. The officials, however, intercept many books in the mails
or in transit by freight.

In all work of reform which marks the history of missions in that
country this agency has been supremely potent. Undoubtedly to-day there
is no more vitalizing force in the empire affecting the intellectual
and religious life of the Moslems than that which is exerted not only
through the Bible and especially prepared literature, but through books
on science. These contain startling revelations to the old-school
Moslem, since modern science runs counter to nearly every teaching of
the Koran. He cannot deny their truth forever, and when he yields he
has already met with a mighty intellectual and religious evolution.

[Footnote 1: This press began operations again in September, 1908.]




XIX. MODERN MEDICINE


    In the Turkish empire a remarkable impetus has been given
    to the material development of Asia Minor and Syria, which
    may be largely traced to the quickening influences of
    American missions. Mission converts are proverbially men
    of affairs, alert and progressive, and in full sympathy
    with modern ideals of progress. The change in their
    personal environment, and in the temper and spirit of
    their lives, testifies to new impulses, higher ambitions,
    and an enlarged and increasing sympathy with modern
    progress. As long ago as 1881, an incident of commercial
    significance was reported in The Missionary Herald. It was
    announced that through missionaries at Harpoot nearly five
    hundred sets of irons for fanning-mills had been ordered
    from the United States, native carpenters having been
    taught to make the necessary woodwork which would render
    them available. Since then the introduction of American
    agricultural machines has increased, in spite of the
    difficulties and heavy cost of transportation. The German
    government has interested itself in securing concessions
    for a railway through Asia Minor to Bagdad and Busrah,
    with the evident expectation that German trade will find
    in those regions a profitable field of exploitation.
    If it should prove true that Mesopotamia may become a
    source of supply for the grain which Europe needs, there
    is good reason to expect that American agricultural
    implements will find a new market in Asiatic Turkey.
    Owing to the large emigration of Armenians to the United
    States, and the long residence of American missionaries
    in Turkey, no foreign country is better known or more
    admiringly regarded by the entire Christian element of
    Armenia than the United States. Mr. Charles M. Dickinson,
    Consul-General of the United States at Constantinople,
    regards even the material returns of American mission work
    in Turkey as justifying in large measure the outlay. His
    opinion is expressed in the following paragraph:

    “In all our efforts to extend American commerce, in the
    hard struggle to establish and maintain direct steam
    communication with New York, the opening of American
    expositions and agencies, and the introduction of new
    articles of manufacture, many of the missionaries have
    been willing pioneers, blazing the way for American
    exporters, and doing valuable introductory work through
    their knowledge of the local languages and their influence
    with the people. From every standpoint, therefore, I do
    not see how the American missions in Turkey, as they
    are at present conducted, can fail to be of distinct
    advantage to the commerce and influence of the United
    States.”
                                      —JAMES S. DENNIS, in
                    “Christian Missions and Social Progress.”

There was no purpose or plan at the beginning of missionary work
in Turkey to make special use of the physician. Whenever a man was
appointed as missionary who had taken a full course of medicine he was
not sent out especially as a medical missionary, but went as did the
others, with the understanding that he was an evangelistic missionary
and was to use his medical skill as an auxiliary force. The outfit of
the early medical missionaries, like Dr. Grant and Dr. Asa Dodge of
Syria, was exceedingly circumscribed, consisting of a few standard
remedies and simple instruments and appliances. There was no suggestion
of a hospital or even a public dispensary. The medical missionary was
able to transport the major part of his equipment upon a horse and
apply his art at any point along the way. After the days of pioneering
were passed and the various mission stations were well established, the
medical missionaries began to prepare for a broader and more thorough
work.

The country had no modern physicians when the Board began work there
and no schools for medicine. The people submitted to the most loathsome
and cruel methods of treatment at the hands of heartless old women and
unskilled men who traded upon their sufferings. From the beginning
the fullest confidence was placed in the American physician. He was
deemed by the ignorant and needy masses as little less than a worker
of miracles. His reputation gave not only himself but his missionary
associates standing among all classes in the country. His presence
often proved in times of stress to be a large element of safety for
all members of the station. The Turkish officer and persecuting
ecclesiast did not care to injure the man into whose hands their lives
might soon be placed by disease or accident. They thought it good
policy to keep on fairly good terms with the doctor.

Medical work in the empire took its earliest and strongest hold upon
Beirut and Aintab. In the former place a hospital was erected and a
medical school was in operation in the ’70’s. Aintab took the same step
ten years later, but finally, for want of funds, gave up the medical
school but continued the hospital. The next mission hospital to be
erected was at Mardin. Until the last decade these constituted the main
mission hospitals in the empire. Hospitals have followed at Cæsarea,
Marsovan, and Van, while others are contemplated at Harpoot, Sivas,
Erzerum, Adana, Constantinople, and elsewhere.

Many Greeks and Armenians have qualified themselves for medical
practise in Turkey by taking a course of training either in the
medical department of the Syrian Protestant College at Beirut or the
medical schools in Europe or the United States. The laws of Turkey
are so stringent in regard to the practise of medicine, or rather so
oppressive, that it is almost impossible for a subject of Turkey to win
great success in it. The law permits the arrest and imprisonment of a
physician upon the complaint of any one that he did not correctly treat
a case which ended fatally. When once he has been imprisoned it costs
a round sum to secure release. This process repeated destroys practise
and eats up profits. Many a well-trained Armenian doctor has been
compelled to give up the effort and return to the United States. There
are several Armenian physicians enjoying a good and honorable practise
in this country. The foreign physician enjoys the extra territorial
privileges of his country and, although often annoyed, is not seriously
disturbed by restrictive measures. He practises under a license granted
by an official medical board at Constantinople.

Medical missions in Turkey have opened the eyes of all classes to the
value of scientific medical practise. Were it not for the restrictive
measures of local officials, every town of considerable size in the
country might now have its native physicians, the most of whom were
trained in Christian schools. Until that time arrives the American
missionary physician will have large place in the life of the country.
His importance there is due to this fact, and also because of the
confidence reposed in him by the higher Turkish officials. They regard
the work of the medical missionary as supremely Christian. It commands
their admiration. Not a little of the hold which the missionaries now
have upon the country is due to his presence and work. In imitation of
the missionaries, the Turks themselves have attempted, at different
places, to maintain hospitals of their own for the care of soldiers
and officers, but these have usually been of little value unless the
physician in charge was a European or a man trained by the missions.

Medical work in Turkey is probably nearer self-support than that of any
other missionary country except Japan. The people are willing so far as
able to pay for medicines received and for services rendered. Wealthy
officials often make a handsome present to the missionary physician
treating them, thus making it possible to treat many poor without pay.
The hospital at Mardin, for instance, receives in fees and in payment
for medicines enough to meet all expenses except the salary of the
American physician in charge. The hospital of Aintab receives little
money from the Board.

Medical missions in Turkey are less hampered by officialism and
hindered by opposition than any other form of missionary work.
Physicians are more generally welcomed and their benefits more
widely appreciated than anything else the missionaries do. While the
other departments cannot be and ought not to be curtailed, much less
abandoned, in view of all the conditions that prevail there with the
constant scourges of pestilential diseases and the recurrence of
violence and massacre in different parts of the country, there is
an unlimited field for the operations of the Christian missionary
physician who commends the gospel which he preaches to all with whom he
comes in contact. At the same time, this work, compared with the extent
of its influence, costs perhaps less than any other form of purely
missionary service.

Missionary physicians, their medical schools, hospitals, dispensaries,
and practise among the people have been a mighty force not only for
alleviating suffering, but for breaking down the superstitions of
all classes of people. The Arabs, the Koords, the Turks, as well as
other Mohammedan races, have found their belief in _kismet_, or fate,
greatly shaken by the practises of men who seemed successfully to set
themselves against the will of God. They have seen the scourge of
cholera stayed in its ravages by the application of modern scientific
methods, and diseases which were regarded as almost universally fatal
become little feared, and they are compelled to inquire if, after all,
“whatever is, is ordained by Allah.” Perhaps the medical work of the
missionaries in Turkey has accomplished more in breaking down that
benumbing belief in fatalism among the Mohammedans than all other
phases of mission work together.




XX. STANDING OF MISSIONARIES


    My purpose is twofold: first to show the American people
    the kind of work in which the missionaries in Turkey
    are engaged, and second to assure them from personal
    observation that these missionaries do not encourage
    revolutionists or the revolutionary spirit. I am surer of
    nothing than I am of this. If you could see them at their
    somewhat thankless tasks you would regard them as the most
    consecrated men and women on the planet, as far removed
    from fostering rebellion as heaven is from earth, making
    the sacrifice of life and of all social and even domestic
    relations, and doing it with a cheerfulness which must
    command not only our respect but also our admiration.

    The price to be paid for the enlightenment of the nation
    is very heavy, but these noble men and saintly women are
    willing to pay it, and I, for one, feel that my poor life
    amounts to nothing in comparison; so with a full heart, a
    heart with a big ache in it, I cry, “God bless them!”

    The missionaries are the Sir Knights of modern times,
    their weapons are no longer swords, but ideas. They
    are to be found in all quarters of the globe, and they
    are always surrounded by ambushed perils. They are the
    representatives of a high civilization and of the best
    religious thought of the age, and are the little “leaven”
    which in good time is to “leaven the whole lump.” I do not
    hesitate to say that they are doing more for the Turkey of
    to-day than all the European Powers combined.
                                     —GEORGE H. HEPWORTH in
                               “Through Armenia on Horseback.”

At the beginning of work in Turkey all classes were suspicious of
the missionaries. Experience with the representatives of the Roman
Catholic and Greek Churches had led the Mohammedans and others to
fear that their errand was not wholly religious. At the same time, it
was impossible for one brought up in the atmosphere of Turkey not to
confound religion with nationality. The American missionaries had one
great advantage, for few even of the educated in Turkey ever heard of
the United States. So there was not much alarm at the prospects of
missionaries from the United States gaining political supremacy in
Turkey. So far as the Turks understood, the country back of them was
without strength or repute. This fact allayed the otherwise inevitable
suspicion that they were political agents.

It required more than fifty years of residence in that country,
accompanied by a life of constant devotion to the interests of the
people, to remove the impression that the missionaries were there for
what they could make out of it. The following conversation, which
actually took place, illustrates fairly well the attitude of inquiry
and doubt. The parties to it were a missionary and an intelligent
Armenian in the interior of the country:

“You must receive a pretty large salary to lead you to leave your home
and friends in America and endure here among us the hardships of this
country.”

“Quite the contrary,” replied the missionary; “I receive what all
American missionaries receive and no more, that is my bare living with
no surplus.”

“Then,” the Armenian quickly replied, “you must expect, after you have
learned the language, to receive some government appointment at a large
salary.”

The missionary answered, “Few missionaries have ever given up
missionary work for a government appointment, and I have never seen
one who would consider such an appointment, or who would remain in the
country at all for diplomatic or consular service.”

“There can be little doubt, then,” said the questioner, “that in your
country the missionary is held in high honor by all the people, so
much so that it is worth all it costs to win it by a period of severe
hardship in a land like this.”

“You are wrong again, my friend,” said the missionary, “for most of the
people in the United States think a missionary is a fool to throw his
life away in a strange and hostile land; and, besides, the missionaries
enter upon the work for life; therefore they have no time left to go
home and enjoy the honors that an admiring people might wish to thrust
upon them.”

“What are you out here for, anyway?” asked the discouraged guesser.

“We missionaries have come out here only to help the people of this
country to establish worthy Christian institutions and to become better
men and women.”

“Surely there is some other reason,” said the man as he walked away.
“Who would ever bring upon himself such hardship and trouble for that?”

The true Christian motive that considers others’ needs ahead of
self-interest was little understood, and it required generations of
missionary labors to bring the people to begin to understand it.

Times of great national distress like war, massacres, famine, and
plague, had given the missionaries unusual opportunity to prove to the
people that they were there, not for their own personal comfort but to
bind up the broken heart and give cheer to the downcast and the dying.
Every added missionary grave, and they dot the country from Arabia to
the Black Sea and from Persia to Salonica, was an added argument which
no Oriental could answer, that the missionaries were there to minister
and not to be ministered unto, and to give even their lives for others.

Through many vicissitudes and misunderstandings and misconceptions the
missionaries have quietly continued their labors until, without doubt,
it would be hard to find an intelligent man of any race or creed in the
empire who does not believe them to be earnest, sincere, altruistic in
their life and work. All classes have learned that in times of trouble
the missionary is their best friend, no matter how much they may have
abused him in times of prosperity. They know that he will always do
what he believes to be for their best good, even though there may be a
difference of judgment as to what is the best good.

In the midst of Oriental duplicity, the missionaries have established
the reputation for speaking the truth. At first this was one of the
severest puzzles to the Turks in the dealings of the missionaries
with the government. They could conceive of no reason for telling
the truth under such circumstances, so they were completely misled.
The missionaries applied to the government, in an interior city, for
permission to erect a schoolhouse. All school buildings were at that
time opposed by the Turkish officials. The governor asked, “For what
is the building to be used?” “A school,” replied the missionary. “What
are you going to keep in it?” asked the governor. “Scholars and
teachers,” was the reply. “Why do you want so large a building?” was
the next question. “Because we are going to have many teachers and
many pupils,” said the missionary. “What are you going to manufacture
there when it is done?” was asked. “Scholars,” was the answer. The
missionary was dismissed and for hours the council discussed the
question. Not a man present believed that the proposed building was to
be a school. They said, “Surely if he were building a school he would
not have acknowledged it; it must indeed be something else.” It was
afterwards learned that they thought the building was to be an armory
for manufacturing guns.

