gelistic mission in Santalia, which, however, seems to have been treated rather as a thing by the way. The church is reminded by these missionaries that too exclusive a devotion to the higher castes is of doubtful evangelical soundness, and that the reaction upon these from the lower classes, if thoroughly evangelized, is not likely to be less powerful for elevation than in the past it has been powerful for degradation. On the whole, the Free Church Deputation seems to have set the Scottish missions in the way of greater evangelical directness of aim, while distinctly maintaining the specific intellectual character, and disposition to seek the most difficult range of work, which is so agreeable to the Scottish genius. The readjustment will be without any of that slashing destructiveness, the fruit of a pure but rather narrow pietism, whose unfortunate working once made the very name of a Deputation a word of fear to many of our American missionaries in India.

The Deputation has considered another important question, and seems to have given a thoroughly sound solution of it. This is the question of Cheap Missions. It takes as the type of these the China Inland Mission. In this, each European agent is paid rather scantily. But as the decided majority of the missionaries are Europeans, the total outlay is large. On the other hand, in the Church of Scotland Mission at Darjeeling, the European missionaries are paid a good deal larger salaries, but each missionary is at the head of a body of twenty or thirty native evangelists. The work is therefore much more effective, and much less expensive. The Deputation accordingly does not recommend any great reduction of salaries, but a large increase of native evangelistic forces.

India is likely to serve in a peculiar measure the purpose of education in missionary intelligence at home. It affords a view of every sort of mission, from the simplest and rudest to the most refined and complicated. And a considerable current of visitors from home is beginning to pour in upon it, in the cooler season of each year, — eminent clergymen, men of letters, members of parliament, and princes of the blood. This may not improve the quality, but it will greatly increase the amount, of English knowledge of India, and there is fortunately in England a vast amount of digested knowledge to correct all crudities.

Dr. Pentecost's visit is generally acknowledged to have been a great benefit and blessing, especially in Calcutta, not only among the English, but among that great number of native gentlemen who know English perfectly. The Viceroy, the Marquis of Lansdowne, and Lady Lansdowne have taken particular pains, by personal attendance and otherwise, to mark their interest in his work. Since 1857 India has enjoyed various viceroys whose names are held in affectionate remembrance by the missionaries, particularly Lord Lawrence and the Marquis of Ripon, the former a Protestant, the latter a Roman Catholic, but both eminent Christian men, whose encouraging influence was felt by all who were laboring for the highest good of India.

The opium traffic, which was introduced to increase the revenues of the Indian government, appears to be recoiling upon it by a large increase of the opium habit in India itself, as well as in Australia. The Divine Nemesis cannot be evaded. But the first great victory has been gained in the House of Commons, and more practical victories are to follow. That Sir Lepel Griffin, who, honoring our nation with a distinction which is surely far beyond our merits, contemns missions and Americans alike, should now shriek out his horror of those who are endeavoring to reduce

the Eastern plague-spot, is altogether according to the fitness of things, although to inquire out the psychological process, by which he discovers their motive to be "selfish vanity," would be too much like essaying to break a butterfly on the wheel. The "Guardian's" dislike of the movement may perhaps be easily enough explained by its sense of religious obligation to oppose whatever Exeter Hall approves, as Hurrell Froude, in his High Church devotion, found it a means of grace in the West Indies to sneer at the negroes whom the Evangelicals befriended. But it does seem rather curious when a secretary of the Church Missionary Society itself apologizes for the traffic, and it is hardly what we should expect when the "Spectator" vigorously defends it, too. The "Christian Union" seems to be equally witty and wise in suggesting that, while suffering that others may not suffer is intelligible and commendable, sinning that others may not sin, as the "Spectator" appears to propose, decidedly breaks all bounds of Christian permissibility. "The Nonconformist conscience," however, within and without the limits of Nonconformity, will doubtless, as of old, go on conquering and to conquer. The late Mr. Brace held that at present the principal seat of Christian excellence in England is in the High Church party. But there seem to be some of its old sins from which it is yet to be purged.

While the Scottish Missions, if not absolutely yet relatively, have been somewhat mitigating their educational standards, the Roman Catholics, as attested by Sir William Hunter, whose statement is fully confirmed by other authorities, have been greatly raising theirs. Their high schools and colleges in India, especially those of the Jesuits, are becoming so numerous, so well appointed, and so well conducted, that the other Protestant missionaries besides the Scottish feel that they are hardly equipped for equal competition. It is highly creditable to the Catholics that they have so thoroughly made up their old delinquencies in this respect. But it will certainly not be greatly creditable to us if, as various missionaries express the apprehension, the higher intelligence of our own converts may, in a generation or two, if appropriate means are not used, pass over to the other side. These warnings are usually a little exaggerated, to make them more effective, but this one is certainly not to be disregarded. There is abundant room for both Christian parties to work in India, while surely each cannot be too well-equipped, above all ought to be amply equipped, for its own domestic needs. It is curious, but in this respect the other missions have done better than the Scotch, which have been arranged rather to work outward than to build up their own Christian communities, so that they find it difficult to obtain a sufficiency of Christian teachers for their own schools, a grievous drawback to missionary efficiency.

