230 REV. G. E. WHITE, ON THE SHIA TURKS. 
his and if he sins he is not to blame. There is consequently no 
adequate sense of sin or responsibility. Sin is little more than 
misfortune, and the act which elicits dire penalties might have 
been slighted over if the ruler had been looking somewhere 
else just then, or had happened to be in a different mood. 
Certainly there must be some atonement for sin, if only the 
guilty conscience could find the acceptable sacrifice, the 
mediator whose intercession cannot be refused. For conscience 
works, even though it has not its legitimate basis to work upon 
in an adequate sense of moral responsibility. 
If a fatalistic creed minimizes moral responsibility, Slda 
belief in the transmigration of souls strikes at a true sense of 
personality. They say that God created man and entered into 
him with the human spirit. At death the spirit comes out. If 
the man has forgotten God, ignored worship, has been and done 
evil, used bad language, and so on through the category he may 
be reborn an animal, he deserves to be. On the contrary a noble 
animal, like a fine horse, may be the present abode of some 
good man. Shias proceed to confuse the personality of men 
whom they hold saints. They affirm that He who was revealed 
to Christians as Jesus was revealed to them as Ali. That is, the 
same person or principle appeared in two incarnations. One 
must not, therefore, give too much weight to their professions of 
reverence for Jesus and His Gospel or to their offering of prayers 
in His name. 
Shias claim to be very near Christians, so near that less than 
the thickness of an onion skin separates the followers of Ali 
from those of the Kazarene. In one respect they show 
remarkable confidence in Christians. One of the regular 
social customs of Mohammedanism is the use of the veil, which 
every woman must wear in the presence of any men except the 
members of her own immediate family. This requirement 
means that no man can trust any woman, and no woman trusts 
any man. But Shia women, who are said to eat at table with, 
and not after, their husbands, do not wear the veil in the 
presence of Christian men, but meet them freely and with open 
faces. And Shias like Christians are said to make the sign 
of the cross on the top of every loaf of bread before it is 
baked. 
This last custom is ofter urged, along with other indications, 
as proving that this peculiar people are apostate Christians in 
origin. The supposition is that their forefathers were 
Christians, who, in some time of agony when the crescent and 
the sword of Islam were in the ascendant, yielded a formal 