When Dr. Hepworth of the New York Herald took his famous journey
through Armenia in 1896, he was given, by a Turkish governor, a
letter of introduction to one of the American missionaries, Dr. H. N.
Barnum at Harpoot, with the added statement, “He knows more about the
conditions of the interior of Turkey than any living man, and you can
depend absolutely upon what he says.”

There is no class of people so trusted by the Armenians in Turkey,
as well as by all other races, as are the American missionaries. Men
who have been hostile to missionary work bring their daughters to the
missionary boarding-school because, they say, “We know they will be
safe here.” All classes take the word of a missionary as absolutely
true and without question. Money is put into their hands by the people
for safe-keeping or for transmission to some other part of the country
or out of it, without hesitation and without asking for a receipt.

There is no doubt that the Turkish officials, even though for reasons
known to themselves they may oppose the erection of buildings for
school or hospital purposes and hamper the missionaries in their
general evangelistic work, have long since ceased to regard them in
any other light than as men and women of unquestioned integrity and
purity of life. Much testimony might be adduced to show the confidence
that officials repose in individual missionaries. They may not like
the higher educational institutions the missionaries have established
there, which are leading an increasing percentage of the people to
think for themselves, yet they do not now attempt to destroy them or
their influence by making personal charges against the missionaries
themselves.

Many Turkish officials of high rank have, in times of special stress,
sought the counsel of missionaries, who had resided in the country many
years, and who were generally reputed to have a wide knowledge of local
affairs. It is interesting to note that in many instances the counsel
obtained was acted upon, and later sincere gratitude was expressed.

After the Armenian massacre in 1895-96 the Armenian patriarch
at Constantinople called the treasurer of the American Board at
Constantinople and asked him to take complete charge of a considerable
sum of money collected for relief. “For,” said he, “I have no means of
distributing this fund with assurance that it will, in any large part,
reach the needy people, but I know that through the missionaries every
dollar will go to the suffering poor.”

The absolute integrity of the life and dealing of the missionaries
with the people has done perhaps as much in that land of deceit and
dishonesty to commend the simple gospel of Jesus Christ to all classes
as any other single phase of the missionary work. It has come to be
believed that a Christian of the missionary type must be true, honest,
upright, and pure. This has great significance in a land like Turkey.

While Turkey has suffered but little from general famine or from
plagues that have been sweeping in their character, still the
missionaries have been compelled to devote much time and strength
to the distribution of help to the starving and homeless, owing to
oft-repeated political disasters amounting occasionally to open
massacres. These began in 1822 at the time of the Greco-Turkish war
when in Chios it was reported that fully fifty thousand lives were
lost. The next great movement of the kind occurred in the Nestorian
mountains when some ten thousand Armenians and Nestorians were said
to have been put to death. In 1860 in the Lebanon and at Damascus
about the same number of Maronites and Syrians were destroyed by the
Turks and Druses. In 1876 occurred the well remembered Bulgarian
massacres where some ten thousand Bulgarians were reported to have
lost their lives. The last great and concerted movement of this kind
occurred, as we all remember, in 1895-96, which extended from Persia to
Constantinople and in which it is impossible to state with accuracy how
many thousands of Armenians were massacred. The number has been placed
at one hundred thousand, though this is undoubtedly too high.

In addition to these marked cases of violence and murder, the same
process has gone on upon a much smaller scale for the last thirty
years, causing terror, distress, and poverty, and calling for comfort
and assistance. In the last three instances of general massacres
reported above, the missionaries were upon the ground, facing no little
of the peril and hardship with the people, and afterwards acted as
agents for the distribution of relief to those who were left in abject
destitution. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have passed through
their hands for this purpose. With this money they have procured and
distributed food and clothing to the starving and naked, while many
lines of industry were opened to afford means of prolonged self-help.

The missionaries in Turkey have taken the lead in the application of
principles by which, in the distribution of charity, much more can be
accomplished, without impoverishing the recipients, by devising means
whereby the aid received can be earned, at least in part. This same
principle has been also carried out in the support of the large number
of orphans saved from the massacres of 1895.

They have purchased and distributed seed for planting when famine
conditions had exhausted the supply. In severer cases when their cattle
had died or had been taken from them, missionaries have purchased oxen
and loaned them to the farmers for putting in their crops. The policy
of aid practised at all times has been to help the people to help
themselves.

The missionaries in these and other lines of eleemosynary operations
have demonstrated that they are the friends of all without reference
to creed or religion. While these disasters have been terrible to
contemplate and have brought immeasurable hardship and care upon the
missionaries, they have yet opened new opportunities of approach to the
people and have revealed the sincere desire to relieve them in their
supreme distress. All classes have learned to trust the missionaries,
and in times of trouble, all races appeal to them for assistance.




XXI. COMPLETED WORK


    What is in the future no man can tell, but the growth of
    pure religion in whatever form of church organization;
    the development of freedom of thought; the attainment
    of civil liberty, and that not merely for Armenia, but
    for Greek, Nestorian, Jacobite, and even for the Turk
    himself, depends upon the continuance of the influences
    for a higher life that have been at work during the past
    sixty years, and that depends upon the missionaries being
    supported at their posts. Theirs is no sectarian work.
    They stand as the friends of Gregorian Armenians, Roman
    Catholic Chaldeans, Nestorians and Jacobites as well as of
    those in closer affiliation with the Protestant Churches
    of Europe and America. America should stand by them and
    demand their full protection. It is our right by treaty;
    it is our right by the duty we owe humanity, by the duty
    we owe to our tradition as a liberty-loving nation. We
    have no political ends to serve; we want not a square
    foot of the sultan’s domains; but we stand, as we have
    always stood, for freedom for the oppressed, for the right
    of every man to worship his God in the light of his own
    conscience.
                                    —EDWIN MUNSELL BLISS, in
                          “Turkey and the Armenian Atrocities.”

In order to understand the methods employed in planting missions in
Turkey and the permanent results following, one must have a clear idea
of what the missionaries were attempting to accomplish. Perhaps we make
the subject clearer by stating first some of the things they were not
attempting to do.

They were not attempting to plant American churches in Turkey over
which the missionaries should preside as pastors and which should be
under the control and direction of the mission.

They were not attempting to transport into Turkey American churches,
and American schools, and American customs and dress or anything else
that is American.

They were not attempting to plant churches or schools or any other
line of Christian work which should be perpetually dependent upon
contributions from America for their maintenance.

What then, to speak positively, were some of the things the
missionaries were attempting to do in Turkey? It should be stated at
the outset that no settled policy was clearly in the mind of any one
missionary at the beginning of the work. When missionary work began
in Turkey no one, not even the officers of the Mission Board, had
framed such a policy in detail. All had one vague desire and purpose,
namely to preach the gospel of Christ to the people who dwell in the
Turkish empire. At first, as has been stated, there was no intention
of organizing churches separate from those already in existence there.
It was expected that the missionaries upon the ground would shape and
adopt their measures as necessity demanded. Men of broad culture, deep
piety, and sound common sense were appointed to the fields, and to them
was entrusted the responsibility of evolving a policy for themselves.

When independent Protestant churches were organized in 1846 it seemed
the only natural step to ordain over them pastors from among their
own people. There were several able and well-educated Armenians whose
fitness for this office was unquestionable. At any rate, there were not
enough missionaries upon the ground to fill these positions. Perhaps
this last fact helped materially in settling the policy of a native
pastor for a native church. Be this as it may, there was a speedy
recognition of the right of the native church to have a pastor of its
own from among its own race. This was early recognized as good policy,
and was put into operation.

It does not, however, seem to have occurred to the missionaries then
that the native churches had the same right to support the pastor
thus ordained over them. The missionaries were there to see that the
Christian work was carried on, and, to their minds, a most important
part of it was to provide for the expense of the churches they had been
agents in forming. In the annual reports of that period we find no
allusion to payments by the people themselves for the support of their
pastors. That was regarded as a part of the service missionaries were
to render, and the people seemed perfectly willing to have it so.

[Illustration: A CLASS OF NATIVE STUDENTS GRADUATES FROM THE AMERICAN
COLLEGE FOR GIRLS, CONSTANTINOPLE]

In 1856 Crosby H. Wheeler was sent out as a missionary and in 1857 he
was assigned to Harpoot in Eastern Turkey. He had received a thoroughly
practical training in business and as a pastor in Maine before going
out. While profoundly earnest in his purpose to Christianize the people
of Turkey, he had little sentiment in his makeup and was eminently
practical in all he undertook. He soon discovered that the churches in
Turkey were regarded by the people as belonging to the missionaries,
since the missionaries paid all the bills. Many who attended felt it to
be a favor they were conferring upon the missionaries. A church in the
city of Arabkir, some two days’ journey northwest of Harpoot, was in
need of a stove. Dr. Wheeler ordered one from America, paid the bill,
even for transportation to Arabkir. One of the deacons of the church
received the stove and set it up, and then sent a bill for his services
to Dr. Wheeler. This turned the tide. Dr. Wheeler from that time became
the champion of self-support for native churches, as a fundamental
principle of self-government and self-propagation.

The people, for the most part, did not welcome the change. They were
Orientals, and could not see why the American Christians should not
have the privilege of supporting their pastors and meeting all the cost
of their churches if they so desired. Dr. Wheeler, by pen and voice,
advocated the policy with great energy and force. The wisdom of it was
recognized by the officers of the Board. It gained general approval
from most of the missionaries in Turkey, but many of them hardly dared
to apply it vigorously in their own immediate community. It required
no little courage to adopt and put through so unpopular a measure.
The principle was a right one and could not but prevail. The wiser
Armenians and Greeks saw that only in this way could they secure for
themselves liberty and independence of action befitting their ability.
While their desire for money inclined them to cling to the old custom,
their love of freedom forced them towards self-support.

The same principle was applied to the missionary schools. At first they
also were free, but in the Orient no real value attaches to that which
costs nothing. Schools that are free can be attended or not as the
pupil sees fit. Books given away are easily lost or destroyed and are
never valued. To command respect for the schools and insure regularity
of attendance it became necessary to charge the pupils tuition. A pupil
for whom tuition had been paid could be depended upon to be present
when not seriously sick. Books and slates when purchased were cared
for and used. Dr. Wheeler once spent several hours in persuading a man
to purchase a two cent slate for his boy in school. The contest was
for the principle, not the two cents. It is needless to say that Dr.
Wheeler carried his point.

This principle is now a well established policy throughout the
Turkish missions. Native churches, as soon as they become financially
able, assume the entire expense for themselves. No missionary is the
pastor of a native church. The weaker churches pay what they can, the
missionaries supplementing with the understanding that the mission’s
aid shall diminish as their financial strength increases.

Many Protestant schools in Turkey to-day receive no aid from mission
funds. The people assume that an education has a real value for which
they are willing to pay. Some of the colleges receive in tuition fees
as much as three-fourths of the cost of conducting the institution.
With others differently situated the proportion is less but all get
no small part of their income from the students. Probably the higher
educational institutions in Turkey secure as large if not a larger part
of their running expenses from the pupils than do similar institutions
in any other country in the world.

The same principle applies also to literature and to medical treatment.
The people pay liberally for all the products of the press, whether
it be in the form of periodicals or books and tracts. Missionary
physicians early learned that they could accomplish more good by
charging fees for service and for medicine in all cases where the
patient is able to pay. The patient who receives medicine free when
he has money to pay for it is apt to defy all directions, or even not
take it at all unless he likes it. Medicine that has been paid for is
pretty sure to be taken. Some of the hospitals in Turkey, apart from
the salary of the missionary physician in charge, are practically
self-supporting, the fees of the patients and the sums paid for
medicine being sufficient to meet the cost of attendants, supplies, and
the care of the hospital.

The deserving poor, however, are not turned away. In schools methods of
self-help are provided for students who have no funds with which to pay
tuition, so that their self-respect and independence are not destroyed.
In the same way provision is made for books. In cases of sickness, no
one who is worthy is ever refused treatment by the missionary physician
because he has no money to pay.

This principle of self-support has become a fixed part of the work in
Turkey. The people are now thoroughly committed to it. They recognize
that the mission is not there to transplant institutions from abroad,
but to sow seed from which institutions may grow in the soil of Turkey,
watered by Turkish showers, warmed by the Turkish sun, cultivated and
cared for by Turkish hands. Much greater progress would have been made
in self-support had it not been for many overwhelming disasters which
have swept over the empire at intervals since missionary work began
there. First it was devastating wars with Greece, with Egypt, and with
Russia. Then came famine and massacre, the latter paralyzing trade,
killing the wage-earners, and driving many of the most enterprising
from the country. Had the Greeks and Armenians in Turkey been free from
these terrible disasters for the last generation, it is safe to say
every missionary church, school, hospital, and press would be to-day
entirely independent of financial aid from this country. There would
probably be need of missionaries for some time to come, and money from
this country might still be called for to open new sections of the
country, as, for instance, in Koordistan, and Albania, and Arabia, but
in the old fields ample financial support would easily be supplied by
the people themselves. In 1907 in spite of their poverty and distress
the people connected with the American Board missions alone paid for
their own churches, schools, and missionary medical attendance over
$128,000,—a sum far in excess of what was paid by the Board to support
the same work. We may confidently expect that if a new imperial policy
should be put into operation and Turkey afford safety to life and
property and liberty of conscience and judgment to all her subjects,
there would be a marked advance in the support of all Christian and
educational work in the country, and a rapid enlargement of all such
institutions.