It is known how fruitful a field of labor has been found at almost the extreme southern point of the great peninsula, in the district of Tinnevelly, where the converts of the two great Anglican societies now amount to between one and two hundred thousand. The two bishops, Sargent and Caldwell, who have long superintended these two missions, are now both withdrawn, Sargent by death, from the work of the Church Missionary Society; Caldwell, by retirement, from that of the Propagation Society. Both were well known as devoted missionary laborers, and the latter is universally acknowledged to be one of the greatest missionary authorities in India. It is to be presumed that in his leisure he will put his remembrances and judgments of the work of God in India into definite shape.

The Syrian Church of the southwestern kingdom of Travancore, which has been settled there no one knows how many ages, some saying from the fourth century, has been disturbed by an important contest between two bishops, each claiming metropolitan rights over her. Mar Athanasius is decidedly friendly to the reforming influences which have lately been at work in the church; his competitor is for keeping everything as it has been from of old. The High Court of Travancore has finally rendered judgment in favor of the latter, the two Brahmin judges pronouncing for him, the one English judge for Athanasius. In our ignorance of the law, we are bound to presume the decision a just one, but as Protestants we should have been well pleased if it had turned the other way. We do not understand, however, that even the successful metropolitan is actively hostile to the Protestants (at least it is not so stated), but rather that he is somewhat stolidly conservative of old usages and superstitions. The church has been wont to open her pulpits freely to both the Episcopalian and the Congregational missionaries of Travancore. Having been for ten, perhaps for fifteen centuries, a feebly burning lamp in the densest darkness, she is glad to rest down on the fundamentals of the faith. And having, as Syrian, separated from the Catholic Church as early as the fifth century, she, like the Coptic Church of Egypt, keeps much of the consciousness of that time, when the hierarchical distinctions had long been fully established, but Christians had not yet forgotten that, as St. Augustine and St. Jerome both say, it is not divine necessity, but ecclesiastical practice, on which their validity depends. We have seen the statement that several of the most vigorous reformers of Hinduism, in a monotheistic and ethical direction, have been brought up on the confines of this church. If this statement is true (and it ought to be either confirmed or confuted), it would show that the Syrian Church, semi-torpid as she may have seemed, has nevertheless, by the very force of her belief, sent out vigorous pulsations into the heathen mass, which may perhaps be dimly discernible even now. It is to be presumed, also, that some of the supposed parallelisms to the gospels in Hinduism and Buddhism (vague at best) have been communicated from this Christianity of the Western coast, especially as the Buddhist myths did not receive their present form until five or six hundred years after Christ. This ancient church ought to be still as much an object of interest and prayer to us as it was to Claudius Buchanan ninety years ago. The desolating policy of Portugal and Rome has sadly crushed and quenched it, nec tamen consumebatur.

Bombay is widely distinct in character from either Calcutta or Madras. Of course it shared with the whole western coast in the unsettling influences resulting from the impact of the Portuguese power four centuries ago. It has still a wonderfully stirring and varied population, and an inspiriting situation on its island, several miles out from the mainland. "Thy towers, Bombay, gleam bright, they say, Across the dark blue sea,"

sings Reginald Heber, in the hope of soon meeting there his wife and children. A strongly differentiating influence is found here in the Parsees, that remnant of Zoroastrian Persians who fled hither long since from Moslem persecution, and whose energy of temperament, monotheistic belief, hatred of idolatry, high ethical code, comparative freedom from superstitious restrictions, respect for their women, who are well

educated, and wealth resulting from their devotion to commerce, render them helpful to progress, although the very nearness of their creed to ours has left them but little inclined to become Christians. On the other hand, for some unexplained cause, the British officials of the Bombay Presidency have been (and perhaps still are) peculiarly disposed to unbelief, and coldly averse to Christian effort. This perhaps is one reason why various philanthropic enterprises, among them those of our countrywoman Mrs. Brainerd-Ryder, though avowedly undertaken with a Christian intent and prosecuted with a Christian spirit, are in form neutral. One of the most important of these is a sort of technological school for women, the president of whose trustees is the eminent Brahmin, Chief Justice E. K. Telang, while on its advisory board there are associated the Lord Bishop of Bombay, Bishop Thoburn of our own Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Vicar-General of the Jesuits.

