When I brought him down from the region of vague general statements and insisted on knowing how many cases he had met with in his own personal experience during sixteen years of missionary work, he was constrained to admit that he had know only one: and when I pressed him farther as to the disinterested sincerity of the convert in question his reply was not altogether satisfactory.
The policy of religious non-intervention has not always been practised by the Government.

Soon after the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan in the sixteenth century, the Tsars of Muscovy attempted to convert their new subjects from Mahometanism to Christianity.

The means employed were partly spiritual and partly administrative, but the police-officers seem to have played a more important part than the clergy.

In this way a certain number of Tartars were baptised; but the authorities were obliged to admit that the new converts "shamelessly retain many horrid Tartar customs, and neither hold nor know the Christian faith." When spiritual exhortations failed, the Government ordered its officials to "pacify, imprison, put in irons, and thereby UNTEACH and frighten from the Tartar faith those who, though baptised, do not obey the admonitions of the Metropolitan." These energetic measures proved as ineffectual as the spiritual exhortations; and Catherine II.

adopted a new method, highly characteristic of her system of administration.