Much has also been accomplished in the line of self-propagation and
aggressive Christian work. Various organizations of native Christian
leaders, like the Bithynia Union of Western Turkey, organized in 1864,
the Harpoot Evangelical Union organized in 1865, the Cilicia Union of
Central Turkey, and similar organizations in Marsovan and in Bulgaria,
as well as in other places, have rendered loyal service in the work
of evangelization. These Unions have cooperated with the missionaries
in aggressive operations as well as in the direction and supervision
of the churches already organized. Their annual meetings have been
marked events in the history of the churches. In these the missionaries
are only honorary members, the native brethren taking the burden of
responsibility. In some of the Unions, as at Harpoot in Eastern Turkey,
a committee is annually appointed to cooperate during the year with
the missionaries in looking after and directing work in the churches
and schools as well as in planning and executing general evangelistic
movements.

What the native churches are doing in the line of expansion is best
exhibited in the Koordistan Missionary Society which had its beginning
nearly forty years ago in the Harpoot Evangelical Union. This society
was formed for the purpose of carrying the gospel and the advantages
of a Christian education to the Koordish speaking Armenians who
dwelt in the heart of Koordistan between the Harpoot, Mardin, and
Bitlis stations of the Board. Funds were collected, visitations
made, and promising Koordish speaking students from that country
were brought to Harpoot and educated at the expense of that society
and later returned to their people as teachers and preachers. As the
work enlarged, evangelical churches in other parts of the country
joined in the enterprise until it has come to be recognized as a work
belonging to evangelical Armenians wherever found. Many Armenians in
the United States have liberally contributed to sustain this society.
The Armenians give freely for any Christian work that appeals to their
national pride or that takes hold upon their sympathies.

In more recent times the alumni and students of Euphrates College who
have gone to England or come to this country have contributed for
providing scholarships in that institution for the education of poor
but deserving students. While some are endowing scholarships, others
propose to provide permanent professorships in the college. All this
is additional evidence that, the Armenians once assured of safety
to life and property, the Christian educational work in Turkey will
speedily become largely, if not entirely, self-supporting. The Greeks,
among whom much less work is carried on, would not fall behind in
self-support.




XXII. INDUSTRIAL AND RELIGIOUS CHANGES


In the year 1860, in a public address in the city of London, the Earl
of Shaftesbury paid the following tribute to the character of the
American missionaries in Turkey:—

    “I do not believe that in the whole history of missions;
    I do not believe that in the history of diplomacy, or in
    the history of any negotiations carried on between man
    and man, we can find anything to equal the wisdom, the
    soundness, and the pure evangelical truth of the body of
    men who constitute the American mission. I have said it
    twenty times before, and I will say it again—for the
    expression appropriately conveys my meaning—that ‘they
    are a marvelous combination of common sense and piety.’
    Every man who comes in contact with these missionaries
    speaks in praise of them. Persons in authority, and
    persons in subjection, all speak in their favor; travelers
    speak well of them; and I know of no man who has ever been
    able to bring against that body a single valid objection.
    There they stand, tested by years, tried by their works,
    and exemplified by their fruits; and I believe it will
    be found that these American missionaries have done more
    toward upholding the truth and spreading the gospel of
    Christ in the East, than any other body of men in this or
    in any other age.”

    Mr. William T. Stead once said, “How many American
    citizens, I wonder, are aware that from the slopes of
    Mount Ararat all the way to the shores of the Blue Ægean
    Sea, American missionaries have scattered broadcast over
    all the distressful land the seed of American principles.
    When General Mosseloff, the director of foreign faiths
    within the Russian empire, visited Etchmiadzin the
    Armenian patriarch spread before him the map of Asia
    Minor, which was marked all over with American colleges,
    American churches, American schools, American missions.
    They (the American missionaries) are busy everywhere,
    teaching, preaching, begetting new life in these Asiatic
    races.”
                         —From “Memoirs of William Goodell.”

Industrially Turkey was ages behind even at the beginning of the last
century. Practically nothing modern had entered the country from
without and found acceptance there. The agricultural implements in use
were of the same primitive character as those of two thousand or more
years before. The plow of Abraham’s day, made of the branch of a tree
and only scratching the surface of the soil, was the only plow known,
and it is not by any means extinct. The winds of the plains winnowed
the grain, and the old threshing instruments with teeth still performed
its ancient service upon the threshing-floors of earth.

In some respects the people were more jealous to guard their methods
of work than they were their beliefs. It was found, however, that
when a man had enlarged the horizon of his thinking, he was far more
susceptible to suggestions as to his method of living and working.

Little by little new tools were brought in and made use of by native
carpenters. Winnowing-mills for cleaning up threshing-floors, after
years of opposition, won favor and are now found everywhere. In some
sections cotton-gins run by water-power have brought a blessing to
the farmers, while now and then a modern plow and other improved
implements are finding acceptance. The sewing-machine is found in
almost every town of importance, and the kerosene lamp has completely
changed the character of multitudes of homes and greatly multiplied the
possibilities of intellectual improvement and social reform.

The first electric telegraph instrument ever set up and operated in
the empire was exhibited to the sultan of Turkey by Cyrus Hamlin, the
missionary. The potato, the tomato, and other vegetables have been
introduced into various sections, and in many cases have become regular
articles of diet and staples in the market. Space forbids mention
of the many industrial, mechanical, and economic improvements which
have entered the country through the influence and even by the direct
exertions of the missionaries.

All this in the earlier years was incidental to the mission work.
During the last twenty years deliberate plans to teach industries have
been made by the missionaries in some of the leading schools. While
this industrial instruction was begun for the purpose of affording an
opportunity to worthy but needy students to earn their way through
school, the experiment proved that there was still another advantage
not second to this in importance, and that was the educational value
of practising an industry, as well as an economic value to the student
and to the country. Industrial plants have been attached to some of
the higher educational institutions like Anatolia College at Marsovan,
where the results have amply justified the effort. It is surprising
to see how rapidly new industrial ideas are disseminated from such a
school.

At the time of the massacres of 1895-96 a large number of orphan
children, both boys and girls, were taken in charge by the
missionaries. These numbered many thousands. Their presence and needs
forced the adoption of methods by which they could earn a part, at
least, of their own support. Various industries sprang up wherever
orphans and widows were found gathered into homes superintended by
the missionary. These activities include cabinet work, carpentry,
tinsmithing, blacksmithing, baking, embroidery, lace-making, with
many other trades, besides silk culture and farming. As the children
are bright and quick to learn the use of tools and remarkably good at
imitation, marked progress is made. It is inevitable that out of these
industrial plants will come new ideas and new industrial and mechanical
impulses. Many of the young men who have come to the United States have
learned trades which they will carry back to their own country as soon
as they are satisfied that liberty is given them to return in safety.
Probably industrial reform has not taken hold of the country as yet
with the same force as other reforms. One prominent reason for this is
that all industries are discouraged by the government. We can expect
but moderate results until there is a change in this respect in the
policy of administration.

Many changes in the construction of houses have taken place in the
interior of the country. Wooden floors are rapidly coming into use,
and windows admitting light and often with a few panes of glass are
found even in remote villages. The one-story buildings in agricultural
villages in which the family and the cattle during the winter occupied
one room, are having a second story added for the family with pure
air and with plenty of light. This one change alone is of inestimable
value in lifting up and improving a people. Whitewash made with lime
is freely used upon the inside of the living rooms and much pride is
exhibited in the surroundings of the home. All this indicates a decided
advance in family life and in the desire for what is civilized and
wholesome. Every step forward is permanent. The industrial advance
goes hand in hand with the introduction of comforts in the home.
The possibilities for rapid enlargement of these reform measures
are innumerable as soon as freedom of action and safety to life and
property are assured.

Enlightened by education, chafing under the restrictions which crushed
all enterprise in that country, and knowing about the large freedom
and the wider opportunities open to all in the United States, a large
number of Armenians have left their homes in Turkey for this country.
Emigration began largely from Harpoot, but has extended now to all
parts of the country, until it is estimated that there are now in the
United States more than thirty thousand Armenians, with perhaps as
many Greeks, Bulgarians, Albanians, Turks and Syrians. Many of these
have become prosperous business men, worthy and loyal citizens of the
United States. Others are farmers, professional men, and laborers in
factories. Some have returned, but the Turkish government is suspicious
of all, and especially of Armenians who have been in this country, and
is likely to deport them if they succeed in passing the guards at the
frontier. In proportion to their numbers, the Protestants in Turkey
have furnished by far the largest number of emigrants. They were the
first to come into closest contact with the American missionaries and
to catch the spirit of modern education. It was most natural that they
should be the first to turn their attention to this country as the
land of the greatest opportunity. Many have come here to secure more
education for work among their own people at home, but the severity of
Turkish rule has hitherto kept the most of these here. Many Armenian
Protestant churches and congregations have been formed in this country,
at points from Boston to California, and in every case the pastors and
preachers were trained at mission schools in Turkey. If it prove true
that old restrictions are removed and safety and freedom assured to
these exiles from their fatherland, no doubt the greater part of these
will return with joy, carrying back with them not only the capital they
have secured, but the enterprise and skill they have acquired in their
experience here. Many of these men may soon become a great force in
aggressive commercial Christian and educational enterprises for their
own people.

The missionaries set out to aid the Armenians and other races in
Turkey to an intelligent and reasonable faith and practise. Separation
from among the Armenians was forced upon the evangelicals, as we have
already seen, but the line that divided the Protestants from the old
Gregorian Church did not mark a cleavage between those who seriously
thought upon religious matters and those who were blind followers of
the Church. Many thoughtful men remained in the old Church, and the
discussions that produced so much disturbance outside were carried on
in greater quietness, even among the clergy. There were two reform
movements proceeding at the same time; one through the propagandism
of the Protestant or evangelical body, separated in 1846 from the
old Church by the action of the Church itself, and the other a much
less marked but no less sincere spirit of investigation and inquiry
continuing within the old Church. The general reform movement had been
too rapid and aggressive for the conservative elements of the Church,
but after the withdrawal of the most active leaders the reform spirit
continued to develop and exert its influence.

These two widely divergent parties of sixty years ago have now
drawn toward each other. There are probably to-day more intelligent
evangelical believers within the old Gregorian, Greek and Syrian
Churches than comprise the entire Protestant body. Separation no longer
takes place in any marked degree. The same men preach occasionally
in both Protestant and Gregorian churches. Evangelical teachers are
engaged without dissent to teach Gregorian schools, while in many
instances there are more Gregorian than Protestant pupils in Protestant
schools.

Gregorian young men preparing themselves for orders in their Church are
welcomed to the Protestant theological schools where they stand upon
precisely the same footing as the Protestant youth with that ministry
in view, while missionaries are invited to give lessons in Gregorian
theological schools.

The Gregorian Church, as a whole, while yet far from the goal reached
by many of its strongest supporters, is making advance towards an
intelligent faith and practise. No longer do the leaders believe that
there is virtue in the forms of worship or salvation in submission to
the demands of the priesthood. They believe that true religion consists
in true belief and right living and to this end they strive.

It is also evident that the Mohammedans have been perceptibly affected
by reading the New Testament; thousands of copies have been sold them.
Whereas heretofore they had interpreted Christianity by the lives of
the people among them who bore that name, they are now studying the
sources and see that between the two there is a wide gulf. They have
been compelled, in self-defense, to search their own religion for
fundamental truths of high character in order to prove to the reformed
Christians that Islam is not as bad as it appears in the lives of many
of its adherents.

In a word, all classes in the empire are learning that religion is a
matter of conviction and life, and not of form, and that it manifests
its true character in the acts of its followers, and not in the boasted
declarations of its leaders.




XXIII. AMERICAN RIGHTS


    It has been stated by American officials in 1895 and 1896
    that the missionaries, having forced themselves into
    Turkey against the will of the government, had no legal
    rights there and no claim to protection. The officials who
    made these statements must have been wilfully ignoring the
    facts of recent history. The missionaries were supported
    and encouraged by the three sultans, Mahmud the strong,
    Abd-ul-Medjid the weak, and Abd-ul-Aziz the weaker. They
    stand on a firm basis of treaties, special enactments, and
    concessions,—a basis in which the present sultan, with
    all his acuteness and his hatred of mission work, could
    find no flaw. Had it been possible to argue with a shadow
    of plausibility that the mission was against the law, or
    that it was not guaranteed by enactments inviolable even
    by a sultan protected by the six Powers, the property
    would have been destroyed and the mission silenced. The
    attempt was made, but failed; and the action of officials
    who destroyed mission property at Kharput, etc., was
    ostensibly disowned.

    Further, the action of strong, free American life in
    Turkey must always tend to strengthen the movement there
    towards that freer and more elastic order which belongs
    to all the English speaking peoples. But, though the
    mission work has, undoubtedly, exerted a great influence
    on the political situation in Turkey, the mission policy
    has studiously and consistently been non-political, and
    has zealously inculcated the doctrine of non-resistance
    and obedience to the existing government.
                          —PROF. W. M. RAMSAY, D. C. L. in
                          Preface of “Impressions of Turkey.”

The right to exercise their functions as a class possessing special
privileges had been granted to ecclesiastics of Christian nations by
the voluntary extension of the Edict of Toleration of 1453 given by the
Ottoman government after the fall of Constantinople. Turkish usage for
nearly four hundred years was the warrant for the entrance of American
missionaries into the country and their assurance of immunity from
official molestation.

