"Like a little candle, burning in the night."

At Busrah, Rev. James Cantine began mission work in 1891, and ever since
that time he and others have been ploughing and sowing seed and waiting
for the showers that come before the harvest. It was at Busrah that Kamil
Abd el Messiah, the Moslem convert from Syria, died a witness for Christ.
Have you read the wonderful story of his life? It is full of pathos and
shows how in the heart and life of at least one Moslem the Holy Spirit
made topsy-turvy things straight. There are others like Kamil in Arabia,
but many of them are still following the Master afar off, because they
fear the persecutions of men. At Busrah, there is also a dispensary, and
here too the gospel is sold and preached and lived before the people.

Bahrein, you know, is a group of islands, and it is about six years ago
that the people first saw a missionary. Nearly three-fourths of the
population are pearl-merchants or pearl-fishers. Will you not pray that
they may learn to value the Pearl of Great Price?

A visit any morning in the week to the dispensary at Bahrein, would soon
convince you that here too the Arab world is slowly but surely turning
downside up. Women learn to their delight that they have equal right to
sympathy with men, and they need not wait until the men are helped first.
The Arabs are very ignorant of medicine and their remedies are either
foolish or cruel. To "let out the pain" in rheumatism, they burn the body
with a hot iron. All their ideas are upside down, and very few know on
which side of their body the liver is located. Now when our mission
doctors perform miracles of surgery on the maimed, and miracles of mercy
on the suffering, the result is to prepare their hearts for Christ's
message. To the fanatic Moslem a Christian is "an ignorant unbeliever."
But we may put a parody on Pope's lines and say, in their case: