I have often heard wonder expressed by Christian ministers at the extraordinary success of Bábí missionaries, as contrasted with the almost complete failure of their own. “How is it,” they say, “that the Christian doctrine, the highest and the noblest which the world has ever known, though supported by all the resources of Western civilization, can only count its converts in Muḥammadan lands by twos and threes, while Bábíism can reckon them by thousands?” The answer, to my mind, is plain as the sun at midday. Western Christianity, save in the rarest cases, is more Western than Christian, more racial than religious; and by dallying with doctrines plainly incompatible with the obvious meaning of its Founder’s words, such as the theories of “racial supremacy,” “imperial destiny,” “survival of the fittest,” and the like, grows steadily more rather than less material. Did Christ belong to a “dominant race,” or even to a European or “white race?” . . . I am not arguing that the Christian religion is true, but merely that it is in manifest conflict with several other theories of life which practically regulate the conduct of all States and most individuals in the Western world, a world which, on the whole, judges all things, including religions, mainly by material, or to use the more popular term, “practical,” standards. . . . There is, of course, another factor in the success of the Bábí propagandist, as compared with the Christian missionary, in the conversion of Muḥammadans to his faith: namely, that the former admits, while the latter rejects, the Divine inspiration of the Qur’án and the prophetic function of Muḥammad. The Christian missionary must begin by attacking, explicitly or by implication, both these beliefs; too often forgetting that if (as happens but rarely) he succeeds in destroying them, he destroys with them that recognition of former prophetic dispensations (including the Jewish and the Christian) which Muḥammad and the Qur’án proclaim, and converts his Muslim antagonist not to Christianity, but to Skepticism or Atheism. What, indeed, could be more illogical on the part of Christian missionaries to Muḥammadan lands than to devote much time and labor to the composition of controversial works which endeavor to prove, in one and the same breath, first, that the Qur’án is a lying imposture, and, secondly, that it bears witness to the truth of Christ’s mission, as though any value attached to the testimony of one proved a liar! The Bábí (or Bahá’í) propagandist, on the other hand, admits that Muḥammad was the prophet of God and that the Qur’án is the Word of God, denies nothing but their finality, and does not discredit his own witness when he draws from that source arguments to prove his faith. To the Western observer, however, it is the complete sincerity of the Bábís, their fearless disregard of death and torture undergone for the sake of their religion, their certain conviction as to the truth of their faith, their generally admirable conduct towards mankind and especially towards their fellow-believers,