They entered without diplomatic negotiations between the United States
and Turkey. Not, indeed, till ten years after American missionaries had
begun work in Turkey was the first treaty between the United States and
that country concluded. Previous to that time the missionaries were
protected by England, which had treaties with the Ottoman government
conceding extra-territorial rights to all British subjects. The Sublime
Porte did not seem to recognize any difference between an English
subject and an American citizen for all were “Frank Christians” to him,
hence the protection afforded was ample.

It cannot be predicted as in the case of most countries how many and
what ordinary international rights will be conceded to foreigners
by the Ottoman government. Rights in Turkey are based not upon
any principle of international law usually prevailing between
Christian nations but upon special treaties which bear the name of
“Capitulations” and “Concessions.” Intercourse of the Christian world
with Mohammedan countries does not proceed according to the law of
nations. International law as practised by the civilized nations of
Christendom is an outgrowth from the communion of ideas existing
between them and rests upon a common conception of justice and right.
Between the Mohammedans and the Christian nations of Europe and America
there exists no such common idea or principle from which could result a
true international law. Relations one with the other have, therefore,
to be regulated by special “capitulation” or “concession” granted by
the ruler of the Mohammedan country.

For this reason, even to the present time, the law of nations as
known and practised throughout Christendom has not been applied in
the relations existing between Turkey and the Christian Powers. But
ever since the Sublime Porte, under stress of circumstances, began to
abandon most reluctantly and by slow degrees its ancient usages towards
other nations, and imperfectly to adopt those of Christendom, its rule
of international conduct has gradually approached that of Europe.

A capitulation on the part of the Turkish empire is regarded by the
sultan and his associates as a concession to foreigners, which they
have a right at any time to annul or destroy if, in their judgment,
such annulment or destruction is for their advantage. The sultan does
not wish to consider a capitulation as imposing a perpetual obligation
upon him or his officials. It is a privilege rendered foreign powers
which can be withdrawn without notice and without explanation. Only
in view of these facts can the treatment of missionaries and other
foreigners by the officials of Turkey be understood.

The Porte has agreed at various times to exercise no preference towards
any of the states with which it has treaties, but to make them all
share alike in the benefits of the provisions contained in the treaties
it has entered into with each. In all its treaties of commerce since
1861, the expressed statement is, “That all the rights, privileges, or
immunities which the Sublime Porte now grants or may hereafter grant
to the subjects, vessels, commerce, or navigation of any other foreign
power, the enjoyment of which it shall tolerate, shall be likewise
accorded and the exercise of the enjoyment of the same shall be
allowed, to the subjects, ships, commerce, and navigation of the other
powers.” It is evident from this quotation that every nation holding
treaty with Turkey has equal rights and privileges with those of any
nation treating with the Ottoman government.

Without dwelling at length upon the various treaties and the steps
which led to their formation, it will suffice to say that these
include, among many other things, the following privileges:

Permission to foreigners who come upon Moslem territory freely to
navigate the waters and enter the ports of the same, whether for
devotion and pilgrimage to the holy places, or for trading in the
exportation and importation of every kind of unprohibited goods.
Exception is made, however, with reference to the Hejaz Province in
which the two holy cities of Islam are located.

Freedom to follow on Moslem ground one’s own habits and customs, and
perform the rites and fulfil the duties of one’s own religion.

Right of foreigners to be judged by the ambassadors and consuls of
their respective governments in suits both civil and criminal, between
one another, and the obligation of the local authorities to render aid
to the consul in enforcing his decision and judgment concerning the
same.

Inviolability of foreigners’ domiciles and, in event of urgent
necessity for arresting a delinquent, obligation of government
officials not to enter the dwelling-place of a foreigner without having
previously notified the ambassador or consul, and unless accompanied by
him or his deputy.

These statements are sufficient to show that merchant, traveler, and
missionary in Turkey are there as foreigners, and as such they and
their domiciles are under foreign protection. They have the privilege
of holding property and of buying and selling the same. Mission Boards
and foreign companies, being foreign corporations, cannot hold property
in the empire. All property real and personal is held in the name of an
individual. Exception is made in the case of the schools which have a
firman (imperial irade) or which have obtained formal recognition from
the sultan, in which case the institution itself holds the property in
its own name, being a recognized chartered institution.

It is well that the missionary and merchant have been and still are
independent of the Turkish officials, for, with the ignorance of
those in the interior and their readiness to play into the hands of
every rival or persecuting agency, there would be constant liability
to arrest, imprisonment, and even deportation. In spite of the
extra-territorial laws, missionaries and merchants repeatedly have
been put under arrest for imaginary charges, and otherwise officially
annoyed. These difficulties have been met in quietness and overcome
without loss of position or prestige. In no instance has a missionary
been arrested for an actual crime or misdemeanor. The usual charge
against them is that they are plotting against the government, and
the officers make attempts to search their houses for documentary
evidence and for arms. These various evidences of hostility have not
seemed to strain the generally friendly relations existing between the
missionaries and the local governments.

Perhaps it should be stated here that all foreign capital invested
in the country is held in the same way and has the same foreign
protection. This is true of all Catholic institutions, Russian
churches, monasteries, and schools, German orphanages, and mercantile
warehouses, English residences, and stores,—everything that belongs to
foreigners representing foreign capital is under foreign protection.

At the same time it is recognized that the school, hospital, or church
which occupies one of these foreign buildings is a foreign institution
and as such has, according to the Turkish capitulations, special
immunities and privileges. All dealings with the Turkish government,
even to the present time, are based upon this supposition. This does
not seem strange or unnatural to the Turkish government, which permits
the English, German, French, Austrian, and other governments to have
their own post-offices at Constantinople, Smyrna, and other ports,
in which they sell only their own postage-stamps and conduct all the
postal business they can procure.

Under treaty rights above quoted, every concession or privilege granted
by the sultan to the schools, churches, hospitals, or institutions
belonging to England, France, Russia, or any other country, belongs by
right to American institutions. The fact that America was discriminated
against in this respect for many years, and that American institutions
were thus deprived of privileges and concessions which had been
conceded to similar institutions of several European powers, is well
known, both at Constantinople, and in the United States. Happily these
matters have now been adjusted.

After seven years of negotiations, in 1907 the sultan finally conceded
in a formal manner the same rights and privileges to American
institutions in his dominion which had already been granted to similar
institutions of France, Russia, Germany and other countries; but as yet
in most cases this concession exists largely in form, while the actual
enjoyment of the privileges is withheld. At the same time insuperable
obstacles are thrown in the way of the purchase of real estate by
Americans and they are even forbidden to improve property which they
have already acquired. It is only by eternal vigilance that American
interests in Turkey can be safeguarded.




XXIV. RELIGIOUS TOLERATION


    One distinctive feature of Islam in Turkey—and this
    applies to nearly all Moslem races in the Ottoman empire
    except the Arabs—is that the Turk does not know the
    language of his sacred book. The Koran is as much a sealed
    book to the Turk as the Bible is to the peasant Roman
    Catholic of Central Europe. He knows, even if he is a
    peasant, many Arabic words and phrases, but although he
    may read the Koran, he cannot understand it; and it is, to
    the Mohammedan, a greater impiety to attempt to translate
    the Koran from the Arabic, than it was, till recent
    years, in the eyes of the faithful but ignorant Romanist
    to translate the Latin Bible into French or German. This
    ignorance of Arabic is a fact even among the more or less
    educated Turks of the capital and coast cities. It is
    very rare to find one who can read Arabic intelligently,
    and who speaks it correctly. Some years ago, when
    K—— Effendi, a learned Arab Koord, who had embraced
    Christianity, was called before the highest Mohammedan
    court, his perfect knowledge of the Arabic, of the Koran
    and of Mohammedan law and traditions completely confounded
    and silenced those who would have been his judges.
                        —From “The Mohammedan World of To-day.”

At the beginning of mission work in Turkey the government and high
officials seemed indifferent. They looked upon missionaries as only
another sect of Christians. It apparently did not occur to them that
Christians would attempt to present the claims of their religion to
Moslems, or that there was the least probability that any Mohammedan
would listen to a Christian upon the subject of religion. For centuries
no Christian in Turkey had made any such attempt. Indeed, the lives
of the Christians there exhibited little that was attractive in the
religion of Jesus Christ.

The Turks, therefore, appeared to assume that the missionary movement
was an effort to reform the Christians or to divide and weaken them. To
either of these purposes or results the sultan and his officers saw no
objections. To the Turks all who are not Moslems are infidels, and it
mattered little to them what these believed since they denied faith in
Mohammed.

Contrary to expectations, observing Moslems were attracted by the
fact that the Protestants made use of neither pictures nor images
in their worship, and demanded purity of life, honesty, temperance,
and truthfulness in their adherents. This was to them a new phase of
Christianity, one that accorded more with the Mohammedan ideas than
the practises of the Catholic and Oriental Churches with which they
were familiar. Among the early inquirers there were many Mohammedans.
In 1835 Dr. Goodell of Constantinople wrote, “Almost every day I
am visited by Mohammedans. I could very profitably devote my whole
time to them.” In cases not a few, in the early days, the Turkish
officials were not slow to shield the evangelical Christians from the
persecutions of the officials of the old Churches. As it did not occur
to the sultan that there was any danger that Moslems could look with
favor upon Christianity, he was the more free to grant full religious
liberty under the importunity of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the
British ambassador.

It was not, therefore, a difficult matter for Sultan Abdul Medjid to
issue, November 3, 1839, an imperial rescript named the _Hatti Sherif
of Gul Hane_, promising to protect the life, honor, and property of
all his subjects irrespective of race or religion. At that time the
sultan was eager to enlist and hold the sympathy of European rulers,
and believed that such a concession would materially help toward it.
This directly pledged the protection of the imperial government to
every subject of the empire in the exercise of his rights as a citizen,
without regard to religion or sect. It was the first declaration of the
Turkish government putting Christians upon a parity with Mohammedans
before the law. It was a long forward step in the way of administrative
reform.

In August, 1843, an Armenian youth, some twenty years of age, was
beheaded in the streets of Constantinople and his body exposed for
three days, because he had once declared himself a Moslem and then
later recanted. It seems that through fear of punishment this young
man had accepted Islam and left the country. Later he returned and
resumed the practises of his former religion. In spite of threats and
promises, he adhered to his ancestral faith with the above results.
Sir Stratford de Redcliffe did all in his power to save his life, but
without success.

This execution aroused the ambassadors of England, France, Russia, and
Prussia, who united in a formal demand upon the sultan to abolish the
death penalty for a change of religion. Hitherto, there had been full
liberty to change any and all non-Moslem religions, and for any one to
abandon the faith of his fathers and to embrace Islam, but the right
had been denied to a Mohammedan to depart from that faith.

Under pressure brought to bear by the four named ambassadors, led by
the British, the sultan on the twenty-first of March, 1844, gave a
written pledge as follows: “The Sublime Porte engages to take effectual
measures to prevent, henceforward, the persecution and putting to death
of the Christian who is an apostate.” Two days later Abdul Medjid, in
a conference with Sir Stratford, gave assurance “that henceforward
neither shall Christianity be insulted in my dominions, nor shall
Christians be in any way persecuted for their religion.” The giver
of these pledges was not only the sultan of Turkey, but he was also
the caliph of the Mohammedan world. The year 1844 is memorable in
Turkey and among the Mohammedans for this record of concessions in the
interests of religious liberty in Turkey, and for all races, including
Moslems.

In 1847 the Protestants had no standing in the Turkish empire.
Nominally they were under the protection of the patriarch at
Constantinople, but in fact they were without protection since their
formal excommunication from the Old Church in the previous year. When
their separation had been made complete, it was necessary that some
recognition be secured for them from the sultan himself in order
that they might continue to live in the empire. Through the British
ambassador negotiations were carried on which resulted in the issuance
of a firman by the grand vizier declaring that “Christian subjects
of the Ottoman government professing Protestantism shall constitute
a separate community with all the rights and privileges belonging to
others,” and that “no interference whatever be permitted in their
temporal or spiritual concerns on the part of the patriarch, monks, or
priests of other sects.” This Protestant charter of 1847, as it was
called, covered all Protestants who should change from the ancient
Churches, but seemed studiously to avoid giving recognition to the
possibility of Moslems accepting Protestantism. This charter was not
issued with the imperial authority of the sultan, but only under the
ministerial authority of the Porte. It was, therefore, liable to appeal
at any time by either the sovereign or any succeeding ministry. In
November, 1850, the reigning sultan, Abdul Medjid, granted an imperial
charter to the Protestants confirming their distinct organization as a
civil community and guaranteeing them religious rights and privileges
equal to those granted all other religious organizations.

This secured in _perpetuum_ to the Protestants the right to choose
their own political chief, to transact business, to worship, to marry,
to bury, and to perform all the functions of a religious organization
under imperial protection. This was the Magna Charta of Protestantism
in Turkey, and is called “The Imperial Protestant Charter of 1850.”
This was supplemented in 1853 by an imperial firman which was sent
to all governors in the provinces, as well as to the head men of the
Protestant communities, requiring that the charter of 1850 be strictly
enforced. The above were issued in the interests of the Protestants
alone.

Besides the written pledge of the sultan given to the ambassadors in
1844, there was no charter in Turkey insuring religious liberty to
Mohammedans, except as the above mentioned Protestant charters admitted
of such an interpretation. That was indefinite and, it was feared, did
not guarantee safety to a Mohammedan who should change his faith. The
European nations had demanded that the death penalty for Moslems upon
changing their religion should be abolished.

