Before we look at the Persian children of to-day, let us go back nearly thirteen and a half centuries to the year of our Lord 570, and take a look at two adjoining countries in Europe and two adjoining countries in Asia.

In Western Scotland, St Columb is teaching the people Christianity, and is writing out copy after copy of the Bible, until tradition tells that he copied it out three hundred times.

In England the heathen Saxons are conquering the Midlands and crushing out the Christianity of the Britons.

In Persia there is a Christian Church, but most of the people are Zoroastrians, that is, they belong to the Parsee religion. They worship God and believe in a prophet called Zoroaster, who lived long before the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, and so knew nothing about Him. He seems to have taught his people much that was very good, but their religion has become full of superstitions.

Lastly, we must go to Arabia, where a Muhammadan legend describes a curious scene.A number of Arab women are riding into the town of Mecca. Their animals are weary and very thin and weak, for it is a year of famine. Last of all comes a woman with a crying baby, riding on the thinnest and most miserable looking donkey of all the company. They are nurses from the healthiest part of Arabia, come to find children to take home and nurse, each hoping to get the child of a wealthy man, who will pay her well, and give her handsome presents.

They are not long kept waiting. The babies are brought out, and questioning and bargaining begin. One baby is not popular—the whisper goes round that it is an orphan—there is no father to give presents—the grandfather who is looking for a nurse will surely not do much for it. And so one after another all the women refuse the baby, and the old man begins to despair of success. All the women have found nurslings except one, the woman who rode in last. She, too, has refused the orphan, but now, seeing no hope of a better bargain, rather than have taken her journey for nothing, she tells the old man she has changed her mind, and carries the baby home. And the story runs that the thin weak donkey that could hardly drag itself along as it entered Mecca, ran along so nimbly on the way home that the rest could scarcely keep up with it.

The orphan baby was Muhammad, the founder of the religion called after him Muhammadanism. Some of the details of this story (told by a Muhammadan writer) are probably quite untrue. Little Muhammad’s grandfather was known to be very rich and in a very high position, and if the baby was refused it was probably because he was a sickly child, and would be difficult to rear. However, in due course he grew bigger, and came home to his mother, and after her death lived with his old grandfather, who thought all the world of him.

Mecca was an interesting town to live in, for once a year pilgrims from all parts of Arabia came to the great idol temple, and little Muhammad would see all there was to be seen, for his grandfather kept the keys and superintended everything.

When his grandfather died he went to live with his uncle, who used to take him on business journeys, going through the wide deserts to distant towns with long strings of camels loaded with goods to sell. So the boy grew up a good man of business and saw much of foreign countries and something of foreign religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Parsiism, and he grew discontented with his own country and his own religion.

All the great peoples round worshipped one God. Surely Arabia would be a better and greater country if it did the same. All the great religions had a prophet and a book. The Christians had Jesus Christ and the Gospel, the Jews had Moses and the Law, even the Parsees had Zoroaster and his book the Zend Avesta. Surely what the Arabs needed was a prophet and a book.

Muhammad was not the only person who thought this. There was a group of people, several of whom were relations of him or of his wife, who shared this view. Some of them thought that Moses and the Law would be best for Arabia; but many of them saw that Jesus Christ and the Gospel were what they needed, and most of these in the end became Christians. If Muhammad had joined them, the history of the world from then to now might have been very different. But Muhammad had set his heart on an Arabian prophet and an Arabian book, and the more he thought of it the more sure he felt that this was the real way to unity and greatness for Arabia.

He himself belonged to the family which took the lead in religious matters in Arabia, he had always been made much of, and told he would be a great man; he used to have fits which seemed to him and to others to mark him out as something out of the common; so it is not surprising that he at last came to believe that he was to be the new Arabian prophet who seemed to him to be so badly wanted. His fits began to take the form of visions, and he believed that the words of the longed for book were being revealed to him.

But it was a long time before he came forward publicly, and when he did he was a good deal laughed at, and only a few became his followers. Then he got an invitation to the town of Medina, where he had a number of cousins. The people of Medina were very jealous of Mecca, and all, whether they believed in him or not, joined in giving Muhammad a great welcome.

It was in Medina that Muhammad really founded his religion, and there he became a very great man. But sad to say, as his religion developed all its bad points came out, and Muhammad became a very cruel tyrant and very self-indulgent, excusing himself by saying that God allowed him, because he was a prophet, to do things which were sinful when other people did them.

The people who joined Muhammad’s religion were called Muhammadans or Muslims, and they went everywhere making as many converts as they could, by fair means or foul. They had learnt that there was one God, but they knew nothing of the Bible; they only knew the Quran, the book which Muhammad was revealing, and they knew nothing of the example of Jesus Christ: their only example was Muhammad, who was a murderer.

You may wonder what all this has to do with Persian children. One of the first countries conquered by the Muhammadans was Persia—and the Persian children to-day are themselves Muhammadans.