in whose favour the result is, if we compare the success of Muhammad and the success of Christ, both taken simply in their character of founders and propagators of a religion, independent of worldly means and power: the one, after thirteen years of labour, could count about one hundred and eighty converts, including both men and women; and the other, after three years of labour, at least five hundred converted men, besides the women.

After this short period the proportion in the respective spread of Christianity and Islam changed; but this change was effected by means proving, no doubt, that the Muslims were daring and successful warriors, but by no means that their religion, as such, has more power to subdue the hearts of men than the religion of Christ.

For three hundred years after the death of Christ the religion which He had founded was fiercely persecuted, first by the unbelieving Jews, and afterwards by the formidable power of the heathen empire of Rome. This vast empire comprised almost the whole of the then known world; its emperors' sway extended from the British Isles to India, and from Scandinavia to the Sahara of Africa. In this mighty empire the Christian religion was prohibited, and consequently its progress opposed by the most formidable worldly power then in existence. Church historians record ten sanguinary persecutions, instituted by the Roman Government against all who

professed their faith in Christ; yet in spite of all this opposition and all these persecutions, during which thousands of Christians, old and young men and women, died a martyr's death, Christianity spread far and wide; and it often happened that the patience, the fervent prayers, the heroic courage and triumphal joys of these martyrs, in the face of death, were the means of converting even their heathen executioners, so that it became a common saying among the Christians, that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church. The Christians' faith and patience proved stronger than all the worldly power of the Roman empire. After three centuries of oppression and persecution, Christianity, without once stooping to take up the sword of rebellion, or opposing force by force, had spread so irresistibly by its own inherent power, that thousands of Christians were found even in the legions of the Roman army, or in the palaces of governors; and their number everywhere had so multiplied that when the first emperor, Constantine, the builder of Stambul, became a Christian, he found that the professors of the hitherto persecuted faith were a more powerful support than the heathen. There can be no doubt that at the end of those persecutions, or at the beginning of Constantine's reign, the Christians in the Roman empire amounted to several millions,¹ and according to the most