In February, 1856, Sultan Medjid issued what is called the Magna Charta
of religious liberty in Turkey. It is entitled the Hatti Sherif (Sacred
Edict) or Hatti Humayoun (Imperial Edict). It was regarded at that time
as guaranteeing full religious liberty to all Turkish subjects of every
creed and faith. One sentence reads, “No subject of my empire shall be
hindered in the exercise of the religion that he professes, nor shall
he be in any way annoyed on this account. No one shall be compelled to
change his religion.” Lord Stratford assumed in his correspondence with
his government that hereafter no one was to be molested on account of
his religion or punished “whatever form of faith he denies.”

This imperial charter was recognized by Great Britain, France, Austria,
Russia, Sardinia, and Turkey, through their representatives who met
in Paris in the same year to form the Treaty of Paris, to which body
it was communicated by “His Imperial Majesty, the Sultan” and as
“emanating spontaneously from his own will.” However, it was clearly
understood that no right was conceded to the above named Powers
“to interfere either collectively or separately in the relations
of His Majesty, the Sultan, with his subjects nor in the internal
administration of his empire.” This left Turkey the only interpreter
of the document, and as sovereign in the administration of her own
internal affairs, including the actual granting of religious liberty.

The acts of government and the behavior of Turkish officials at
that period gave the impression that the Porte meant to recognize
and enforce the principles of religious liberty. Many Mohammedans
began openly to purchase copies of the Turkish Bible and to examine
the claims of Christianity. In September, 1857, officials of the
government in Constantinople carefully examined a Turkish gentleman,
Selim Effendi, and his wife, and gave a certificate that they had
become Christians without compulsion, and that “it was the will of His
Majesty, the Sultan, that every Ottoman subject, without exception,
should enjoy entire religious freedom.” The spirit of inquiry spread
and a converted Turk was employed as an evangelist in Constantinople
and was unhindered in his labors among his countrymen.

In 1858 religious meetings were held with Turks and Koords in Eastern
Turkey. In 1859 it was reported that the Turkish governors of Sivas,
Diarbekr, and Cæsarea, after considering cases of the conversion of
Moslems to Christianity, declared publicly that a Mohammedan who
became a Christian would not be molested. In 1860 cases were reported
from the Taurus Mountains of converted Moslems, and of others who
were attendant upon Christian services. One of these was a member of
the governor’s council. In the vicinity of Aintab, at that time, some
thirty Mohammedans were in attendance upon Christian services at one
outstation. There were conversions of Turks reported at Diarbekr,
Harpoot, and Cæsarea, followed by baptism, and without disturbance.

Up to 1860 fifteen Moslem converts had been baptized at Constantinople.
One of these was a Turkish imam or preacher. In an examination before
the Minister of War this imam declared that there were forty Turks in
the city who believed as he did. This spirit of inquiry was wide-spread
and continued until 1864. There was no doubt that Christian ideals
were spreading rapidly among the Turks, and it is thought that the
government formed the opinion that a considerable number of Mohammedans
were desirous of reforming their own faith. Sultan Abdul Aziz became
suspicious and fearful, and set spies to watch the missionaries. On
a Sunday morning in Pera, Constantinople, Selim Effendi, a Turkish
evangelist, and some twenty Turks were arrested as they emerged from
their places of worship and were cast into prison. Without trial some
of these men were sent into exile.

The official French paper, the _Journal de Constantinople_, in its
issue of August 4, 1864, published a leader supposed to emanate from
Ali Pasha, the grand vizier, in which the arrest of the Christian Turks
was charged to the alleged fact that the zeal of the missionaries
in making converts amounted to a “veritable war,” and that in this
work of proselyting seductive arts were employed. These charges were
investigated by the Minister of the United States, and by the British
ambassador, and not only were the missionaries exonerated from all
blame, but Earl Russell, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs
in Great Britain, strongly defended the missionaries and demanded
of Turkey that she maintain in her dealings with her subjects the
observance of the true principles of religious liberty. Upon the demand
of the English government the exiled Turks were permitted to return.

It was at once understood by the Moslems that for them there was no
liberty to change their faith. It is true that none were arrested upon
the open charge of changing their religion, but every conceivable
pretense was trumped up against them, to substantiate which any number
of Mohammedan witnesses could be procured, and the Christian Mohammedan
was sent into exile, languished in prison, or disappeared from view.
Frequently missionaries attempted to follow up a case of manifest
persecution, but they usually came upon a medical certificate that the
man had died in prison from fever or some other natural cause, or lost
all traces of the prisoner through frequent transfers to distant parts.
Some men are known to have been shot by their guard in the transfer.

In the Treaty of Berlin, entered into in 1878 by England, Austria,
Russia, France, Italy, and Turkey, Article 2 states that absolute
religious liberty is to exist in all the various territories mentioned
in the preceding article “including the whole Turkish empire.” The
sixty-second article begins, “The Sublime Porte, having expressed its
willingness to maintain the principle of religious liberty and to give
it the widest sphere, the contracting parties take cognizance of this
spontaneous declaration.” Then follow specifications of how the sultan
is to carry out these principles.

In spite of these reiterated declarations, it is evident that the
Turkish government does not and never did intend to acknowledge the
right of a Moslem to become a Christian. A high official once told
the writer that Turkey gives to all her subjects the widest religious
liberty. He said, “There is the fullest liberty for the Armenian
to become a Catholic, for the Greek to become an Armenian, for the
Catholic and Armenian to become Greeks, for any one of them to become
Protestant, or for all to become Mohammedans. There is the fullest and
completest religious liberty for all the subjects of this empire.”

In response to the question, “How about liberty for the Mohammedan
to become a Christian?” he replied, “That is an impossibility in the
nature of the case. When one has once accepted Islam and become a
follower of the Prophet he cannot change. There is no power on earth
that can change him. Whatever he may say or claim cannot alter the fact
that he is a Moslem still and must always be such. It is, therefore,
an absurdity to say that a Moslem has the privilege of changing his
religion, for to do so is beyond his power.” For the last forty years
the actions of the official and influential Turks have borne out this
theory of religious liberty in the Ottoman empire. Every Moslem showing
interest in Christian things takes his life in his hands. No protection
can be afforded him against the false charges that begin at once to
multiply. His only safety lies in flight.




XXV. THE MACEDONIAN QUESTION


    MR. G. B. RAVNDAL, until recently United
    States consul at Beirut, Syria, is an intelligent and
    sympathetic witness of the progress of events in that
    part of the Turkish empire. He writes, with special
    reference to the commercial aspects of missionary advance,
    that “the Syria of to-day cannot be compared with the
    Syria of twenty-five years ago. Education is working
    wonders, raising the standard of living, multiplying and
    diversifying the requirements of the people, developing
    the natural resources of the country, and increasing the
    purchasing capacity of the individual. Illiteracy is on
    the wane, independent thought is in the ascendant. We have
    printing-presses, railroads, carriage-roads, bridges,
    postal and telegraph routes. Trade is increasing in volume
    and variety, and the United States is getting a larger
    and larger share of it. Our country, owing primarily
    to the efforts of our missionaries, is near and dear
    to a large portion of the population, not only of this
    country, but of the entire Levant—nay, even of Persia
    and the Sudan. Through our college (at Beirut), with
    its School of Commerce and museums, through the mission
    press, the industrial academy, and the experimental farm,
    missionaries have become ambassadors of American trade,
    and as the foreign commerce of the Levant swells into
    larger proportions—it is yet in its infancy—the United
    States is getting a surer foothold in the near East.”
    He also speaks of his gratification in witnessing the
    increasing introduction of American machinery into Syria,
    such as reaping, threshing, and milling machines, and
    expresses his confidence that “Western Asia will before
    long become a market for our agricultural, irrigation,
    and other machinery, which no manufacturer at home will
    despise or ignore.” He refers to the School of Commerce
    recently established in connection with the American
    College at Beirut, with its students drawn from a widely
    extended region, reaching from Trebizond on the north to
    Khartum on the south, and from Albania in the west to
    Teheran in the east, as an enterprise which is destined
    to “play a leading part in the economics of the Levant.”
    There is a business ring to testimonies like these just
    quoted from men of official position in the East, which
    surely cannot be credited to missionary partiality or
    misjudgment, and as such we are glad to have the privilege
    of presenting them.
                                       —JAMES S. DENNIS, in
                     “Christian Missions and Social Progress.”

The Albanians in Macedonia have been for more than a generation a
source of terror and a tower of strength to the Turkish government.
They number perhaps two million in the country and occupy a region
remote from the capital, and difficult to control. They have never been
fully loyal to the sultan or any other ruler, and, occupying as they do
the fastnesses of the mountains along the western borders of Macedonia,
they have enjoyed unusual liberty. They have been referred to as the
least civilized of the European races. They are warlike by inheritance
and profession, and cling with an intense devotion to their Albanian
tongue.

They claim that they are direct descendants from the ancient Pelasgi
and are proud of their lineage. An Albanian prince told the writer not
long since that he was of the same race that gave Alexander the Great
to the world. They call themselves _Skipeter_ or “the Eagle People.”
The majority of the race have outwardly accepted Mohammedanism but in
most cases this is largely in form only. As the Koran is permitted to
circulate in Turkey only in the Arabic tongue, and as few Albanians are
acquainted with that language, they have little knowledge of Islam, and
perhaps less love for it. Many of them are nominal members of the Greek
Church.

On the other hand, the Turkish government, through the love of the
Albanians for war, has brought many of them into direct service to
the state. Some of the best and bravest officers in the Turkish army
are Albanians. Mohammed Ali Pasha, who reformed Egypt and founded
the present khedival house, was an Albanian. They have risen to the
highest positions of influence and power in the empire, not a few of
them serving in the sultan’s cabinet. This reveals the native strength
of this people, and the reason why the sultan jealously guards the race
in his attempt to hold them true to Mohammedanism and loyal to himself.
Their very strength of character makes them bold and fearless in the
fastnesses of their remote mountain home, and hard to subdue; but when
they declare allegiance to a cause or a person they cannot be diverted
by fear or favor.

This sturdy people with high codes of honor in their dealings with
each other and with strangers number about one-tenth of the Mohammedan
population of the Turkish empire. Until within a few years they have
been regarded as inaccessible to the missionary and to the Christian
worker. Recently mission work in Macedonia has come into contact with
them and a few have embraced Christianity. Nearly twenty years ago a
school for girls was started in Kortcha, one of their chief cities,
conducted by Albanian Christians, and in the Albanian language. Some of
the chief men gladly put their daughters in the school, but were later
compelled by the sultan to withdraw them.

The Albanians constitute one of the vital race problems of Macedonia.
They are eager for modern education and are restless under the
restrictive and oppressive rule of the Porte. If they become, as
a race, members of the Greek Church, as many have already become,
their influence will be cast against the rule of the sultan and in
favor of outside protection. If the Turks can hold them to a servile
Mohammedanism, they will greatly strengthen the power of the throne
at Constantinople. Upon the other hand, if they insist upon a modern
education for their children, and enter upon an impartial investigation
of the merits of Protestant Christianity, there is no standard for
measuring their influences on the other races of Macedonia. Albanians
in large numbers are coming to the United States, and here they seek
education for themselves and plead eagerly for assistance that they may
be able to give greater educational and religious privileges to their
children at home.

This race is but a part of the Macedonian question which has been
agitating Turkey and Europe for the past few years. If the demands
of the European Powers are acceded to, the hold of the sultan upon
Macedonia will be weakened, although not broken. It has been well
known for the last twenty years that, with every weakening of the
sultan’s power, strength has never returned to it. Should there be a
withdrawal of Turkish rule from Macedonia, including Albania, it would
remove all restraint from the Albanians and give them full freedom to
educate their children and to worship God according to the dictates
of their consciences. Under these circumstances few would probably
remain Mohammedans for any length of time. To Turkey these conditions
contain mighty possibilities, nor are they without deep significance
to the entire Moslem world. It may be that we are to-day witnessing a
break in the Moslem ranks that have hitherto presented a solid wall
of opposition to every Christian approach. There is no phase of the
present Turkish question which is more important or significant.

Besides the Albanians, Macedonia has three most discordant national
elements consisting of Turks, Bulgarians, and Greeks. The Bulgarians
are eager for the extension of the Bulgarian principality south to the
sea, while the Greeks desire the extension of the kingdom of Greece
eastward to include that part of Macedonia in which a large number of
Greeks dwell. The Turks represent the government and are strenuously
opposed to both these tendencies, and they express their opposition
in every kind of repressive measure known to the Porte. To this is
added the rivalry and hostile jealousies existing between the Greek
and Bulgarian churches in the country, and the resultant condition of
affairs is about as bad as well can be.

Marauding parties, formed and armed in many instances upon the
Bulgarian side of the border, have penetrated into Macedonia,
terrorizing all classes and clashing with the Turkish troops. These
have operated for several years. The object of these expeditions
apparently was to arouse the attention of the world to the
misgovernment of the country and so secure outside intervention, and
consequent reform. Their purpose has been offset by the lawlessness
of the Turkish soldiers, and between the two the innocent citizen and
peasant are ground almost to powder. There are also Greek bands of
marauders who strike terror to the regions in which they operate.

It is to restore some degree of order and to prevent the country from
running into absolute lawlessness, that the European Powers have
endeavored to unite and secure for Macedonia a systematic and safe
administration. If the Powers succeed in this effort, we may reasonably
hope that the hold of Turkey upon Macedonia will soon begin to break
and that ultimately all that section of Europe will be free of Turkish
rule. The sultan will not yield those rich and fertile provinces of
his empire willingly, but he is powerless to resist the demands of the
combined Powers of Europe.




XXVI. GENERAL POLITICAL SITUATION


    There are no indications of the presence of the “Young
    Turk” secret organization, but there is a growing
    discontent with the present régime. This is caused (1)
    by individual dissatisfaction with injustice, increased
    taxation and harsh military service; (2) by the racial
    ambition of Arabic speaking Moslems who regard the Turk
    as a barbarian and of doubtful orthodoxy, and are restive
    under Turkish rule which allots them few positions, civil
    or military. Many Arabs wish the caliphate assumed by one
    of their race and would bring the capital of Islam near
    if not into Arabia, its cradle. This politico-religious
    aspiration is ascribed to Midhat Pasha and has been
    fostered, since his day, by pamphlets widely scattered
    and by secret societies. (3) Discontent also results from
    impotent rage at the waning political power of Islam
    under Turkish leadership. Moslem supremacy has been lost
    in Mount Lebanon, in most European provinces, in part of
    Asia Minor, in Cyprus, Crete, Egypt, and is now imperilled
    in North Africa. (4) Another cause of discontent is
    realization of the fact that universal corruption is
    sapping the vitality of the empire and dissipating its
    resources. (5) To these causes is added knowledge that
    other lands have secured improved material conditions
    and equable justice without interference with religious
    observances. This embitters by contrast their present
    situation. Emigration, which has taken tens of thousands
    of Christians from Syria, has lately begun to draw from
    the Moslems. The letters of the absent and the influence
    of those who have returned are factors of unrest. That any
    or all of these elements of political ferment will produce
    any revolt is improbable. No leader could expect success
    with an unarmed and poor set of followers nor could he
    unify and harmonize hostile sects.
                      —From “The Mohammedan World of To-day.”

The political situation in Turkey can well be summed up as “A fifteenth
century Oriental government in conflict with modern civilization.” This
condition is aggravated by the existence of European rivalries and
jealousies and Mohammedan fanaticism. The combination of these forces
is hard to analyze and its results even more difficult to forecast.

The first, and in some respects the most evident, difficulty especially
manifest to those who reside in the empire, is the intellectual,
social, and moral upheaval caused by the influence of Christian
civilization upon the people as a whole. New and, to that country,
startling ideas of religious freedom, human rights, and the true
functions of a government, have taken hold upon large numbers out of
every nationality and religion. So long as the government of Turkey
is conducted according to Oriental fifteenth century ideals, it is
inevitable that there must be a conflict, trying both to the government
and to the governed. So long as the people were densely ignorant,
knowing little of the world outside and far less of the principle that
governs civilized people, they made little complaint. As enlightenment
came to them from various sources, it was inevitable that unrest should
also come. Had Turkey been able to adjust herself to the new situation
and move forward in her administrative methods, keeping pace with the
growing intelligence of her subjects, she might have become one of the
strong, compact, and thrifty nations of the East.

She chose otherwise and began early to devise and put into execution
plans for the suppression of general education. At the same time, the
press was throttled by a severe censorship and all who were suspected
of thinking for themselves came under a ban. Turkey, in her feeble way,
attempted to follow the lead of Russia in this respect, and did so
undoubtedly under Russian advice. The failure to protect property has
discouraged the investment of capital. Industries languished and have
almost died out. Inevitably enterprising men would seek to emigrate.
When once outside the country few incline to return so long as present
conditions continue. In fact, the government discourages the return of
any who have been abroad, fearing the new ideas they acquired in Europe
and the United States. At the present time the government practically
forbids the return to Turkey of all who have been in civilized
countries, endeavoring to maintain a wall of seclusion against all
ideas of modern civilization. Turkey calls such people dangerous
characters and throws them into prison as revolutionists.

This dangerous class includes Albanians, Turks, Greeks, Syrians, and
Armenians. In most respects among these are found the most enlightened
people of the country. Some of the educated Turks have obtained their
new ideas from sources within the country, while others have studied in
Europe. Many of them have come into more modern ideas of a government
and its functions, and would gladly see changes made which would bring
Turkey into harmony with Europe. These are called the new Turks, and
are classified roughly together as the “New Turk party.” They are not
revolutionists in the ordinary sense of that word. They find no favor
with the reigning sultan, and are exiled and even executed without
trial. The party, although apparently not organized, is a fact, and the
spirit of reform is spreading among the Turks. Measures to suppress
this movement are generally secret and are seldom reported abroad. A
Turk once told the writer that “when outrages are perpetrated against
the Christians, the whole world lifts up its hands in horror and the
sultan is ordered to cease; but when the poor Turks are the victims,
where is there a voice raised in their defense?”

Naturally the Turkish government fears the Armenians since they have
made such rapid progress in education during the last eighty years.
Since Bulgaria became practically an independent state, Turkey has
tightened its hold upon Armenia. At the same time, the Armenians,
seeing the great freedom and prosperity enjoyed by the Bulgarians,
have cherished dreams of the time when they too might be free. While
all Armenians have at times indulged in such visions, but few have
ever seriously considered the proposition a practicable one. Only the
most rattle-headed of them declare such a plan possible and only such
are advocating revolutionary measures to that end. Armenia (a name not
permitted in Turkey) can hardly be erected into an independent nation,
although it would be impossible to convince Sultan Hamid II of that
fact. He governs as if he expected hourly that Armenia may rise and
demand its freedom, although the Mohammedans are everywhere greatly in
the majority.

There are, however, a considerable number of Armenians who have been
driven to desperation by the injustice and cruelty of the government.
Aware that they are powerless to reform Turkey, they declare their
inability longer to endure. These resort to acts of desperation with
the hope that Europe will become aroused, as it did in the case of
Bulgaria, and interfere in the interests of the oppressed. Small
revolutionary parties called by various names have been organized
in Macedonia, in Armenia, and especially in border countries like
Bulgaria, Russia, and Persia, for the secretly avowed purpose of
compelling the attention and interference of Europe. They have stirred
the Turks to acts of extreme cruelty, but have egregiously failed to
accomplish their purpose.

These internal affairs which disturb and vex the people almost beyond
endurance are allowed to continue, unchecked by European interference,
because the nations of Europe cannot agree to act together, nor can
they trust any one to act for the rest. England’s influence, which
was supreme when the Treaty of Berlin was signed, has been superseded
by Russia, and she in turn has taken, more recently, second place
to Germany. The sultan, most astute of all, is able to set rivalry,
jealousy, and suspicion against suspicion, jealousy and rivalry, and
while they quarrel over methods and precedents, he works his will.
No diplomat is able to cope with the sultan of Turkey, because his
statements cannot be relied upon, while his promises are meaningless.
Every ambassador and minister learns this to his sorrow, but is
powerless to meet the conditions created by it. To call the sovereign
of a state to which he is accredited “a falsifier” would not be
diplomatic, and might strain existing relations, and to meet falsehood
with falsehood is against the principles of representatives of the
Christian nations. While the foreign legations are considering these
problems the sultan continues his own way.

The present unsettled condition in Russia and the defeat of that
country by the Japanese will undoubtedly weaken her influence over the
sultan. The emperor of Germany, while maintaining friendly relations
with Hamid II, does not seem to attempt to restrain him in his acts of
violence against his own subjects. If he would, it is believed by many
that Emperor William might accomplish much in bringing about reform
measures in Turkey, if the other Powers of Europe would permit him to
do so.

Financially Turkey seems to be upon the verge of bankruptcy. Her system
of assessing taxes, paralyzing industry, and her method of often
collecting from the poor taxpayer many times the amount due, have
impoverished the country. The occasional general massacres in different
sections have been terribly destructive to national wealth, striking
directly at its sources. The strained political situation is due in no
small measure to the economic conditions of that country, accompanied
by the unjust administration of the government. If Turkey could afford
her subjects of all classes a safe and just government, it might soon
be one of the most prosperous and thrifty countries in Asia, comparing
favorably with the governments of Europe.

What the future will bring forth for Turkey no one can predict. Some
twelve years ago the writer asked an old and experienced diplomat at
Constantinople what was to be the outcome of the then threatening
conditions in the country. His reply was, “I have studied Turkey from
within and without for thirty years, and have carefully weighed the
diverse forces that are operating in the empire. I have come to one
clear and final conclusion which I am certain will stand the test of
time, and that is that I do not know anything about what the future
will produce here.”

One thing is sure, the methods of government which were successful
there six centuries ago cannot be continued indefinitely. Modern
thought and ideas will not submit in patience and quietness forever
to the oppressive measures of the middle ages. Dawn is breaking and
it is useless for the night to rail at its coming. Intelligent belief
will win in the end, and justice and righteousness must triumph. This
may cost the shedding of blood, but indications do not point that way.
A mighty revolution is already in progress which will accomplish its
purpose, in time, by the simple laws of God wrought out by the lives
and acts of intelligent and righteous men. The forces of reform are
in operation, not only in institutions, but in the hearts and in the
longings, and in the purposes, of men of all classes and races. It
propagates itself as it moves from coast to coast, and from plain to
mountain fastness, gaining in force and depth and breadth with every
decade. Present conditions cannot indefinitely continue. Times may be
worse before they are better, but even greater changes are inevitable
and at no remotely distant day. God is in his heavens and he is guiding
the affairs of the Turkish empire.




XXVII. CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT


    In the Mohammedan dominions of Turkey missionary
    institutions have graduated men who have in many
    instances occupied government positions on account of
    their superior capabilities, in spite of the fact that
    Christian officials are greatly handicapped by Moslem
    prejudices. In the case of the Bulgarian graduates of
    Robert College, it was said in 1902, by a missionary of
    the American Board then residing at Sofia, that “since the
    beginning of the national administration of Bulgaria, in
    1878, there has been no government ministry without one
    at least, and often two or three, Robert College members.
    The present Secretary of the Cabinet, whose ability has
    preserved his position for him during ten years, and under
    eight successive ministries, is one of these men.” The
    judge of the supreme court, besides the mayor of Sofia,
    and many others in diplomatic, judicial, or clerical
    posts, are all Robert College men. The Syrian Protestant
    College at Beirut has graduated men who, as government
    appointees, occupy positions of responsibility, and exert
    no little influence in the administration of political and
    judicial affairs in Syria, especially in the Mount Lebanon
    government. Its medical graduates, moreover, are to be
    found in the military and civil service in almost all
    sections of Asiatic Turkey, and notably under the Egyptian
    administration.
                                          —JAMES S. DENNIS in
                       “Christian Missions and Social Progress.”

    Many causes have combined, many factors are present,
    many influences have turned the hearts of men through
    that empire [Turkey]; but if we ask ourselves what the
    governing and final factor is which has brought about
    the first of the world’s bloodless revolutions, which
    has seen a people divided and dissevered by creed, by
    race, by language, by every conceivable difference which
    can separate the sons and daughters of men, suddenly act
    together—we do ill if we forget that for eighty years the
    American missionaries have been laying the foundations
    and preaching the doctrine which makes free government
    possible.
                                 —TALCOTT WILLIAMS, LL. D.,
                   editor Philadelphia Press, in an address
                   at Brooklyn, N. Y., Oct. 15, 1908.

Late in 1902 a plan for administrative reform in the Adrianople,
Salonica, and Monastir Provinces of European Turkey was published.
These included Macedonia where disorders and atrocities had become
chronic. Under this measure the valis or governors were given new
powers and an inspector general was appointed reporting directly to
the grand vizier. The Powers compelled the addition of a financial
commission representing them, which should examine the budget of the
three vilayets and recommend improvements. With the aid of three
Ottoman inspectors, the commission was to supervise the provincial
finances and in other ways bring relief to the untoward conditions of
the inhabitants. The gendarmerie was put under a foreign officer with
an Italian general in command, and much improved in efficiency.

A three per cent increase in the customs duties provided funds for
securing other reforms. These, however, it must be said, existed
largely upon paper. While the Powers ostensibly had some responsibility
and authority in the administration of affairs in Macedonia, the sultan
was able in ways so well known to himself to thwart their exercise
of it while the discordant elements in Albania and Macedonia made
conditions for all classes more intolerable than ever.

Again, early in 1908, the Powers gave hesitating attention to this
plague-spot of Europe as one united cry of distress arose from all
tongues, the Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian, and Albanian alike. It is
impossible to say which race was the greatest sufferer or which the
freest from oppression. Practically the entire country was in a state
of anarchy and there was none to deliver. On March 13, 1908, the Porte
reluctantly consented to the British proposal that the mandates of
foreign officials in Macedonia be renewed for a period of seven years.
A budget was adopted for the support of the army, the civil list, and
the railway, which threatened a deficit of nearly $4,000,000. With all
these arrangements no party to the transaction was satisfied, except
those European Powers that hoped, in the end, to make political capital
out of Macedonia’s affliction. These entered reluctantly into agreement
as did also the sultan, who saw his personal power in the three
provinces gradually wane; but his former experiences made him quick to
read the signs of the times.

In the meantime the army in those provinces had been reenforced.
Monastir, upon the border of Albania and connected by rail with
Salonica, was made an important military post. The people themselves
had no faith that these measures would assure them of safety of life
and property, while the representatives of the Porte were anxious to
demonstrate that the scheme of the Powers was not calculated to restore
and maintain order. Matters went on from intolerable to worse until
plunder, robbery, brigandage and murder became daily occurrences in
practically all parts of the country. These were the conditions that
prevailed in Macedonia the latter part of July, 1908.

