Frederick J. Bliss spent a great deal of his life living in Syria and Palestine, as his father worked for the Syrian Protestant College. Thus, his knowledge of the religious practices of the people of that area is not merely academic but also based in his own experience. The present volume is the edited and published version of the lectures Bliss presented at Lake Forest College in 1908, sponsored by the Bross Foundation. In these lectures, Bliss describes the religious practices of the two main religions in Syria and Palestine: Christianity and Islam. With regard to Christianity, Bliss discusses the many sects of Christians that inhabit the middle East, and he describes the practices that are unique to each group. Bliss’s depiction of Islam, filtered as it is through his Western, Christian worldview, leaves much to be desired, but his descriptions still provide interesting insights into the practice of Islam in Syria and Palestine at the turn of the twentieth-century.