Zalt of the important town Taif, two days from Mecca, who was at the same time a renowned poet. These men naturally met with more or less sympathy from the intelligent portion of their countrymen, and were in fact a small sect of Deists, distinguished by the appellation of 'Hanifites,' i.e. Separatists, Dissenters, Nonconformists, Protestants, on account of their having turned away and separated from the national Polytheism and professing only the one true God.¹ This step of separation and turning away from idols to God, being similar to what Abraham did in his days, they also professed that they were holding 'the Faith or Religion of Abraham.' One of these Nonconformists was the son of an aunt of Mohammed; and two others were near relatives of his wife Khadija. Is it surprising that a reflective mind like Mohammed's should be attracted by the more enlightened religious views of influential and intelligent men, so closely related to him? May we not go still further than this? It was, we are informed, Mohammed's custom during the hottest season of the year to retire to that very Mount Hira where the zealous Hanif Zeid lived in banishment for many years. There he may perhaps have enjoyed many an instructive interview with this persecuted but steadfast reformer, and have received from him much of that light on religious matters which,

¹ The transient assumption of a similar name by a number of Turks who were disposed to break loose from orthodox Islamism, became the direct cause of the notorious violent interference of the Turkish Government with the Protestant missions in Constantinople, in the year 1864. Rumours were then spreading that 30,000 or 70,000 or 120,000 Turks had become Protestants and were petitioning the Government to hand over to them one of the mosques for their own separate worship. We, the Missionaries of several Societies, were astonished at those rumours, because we had no connection with, nor even knowledge of, a Protestant movement of anything like those dimensions. The Government nevertheless suspected us of being at the bottom of the movement, and perhaps not unnaturally, on account of the name mixed up with it. The Sublime Porte, wishing to stop the movement and silence the rumours, determined to close and seal up all the offices of the different Protestant Missionary Societies then at work in Constantinople. A long correspondence ensued between the English and the Turkish Governments. The end of this was, that we Missionaries were restricted in our work to mere private intercourse with individual Turks, and enjoined to avoid anything the least calculated to draw public attention upon us. The rumoured existence of so widespread a reputedly Protestant movement long remained an unsolved mystery to us.

A number of years later, when on a Missionary tour in Western Turkey, I was requested by some Albanians to assist them in procuring the recall of one of their

after the master's death, he gave out as having been derived direct from heaven, through an angel specially sent to him by the Almighty. As a matter of fact and history we find Mohammed glory in the appellation of 'Hanifite' and openly declare that his doctrine is nothing but the ancient 'Faith or Religion of Abraham.'

The very idea of some one becoming 'the prophet of his country,' that is, specially of Arabia, does not seem to have been originated by Mohammed, but to have been extensively entertained by the Hanifite sect. For it is expressly recorded by El Zobair, that Omaia, the celebrated poet of Taif, himself a Hanifite, 'had a desire to be chosen to the prophetic office, because he had read in the Sacred Books that a prophet was to rise up amongst the Arabs; and it was believed that he might himself be that prophet. When Mohammed had received his mission, people said to Omaia, "This is he of whom thou didst speak, and whom thou didst expect." But he envied him and said, " I had hoped to be chosen myself."'

It must therefore be accepted as an established fact of history that the religious condition of Arabia, about the age of Mohammed, was such that no new supernatural revelation, nor even uncommon originality of mind, was required

friends, a native Bey, who had been banished to a fortress in Syria, ostensibly on the charge of having had a share, at Constantinople, in an attempt to place Murad Effendi on the throne, but in reality, they affirmed, because he had become a 'Protestant.' On closer inquiry I found that this Bey had nothing whatever to do with our Christian Protestantism, but that in fact he was a kind of Protestant Mussulman, repudiating traditional Mohammedanism, as the Protestant Christians had repudiated Roman Catholicism. There were thousands of Mohammedans in those parts, generally called Pektashis, but, as it would seem, occasionally also Protestants, who were described to me as men abstaining from the Ramadan fast and the five daily prayers, but retaining the Mussulman form of a deistic belief in God.

Now if the many thousands of rumoured Protestants in Constantinople who, without any desire to embrace historical Protestantism, wished to occupy a position within Islam, corresponding to that of Protestants within Christendom; the alarm of the Porte at those rumours and the fact that the whole movement was kept apart and concealed from the Protestant Missionaries, became equally intelligible. It is evident that in name and in religion these Mussulman Protestants of Turkey closely resembled the ancient Hanifites of Arabia. Their movement was virtually an attempted return to pre-Islamic Hanifism, which latter had itself been the protoplast from which historic Islamism developed itself.