What were some of the general conditions in Turkey which led directly
to the uprising in Macedonia soon after the 20th of July, 1908,
resulting in the revival of the constitution for all Turkey which had
remained inactive since 1877? Sultan Hamid II has been an absolute
ruler. His pride has centered in his complete personal mastery over
every department of government and all officials, both civil and
military. As he advanced in years, he became increasingly suspicious
of every one holding office or occupying a position of influence. He
seemed so morbidly afraid of a popular uprising that any mention of
an Armenian revolution or reference to a constitutional government
or suggestion of a Young or New Turkey party, threw him into a state
of nervous panic. In order to protect his own person, to guard his
administration from corruption by men who thought in terms of modern
government, and to suppress any and all movements toward reform, he
gradually built up about him a cumbersome, cruel and expensive system
of espionage. Every official from the grand vizier at the Porte to the
postmaster in a remote inland village was watched and reported upon.
One official was directed to make secret reports upon a colleague and
all men of wealth and consequent influence, and especially all who
had received a degree of modern education were always under sleepless
surveillance from the watch-dogs of the palace.

No one knows how many of these men were engaged in the secret service,
but there were undoubtedly many thousands. Some drew salaries of large
proportion while others were paid according to the service rendered.
These spies well knew that they too were under observation by others
who had been commissioned to see that they were loyal to their chief.
The gates of the foreign embassies were guarded, and the names of
all Ottoman subjects who entered them were reported to the police.
Everywhere these sleuth-hounds of Yildez were doing their best to
justify their appointment, and, if possible, to secure a rise in salary
or a handsome bonus. It is reported that this large corps of secret
service men were the only officials who received liberal pay and who
got it regularly and in cash.

Through information thus obtained, strange things took place. Of
course there were never any hearings or trials. None were necessary
when trusted spies had reported adversely. Groups of students in the
government schools disappeared and the parents even did not dare ask
a question. Men of wealth found themselves bundled off to Arabia in
poverty, and officials in honor on one day were in exile, if not in
their graves, on the next. The only thing certain about the life of an
influential and intelligent Ottoman subject was his being under strict
surveillance by those who were mainly concerned to satisfy their chief
of their own efficiency.

During recent years the one horror of the sultan has been the “Young
Turks,” which meant Turkish subjects who know about good government
and are eager to see it tried in Turkey. All who were suspected of
harboring such ideas were summarily treated. Many such have been
banished into interior provinces such as Macedonia, Asia Minor,
Armenia and Syria. Some were given minor offices in their place of
banishment, but all have been diligent in promoting their ideas. There
is hardly a town of importance in Turkey to which one or more of these
intelligent, thinking Ottoman subjects has not been exiled and where
they have not propagated their principles of reform as opportunity
offered. This seed-sowing of modern ideas has been broadcast, and the
seed has fallen into rich soil. During these years, secretly and in the
dark, multitudes of Ottoman subjects have been studying the science of
government with the best educated in the empire as instructors. The
lesson has not been the less impressive because secret and the teacher
none the less in earnest because his profession was perilous. Wherever
these exiles went they found the people writhing under injustice.
Excessive taxes were assessed and then collected by extortionate
officials who, in the name of the sultan, carried on a system of public
robbery. Taxes paid in the spring were again demanded in the autumn,
the peasant having no defense in the absence of tax receipts. These
teachers of a possible new order of things did not need to take time
to persuade their hearers that a change was desirable. Restlessness,
approaching a state of sheer desperation, everywhere prevailed. In the
meantime, revolutionary committees or organizations among Armenians and
perhaps other nationalities had identified themselves sympathetically,
if not formally, with the New Turkey party.

Government by espionage and instruction of the masses by banished
reformers have been going on in all parts of Turkey for many years, no
one can say with certainty how many. It was inevitable that a crisis
must come. The additional fact that all public officials, especially
the army, were poorly paid on paper, if at all, brought things to a
pass that seemed to be waiting only for a leader or an occasion to
precipitate concerted action.

Such was the situation in Macedonia the latter part of July, 1908.
The large army, half starved and underpaid, was sent into the country
to put down lawlessness among a people made desperate by prolonged
oppression. Previous experiences had satisfied the soldiers that in
battling with the hardy mountaineers, many of whom were fighting for
their homes, they had little chance of success. Why should they throw
their lives away in a useless conflict with people of their own blood,
and for a sovereign who appeared scarcely grateful. This was indeed
an opportune hour to strike a blow for liberty. It is not yet known
how completely the New Turks—called in Macedonia, the “Committee of
Ottoman Union and Progress”—had organized, but subsequent events show
an excellent degree of cooperation.

In Monastir the army took oath of allegiance to this committee; the
troops in Salonica, Kortcha and other parts of the country followed
in their lead. A few officers who hesitated were summarily shot.
Proclamations in the name of the committee were posted in the leading
cities asking all to join the society. At Kortcha in Albania, for
instance, a time limit was set for joining the movement, after which
all outside were to be regarded as traitors. In all Macedonia there
seemed to be little hesitation. Other proclamations enjoining orderly
conduct were posted, and within five days Macedonia was more quiet and
life and property safer than for twenty years previously.

In the meantime, the leaders were in telegraphic communication with the
sultan at Constantinople. What had taken place was reported to him,
and he was asked to declare a constitutional government without delay.
It was intimated that the army was ready to march on Constantinople
if he refused. He hesitated for a while, but when he learned that the
Albanians were in the forefront of the movement, and that he could not
depend upon the troops, he yielded to a demand he could not resist.
Ferid Pasha, his Albanian grand vizier, was summarily dismissed. Said
Pasha was appointed to succeed him and Kiamil Pasha was placed upon
the Council of Ministers; both men of liberal ideas who had been saved
by Great Britain when there was a price upon their heads. Stormy
debates followed in the palace at Constantinople as to what could be
done to meet the demands of the formidable committee in Macedonia.
Honeyed words and paper promotions had proved unavailing and repeated
telegrams from the front spoke of urgency. At last the sultan yielded
and, on Friday, the 24th of July, issued an irade restoring the
constitution of 1876 that had been suspended since 1877.

The constitution which is now revived was sanctioned by Sultan Hamid
II soon after he came to the throne in 1876. At that time a European
Commission met in Constantinople to suggest methods by which the
sultan might set in order his European provinces. He desired to show
Europe that he was able to work out reforms of his own. He therefore
appointed a well-recognized reformer as grand vizier and proclaimed a
constitution. This provided for a responsible ministry, a senate, a
chamber of deputies, the right of public meeting, freedom of the press,
the appointment of judges for life, compulsory intermediate education,
religious liberty, and a long list of other rights and privileges
belonging to an enlightened and free government. Within two months,
Midhat Pasha, who drafted the constitution, was banished.

An election, however, was held and, in 1877, the Senate and the Chamber
of Deputies met in a Parliament House that had been fitted up by the
sultan in Constantinople. At that time in his speech from the throne,
he repeated his promise for social reforms and a reorganization of the
army and navy. The two houses were discussing this address when war
broke out in Russia. Martial law was proclaimed in May, and in June
parliament was adjourned. Once again that year it was assembled but the
sultan was not pleased with the independence exhibited, so in February,
1878, it was dissolved or “suspended” as he preferred to call it. It
never met again.

This is the constitution to which the thoroughly alarmed sultan turned
as the demand came up from his trusted troops, beloved Albanians and
faithful Moslems in Macedonia, for immediate and effectual reforms.

To this he solemnly swore fidelity in the most sacred way known to
the Moslem, namely, upon the Koran. The Sheik-ul-Islam, the supreme
high priest of the Mohammedan faith, exhibited to the people in
Constantinople the book upon which this oath was taken, and made public
declaration that it is the purpose of the sultan faithfully to carry
out his pledge. He even went further than this and said that it is the
spirit of Islam to give the fullest religious freedom to all subjects
of the empire and to guarantee constitutional justice and liberty. All
this committed the sultan to the constitution far more irrevocably than
he was committed in 1876. It made also the Sheik-ul-Islam witness and
sponsor to the people of the sultan’s promise.

The announcement that a constitutional government was granted was wired
to the impatient leaders in Macedonia and published in the papers in
Constantinople. The result was unparalleled in the history of any
country in any age. All Turkey gave way to a carnival of joy. An order
was issued abolishing the secret service, and freedom of the press was
guaranteed by the constitution. All political prisoners were released
and those in exile were invited back to their homes. Incidentally the
prison doors were thrown wide open and the criminal shared the common
joy of all. The occupation of the censors of the press was gone and
every paper in the empire spread the glad news that a new day had
dawned. New papers started like mushrooms in a night. Representatives
from the committee in Macedonia proceeded to Constantinople and
apparently came to an understanding with the sultan as to the
situation. He was plainly told, it is persistently rumored, that if he
did not appoint as ministers men of their choosing, his only safety
would lie in abdication. The old members of the cabinet, representing
the régime of oppression, disappeared or were imprisoned, and the new
men quietly stepped into their places. Isset Pasha, the much hated
secretary of the sultan, in spite of efforts by the new party to retain
him, succeeded in boarding a British vessel at Constantinople and
escaping to England.

The people of Turkey, with centuries of repressive discipline in the
political school of the empire, were supposed to have lost the faculty
of spontaneous exultation or general demonstration of joy. But impelled
by a sense of liberty never before experienced, the entire population
broke into an outburst of appreciation for the new order of things such
as Turkey had never before witnessed.

The people gathered by thousands and by tens of thousands in the
public squares of their cities to listen to the proclamation of
liberty and the firing of salutes in honor of the occasion. These
crowds were composed of Christians and Moslems, who only a few days
before had seemed to hate each other with deadliest hatred. Now they
clapped their hands and joined their voices in shouting “Long live the
Fatherland,” “Long live the People,” “Long live Liberty,” “Long live
the Constitution.” Christian and Moslem leaders embraced and kissed
one another in public while tears rolled down the cheeks of thousands
as they took part in the festivities. Great assemblies were addressed
by Mohammedan and Christian speakers, all of whom exhorted the people
to unity and the maintenance of order, declaring that religious
distinctions were now done away, as all pledged their allegiance to the
new constitution and to the Ottoman empire. In an immense procession
in Salonica a float was drawn upon which rode a girl dressed as the
Goddess of Liberty. At Constantinople in one of the large Gregorian
churches, the assembly was addressed by both Mohammedans and Christians
and the Moslem band played the Armenian national air. For an Armenian
to have sung this air one month before would have meant exile or death.

In one of the principal mosques of the capital a memorial service for
the Armenians slain in the massacre of 1896 was held in which Moslems
and Christians fraternally joined. This was followed by a similar mass
meeting in an Armenian church in memory of the Mohammedans who had laid
down their lives for the freedom of their country. All united in the
declaration that the massacred Armenians and the Moslems dying in exile
were brothers in their common sacrifice for the freedom of Turkey.

These scenes of spontaneous celebration enacted in the great centers
of population indicated the universal readiness of the people for
the proclamation and their unanimity in the reforms. It is indeed an
uprising of the people for liberty and, by meeting their demands,
the sultan, for the time, has made himself the most popular ruler
sitting upon any throne. The carnival of joy gives hint of what their
disappointment will be should there be any breach of good faith in
securing to them all the privileges granted by the constitution. Not
the least of their joy is in the marvel that this revolution has
been brought about almost without the shedding of blood. A few in
Macedonia who hesitated to join the new party were executed, but in
Constantinople there was no loss of life in completing the transfer
from the old to the new régime.

The masses of Turkey know little of the duties and responsibilities
of a parliament. They are launching out upon an experiment, unknown
and untried. It remains to be seen how they will meet their own
expectations in the measure of self-government which the constitution
grants. There are many able, educated men among the Turks, Armenians,
Greeks, Bulgarians, and Albanians. The question is: Will these, laying
aside all national and religious jealousies, be able to work together
in the creation of a new government, and all under the leadership of
Sultan Hamid? It is also an open question whether the sultan himself,
after a life of absolutism, can adapt himself to the new order and
execute it in a way to insure a sympathetic following and substantial
success.

There is danger that the people may be unreasonable in their demands
and rebel against the collection of taxes adequate for the proper
conduct of the government. Only a beginning has yet been made. Much
remains to be done.

In all the history of Turkey a reform has never been inaugurated with
the same solemnity and religious sanction that attended the recent
declaration of constitutional government. The highest sanction of Islam
has been accorded it, and, so far as we can see, the sultan could not
materially alter his course without bringing himself personally in the
eyes of the people into open conflict with his own religion and the
faith of the great majority of his subjects. It is conceivable that,
if he should find it impossible faithfully to carry out the provisions
of the constitution, he will be asked to step aside and permit his
constitutionally proclaimed successor to fulfil his oath of loyalty.

Under a constitutional government well established and righteously
administered, there are boundless possibilities for the material,
intellectual, political, and moral advance of the empire, so long
regarded as decadent. This can be accomplished only by tireless
labors and great sacrifices upon the part of those who bear the
responsibility. But it can be done if all national and traditional
differences are buried, in the one patriotic purpose to restore the
country to something of its former power and glory, and to weld the
masses of its divergent population into a homogeneous nation.

It is to be sincerely hoped that the European Powers will not interfere
with this endeavor upon the part of the people of Turkey to establish
for themselves a safe and just government. They have the right to a
free hand in working out the problem of government for themselves, so
long as they do not plunge the country into anarchy.