How singularly astray those are who speak of modern Hinduism as if it were a religion which could be treated with respect, like Parsism, like Islam on its theistic or Buddhism on its ethical side, is shown in the agitation caused by the recently enacted and timidly moderate bill raising the age of conjugal consent from ten to twelve. The abominations and atrocities of the marriage system of India are sickening to read and impossible to relate. Yet this bill, which competent authorities declare to be by no means what the actual physical temperament of the Indian population seems to admit, and indeed to require, awakened the most frantic opposition among the Hindus, culminating in a vast expiatory or deprecatory pilgrimage, attended by two or three hundred thousand suppliants, who interceded with piteous laments with the dreadful goddess Kali to avert this blow, which they declared would be mortal to their religion. Kali, the wife of Siva the Destroyer, the goddess whose tongue, thrust out till it touches her girdle, seems to be dripping with the blood of her enemies, and whose necklace of human skulls depends from her neck in long festoons. is the worthy object of such a devotion, the genuine Madonna of such a religion.

Those Americans who are so much disturbed because the Roman Catholics enjoy full political rights among us may (if it is in them) learn equity and common sense from the magnanimous courage with which the British government behaves towards the Mohammedans of India. These have a creed which does not, like Roman Catholicism, simply advance spiritual claims hard to reconcile with the independence of the civil power, but which really knows no distinction between the two. The extravagant pretensions of Italian canonists, most of which are confessed to be no certain part of the faith, express by analogy the very substance of Mohammedan belief. Islam allows no excuse to its adherents for rendering allegiance to an "infidel," except an absolute incapability of evading submission. And as India was for centuries a Moslem dominion, the succession of a Christian government to authority has caused the keenest disturbances of conscience, in the minds of the true believers, as to whether it was lawful to pay tribute to the British Cæsar or not. This has been a theme of anxious and protracted discussions, which have hardly been brought to a definitive issue even by reassuring decisions from Arabia. But England, which has not undertaken to check the full- · est ventilation of the question, puts away from her, with equal wisdom and justice, all consideration of the question how far the speculative and abstract principles of Mohammedan religion agree or disagree with the

practical citizenship of her Moslem subjects. She knows that, with the great mass of men, healthy human interests, in the end and in the main, must and should determine the measure of their attachment to an actual government which shows that it has no desire to persecute their essential religion. Her policy is founded upon this large confidence, and the result does not put her to shame. Indeed, there are able Englishmen, thoroughly acquainted with the country, who urgently counsel her to throw the main weight of responsibility for its administration, so far as it rests on the natives of India, not upon the moral slackness of Brahminism, but upon the higher intelligence and more developed conscientiousness of Mohammedanism. England has no committees lying in wait, in Bombay or Calcutta, to devise invidious reasons for refusing honors to the dead, or to urge that the living shall be excluded from civil trusts for which they are found worthy until they shall consent to take oaths forswearing their spiritual allegiance to the Ottoman Caliph, or the tribe of Koreish. She only inquires whether they are in fact men that are rendering, and are likely to render, faithful service to the Empress of India. She respects every man's conscience, makes due concessions to his practical scruples, modifies the details of her policy according to the facts that she finds, and therefore is able to advance farther and farther, with ever-growing popular assent, the banners of a rational and essentially Christian rule. As the "Indian Witness," Bishop Thoburn's organ, says, it is indeed impossible to say that inward forces may not even yet burst forth and overwhelm all the formations of a better civilization. But there is good hope that this will not be, and the best guaranty that it shall not be is to be found in the calm wisdom and large equity of the English administration in India in its present form. Charles C. Starbuck.

ANDOVER.

(To be continued.)

NOTES FROM ENGLAND.

THE great event of the last few weeks has most undoubtedly been the announcement made by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in bringing in his annual Budget, that after 1st September next the government would give a grant to elementary schools in lieu of the school fees now payable, and so would initiate Free Education. By many this is taken as a sign of an approaching dissolution of Parliament: the government, it is said, will certainly appeal to the country before another Budget. But, as under our constitutional Septennial Act a government can decide on a general election at any time before the seven years of Parliament have run out, it is the usual practice for the government in power to suddenly choose a time suitable to themselves, and to give but little warning to friends or foes. So, now, it is the unexpected in this case that is most likely to occur.

As to Free Education itself, it is generally approved except by "those stern and unbending Tories," now only a small portion of the Conservative party, who retain the opinions which they held twenty years ago, and to whom anything that can be called on any pretext socialistic is an