I shall be asked if the Mohammedans do not believe in one God, and the same God as the Christian; and if that does not make it a religion, and very near that of Christians. Yes, they do; and so do the devils. That is what Mohammedanism is, the religion of devils. Most of the Turkish conversation consists of oaths and smut. I do not mean among the common people--theirs is nothing else--but of the educated upper classes, their scholars, teachers, governors, and priests. I came in contact with them for years, and I hated to listen to them, their talk was so full of cursing and filth. You never see the fruits of the spirit in them; only the fruits of the flesh. They do not understand what spiritual life is; with them all is sense,--eating and drinking, finery and lust,--lust above all, everywhere and always, like cattle. They seem never able to forget sex and its uses. Some people think the climate makes the Turks lazy; it is enough on that point to say that Constantinople is almost exactly in the same latitude as New York, and Smyrna as St. Louis. The Turkish climate is a temperate and salubrious one, with no greater extremes of temperature than the United States; not tropical or enervating. Nor is it their race that makes the Turks lazy; they were not so at the outset. It is their religion and the habits it breeds. Their minds and bodies are enervated by the unwholesome nervous excitation of lust, their energies further sapped by a falsehood that leaves no room for aspiration, their vanity as a military caste in not working takes all the spirit of manly enterprise out of them. If the climate enervates the Turks, why does it not the Christians? In the very same cities you find the Christians rich, enterprising, full of energy; the Turks poor, ignorant, unambitious, and lazy. The religion makes all the difference. Christianity teaches purity, sympathy, and industry; Mohammedanism teaches impurity, hate, and sloth. The pure life of the Christian conserves all the energies; the hopes of Christianity give vigor and endurance. The promise of each for the future gives the clue to the history of each; the Christian heaven of unity with God, the Mohammedan heaven of a lot of street dogs and sluts.