There has never been a time when Western peoples have had a greater
opportunity to aid materially in making stable the new order of
things in the Ottoman empire. Under the Constitution, with compulsory
education and a free press, Turkey will require aid from without in
organizing and establishing schools all over the country, and in the
preparation of a literature of the widest range. These needs are at
once apparent. The colleges in the country should be immediately
enlarged and strengthened that they may be able to meet the demands
that will be made upon them. The entire country is in need of
normal schools to train teachers for educational institutions of
the preparatory grades. Turkey needs and deserves the sympathy and
cooperation of other nations, not by way of interference, but by way of
fraternal assistance and genuine help to the full realization of all
the benefits of a representative and a constitutional government. The
motto which seems to have been adopted by common consent is, “Liberty,
Justice, Equality and Fraternity.” Every friend of constitutional
government can sympathetically join with the people of Turkey in their
honest endeavor to establish a new order for themselves upon these four
corner-stones as their basis of union and mutual well-being.




INDEX


    Aden, 133.
    Adrianople, 33, 173.
    Agriculture, methods, 23, 233;
      products, 23, 24.
    Aintab, 139, 171;
      medical work, 208.
    Albanians, 78, 80, 261;
      work among, 262.
    American Bible Society, 154.
    American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 90, 145, 146.
    American College for Girls, 189.
    Amurath I, 1359-1403, 33.
    Anatolia College, 191, 234.
    Anderson, Sec. Rufus, 123, 171, 183.
    Angell, James B., quotation, 136.
    Arabia, missions in, 132.
    Armenia, traditional history, 65;
      political history, 66;
      population, 67;
      religious history, 68.
    Armenian Church, Evangelical;
      _see_ Evangelical Armenian Church.
    Armenian Church, Gregorian; _see_ Gregorian Church.
    Armenian Evangelical Union, 163.
    Armenians, 65-70;
      tour among, 123-126;
      interest in, 144, 149;
      desire for political freedom, 269.
    Army, organization of, 43.

    Bajazet I, 33.
    Barnum, H. N., 186, 216.
    Barton, George A., quotation, 118.
    Beach, Harlan P., quotation, 180.
    Bebek, boys’ school, 164, 171;
      seminary, 182.
    Beirut, 122, 137;
      medical work, 208;
      press, 199;
      school, 184;
      Syrian Protestant College, 187, 190.
    Bible, Armenian, 150-153, 198;
      publication, 153;
      translations, 199.
    Biblical interest in Turkey, 19.
    Bird, Mr., 123.
    Bithynia Union, 228.
    Black stone of the Kaaba, 96.
    Bliss, Daniel, 187.
    Bliss, Edwin Munsell, quotation, 222.
    British and Foreign Bible Society, 151, 154.
    Bryce, Hon. James, quotation, 196.
    Bulgarians, 80;
      in Macedonia, 263;
      work among, 173.

    Cabinet, Turkish, changes in, 283.
    “Capitulations,” 241.
    Central Turkey College, Aintab, 189.
    Church Missionary Society, 145.
    Cilicia Union, 228.
    Circassians, 80.
    Classical interest in Turkey, 18.
    Colleges, official recognition, 189;
      present need, 286.
    Committee of Ottoman Union and Progress, 279.
    Concessions, 241.
    Constantinople, 137;
      missionary center, 87, 93-97.
    Constitutional government, present problems, 285.
    Constitutional liberty granted, 281.
    Cromer, Lord, quotation, 10, 40, 50, 112.
    Crusades, 54, 59.
    Cyprus, possession by England, 47.

    Darazi, founder of Druses, 55.
    Death penalty for Mohammedan convert, 133, 250.
    Decline of Empire, 15.
    Dennis, James S., quotation, 206, 260, 274.
    De Redcliffe, Sir Stratford, 250, 253.
    Diarbekr, 128, 130, 139.
    Dionysius, 160.
    Disciples of Christ, 145.
    Dodge, Dr. Asa, 207.
    Druses, 55, 78.
    Dunmore, Rev. and Mrs., 130.
    Dwight, H. G. O., tour in Asia Minor, 123-126.
    Dwight, Henry Otis, quotation, 92.

    Edict of Toleration, 1453, 241.
    Education, 106, 181;
      of priests, 106, 159, 160;
      of women, 107, 187;
      Lancasterian schools, 160;
      theological, 176;
      Turkish, 193;
      industrial, 234.
    Emigration, 236.
    England, first treaty relations with Turkey, 34;
      seizure of Cyprus, 47;
      policy in Turkey, 48.
    English taught in schools, 183, 184.
    Erzerum, 127, 139.
    Eski-Zagra, 173.
    Euphrates College, Harpoot, 186, 188, 190, 191, 229.
    Evangelical Armenian Church, 161, 165, 166, 167, 168, 174, 177.

    Fatalism, 210.
    Financial condition, 271.
    First Turkish ambassador, 33.
    Fisk, Pliny, 87, 119, 120, 121, 145, 149.
    Free Church of Scotland, 54.

    Germany, policy in Turkey, 48;
      influence in Turkey, 270.
    Goodell, William, 121, 123, 157, 159, 174, 177, 198, 249.
    Grant, Dr. Asahel, 127, 129, 207.
    Greco-Turkish war, 121, 123.
    Greek Church, 59-62.
    Greeks, work among, 143;
      in Macedonia, 264.
    Gregorian (Armenian) Church, 68-70;
      deterioration, 70, 79, 102, 104;
      jealousy in, 102;
      political organization, 105;
      reform in, 150, 165, 237.

    Hagopos, 163.
    Haig, father of Armenian race, 65.
    Hall of the Holy Garment, 96.
    Hamid II, _see_ Sultan Abdul Hamid II.
    Hamlin, Cyrus, 164, 182, 234.
    Harem, 41.
    Harpoot, 131;
      educational work, 186;
      printing-press, 201.
    Harpoot Evangelical Union, 228, 229,
    “Hatti Sherif of Gul Hane,” granting of religious liberty, 250.
    Health of missionary, 122.
    Hejaz, 133.
    Hepworth, George H., 216;
      quotation, 212.
    Historical interest in Turkey, 17.
    Holmes, Mr., 128.
    Hospitals, self-support in, 209, 227, 228.

    Industrial education, 234.
    Industrial reform, 233.
    Imperial Protestant Charter of 1850, 252.
    Islam, Koran, 35, 201;
      death penalty for change of faith, 133, 250;
      fatalism, 210.

    Jacobites, 57-59.
    Janissaries, 32.
    Jerusalem, 122.
    Jesuit schools, 183.
    Jews, 56, 57;
      revival of interest in, 86;
      work among, 140, 143.

    Kaaba, 95.
    Keith-Falconer Mission in Arabia, 133.
    King, Jonas, 120, 121, 160.
    Koordistan Missionary Society, 229.
    Koords, history, 73;
      character, 74;
      armed by government, 75;
      religion, 76, 78.
    Koran, 201;
      basis of law, 35.

    Lancaster, Joseph, 160.
    Lancasterian schools, 181.
    Lawrence, Edward A., quotation, 14, 64.
    Laws, founded on Koran, 35.

    Macedonia, Turkish rule in, 261, 263;
      uprising in, 264, 276, 279;
      reforms promised, 275;
      Young
    Turk Party in, 279;
      constitution restored, 281.
    Mahomet I, 1413-1421, 33.
    Mahomet II, conqueror of Greek Empire, 33.
    Marash, 172, 188.
    Maronites, 54.
    Martyn, Henry, 124.
    Massacres, 218.
    Mecca, 94.
    Medical missionaries, 207.
    Medina, 207.
    “Memoirs of William Goodell,” quotation, 232.
    Methodist Episcopal Board (U. S.), 146.
    Midhat Pasha, 281.
    Mineral resources, 24.
    Mission policy, 119, 139, 141, 157, 159, 162, 207, 223.
    Missionaries, moral influence of, 142;
      noted, 177;
      contribution to knowledge of country, 115;
      to literature, 199;
      to industry, 233;
      trust in, 216;
      relief work, 218;
      relation to native churches, 173;
      under English protection, 241;
      charges against, 255.
    Missionary interest, awakening of, 86.
    Missions, division of field, 145;
      problems of, 115;
      object of, 108.
    “Mohammedan World of To-day,” quotation, 72, 248, 266.
    Mohammedans, contact with Christianity, 113-115, 119, 238;
      interest in, 144;
      converts, 254, 257;
      religious liberty promised, 250;
      no religious liberty, 255.
    “Multeka,” code of laws, 35.

    Native Church, self-support, 224-227;
      self-propagation, 228.
    New Turk Party, 79, 268, 279.
    Nicholas, Czar, epithet applied to, 15.
    Norton, Thomas H., quotation, 170.
    Nusairiyeh, 53.

    Orchan, 32.
    Orphans, industrial training of, 234.
    Osman, founder of dynasty, 31.

    Palestine, missionaries to, 86.
    Parker, John M., 138.
    Parsons, Levi, 86, 87, 119, 120, 145, 149.
    Pashtimaljian school, 160, 181.
    Patriarch, Greek, 60;
      Gregorian, 69;
      power of, 105.
    Periodical publications, 200.
    Perkins, Mr., 126.
    Persecution of “Evangelicals,” 166.
    Peters, John P., quotation, 156.
    Philippopolis, 173.
    Physicians, native, 208.
    Pomeroy, Dr., 167.
    Population of Turkey, 16.
    “Porte, The,” meaning of, 34.
    Postal system, 26.
    Presbyterian Board of Missions, 146;
      work among Maronites, 54.
    Press, printing, 172, 197;
      freedom guaranteed, 282.
    Priests, Christian, low standard of, 103.
    Privy council, 36.
    Property, right to hold, 244.
    Protestant Charter of 1847, 252.

    Railroads, 24, 25, 47.
    Ramsay, W. M., quotation, 240.
    Reformed Church, 145.
    Reformed (Dutch) Church of America, in Arabia, 133.
    Reforms in Gregorian Church, 237.
    Religious liberty granted, 250, 253.
    “Researches in Armenia,” Smith and Dwight, 123-126.
    Revolutionary parties, 264, 270.
    Riggs, Elias, 198.
    Roadways, 24.
    Robert College, 184, 185, 189, 191.
    Roman Catholics, opposition of, 121, 144, 162.
    Russell, Earl, 255.
    Russia, opposition to missionary work, 182;
      influence in Turkey, 268, 270.
    Russian Bible Society, 150-152.

    St. Gregory the Illuminator, 68.
    St. Paul’s Institute, Tarsus, 189.
    Salonica, 140.
    Samakov, Collegiate and Theological Institute, 187.
    Schauffler, Dr., 143, 182.
    Schneider, Dr., 171.
    Schools, present need of, 286.
    Self-support, hospitals, 209, 227;
      church, 224, 228;
      schools, 226, 228.
    Selim III, 1789-1807, reforms of, 85.
    Seventh Day Adventists, 145.
    Sheik-ul-Islam, 35, 282.
    Size of Territory, 16.
    Smith, Eli, tour in Asia Minor, 123-126.
    Smyrna, 137, 140, 172.
    Spies, government, 227;
      abolished, 282.
    “Sublime Porte,” 34.
    Suliman “the great,” 1520-1566, 34.
    Sultan Adbul Aziz, 255.
    Sultan Abdul Hamid II, succession to throne, 41;
      character, 41, 46, 48, 270;
      absolute power in government, 35, 43;
      in religion, 46, 93, 94, 96;
      foreign relations, 47;
      attempt to subdue Koords, 75;
      system of espionage, 277;
      fear of Young Turks, 278;
      restores constitution to Macedonia, 281.
    Sultan Abdul Medjid, 250, 251;
      grants religious liberty, 253.
    Syrian Church, 57-59.
    Syrian Protestant College, 187, 190.
    Syrians, work among, 121, 144, 173.

    Tamerlane, 32, 33.
    Taxation, system of, 51, 279.
    Telegraphy, 26, 234.
    Territory, population, 16;
      size, 16.
    Theological schools, 190.
    Townsend, Meredith, quotation, 22, 30, 100.
    Transportation, 25.
    “Travels and Researches in Asia Minor,” 138.
    Treaty of Berlin, 256.
    Treaty of Paris, 253.
    Treaty rights, 243.
    Trebizond, 127, 139.
    “Turk,” religious significance, 77.
    Turkey, importance as mission field, 89;
      relations with foreign powers, 241;
      policy of suppression, 268.
    Turkish schools, 193.
    Turkomen, 80.
    Turks, origin, 31, 77;
      character, 79;
      dominance over non-Moslems, 78, 81.

    Unions of native churches, 176.
    United Free Church of Scotland, in Arabia, 133.
    United States, Armenians in, 236.
    United States, relations with Turkish government, 34, 45, 241, 245.

    Vali, power of, 36.
    Vartenes, expelled from church, 165.
    Vilayet, 36.

    Ward, William Hayes, quotation, 148.
    Wheeler, Crosby H., 185, 201, 224.
    Williams, Talcott, quotation, 274.

    Yemen, 133.
    Young Turk Party, 278;
      in Macedonia, 279.

    Zwemer, S. M., quotation, 84.




      *      *      *      *      *      *




Transcriber’s note:

  Illustrations have been moved so they do not break up paragraphs.

  Old or antiquated spellings have been preserved.

  Typographical errors have been silently corrected.

  The original text had double headings for all the chapters. These
    have been reduced to a single heading in this version.

  The cover image is created by the transcriber and is placed in
    the public domain.