effected; I firmly believe they are good men working for the sake of a good cause. I much suspect

that those who have abused or sneered at them have generally been such as were not very anxious to find the natives moral and intelligible beings. They forget, or will not remember, that human sacrifice and the power of an idolatrous priesthood; a system of profligacy unparalleled in any other part of the world; infanticide, a consequence of that system; bloody wars, where the conquerors - spared neither women nor children; that all these things have been abolished; and that dishonesty, intemperance, and licentiousness have been greatly reduced by the introduction of Christianity. In a voyager to forget these things is a base ingratitude; for, should he chance to be at the point of shipwreck on some unknown coast, he will most devoutly pray that the lesson of the missionary may have extended thus far." "The lesson of the missionary is the enchanter's wand."

After Rev. William Robertson, of Edinburgh, had made an address on missions, a man accosting him said, "I was captain of the Ruby, that bore Bishop Sterling to Tierra del Fuego, and it was Bishop Sterling's reports of the work there that made Charles Darwin a convert to missions. There, where Allen Gardiner found the most debased savages, a society is now organized to rescue shipwrecked mariners."

We reluctantly bring to a close this brief survey

of the fruits of missions. Where the field is the world, it is impossible to bring even one blade from all its various harvests to show a specimen of what the seed of the kingdom yields. We have culled here and there what suffices to exhibit the proofs that in no part of the world have such fruits been lacking as prove that it is God's husbandry. In the islands of the sea, the Fiji and Hawaiian groups, Tahiti, Aneityum, and in the South Seas generally; in the most ancient and colossal kingdoms, like Turkey, China, and India, where the most gigantic and stubborn growths of evil were found, and deep-rooted as the ages could make them; where an iron caste system and the imprisoning law of zenana life and harem seclusion made all work seemingly fruitless; again, among comparatively degraded and low caste tribes and peoples, like the Siamese, Burmese, and Karens; even where the "habitations of cruelty" seemed to have their stronghold, as in Malabar and Calabar; where the people seemed, as Charles Kingsley thought, meant to show that it was possible to sink too low for even the Gospel to reach them, like the Australian aborigines, or the Maoris of New Zealand, or the Fuegians; everywhere, among high and low, the Gospel has been the same power and wisdom of God to salvation.

And now what is the grand conclusion? God has not only fulfilled His promise to His missionary band, but His royal challenge is, in the very

successes of a century, thundering in our ears : "Go ye into all the world-preach the Gospel to every creature"-in every part of the field which is the world sow the good seed of the kingdom. And the fruit of the handful of grain shall yet shake like the forests of Lebanon.

VII.

THE DIVINE CHALLENGE OF MISSIONS.

MONG the attractions of the famous

museum at Marseilles, the foremost is the great painting by Auguste Barthélemy Glaize, of Montpellier, which is known as LE PILORI. It fills the entire end of the saloon, and is one of the most suggestive paintings in all France. Theophilus Gautier has described it in language scarcely less artistic than the picture.

Occupying the central place in this group, is the figure of the Saviour, in whose stead Barrabas was preferred; Jesus, who was scourged, bound to a pillar, spit upon, crowned with thorns, and hung upon the cross of slaves. Behind Him an angel unrolls a little scroll, on which we read: "Father forgive them; for they know not what they do."

At the bottom of the scaffold are four huge allegorical figures, symbolizing Misery, Ignorance, Violence, and Hypocrisy. These figures, placed back to back, and arranged in two groups like those of the tombs of the Medici, are a monumental and Michael-Angelesque combination of sculpture-like forms.

Misery is a dismal looking female, wrinkled and ghastly, from whose dry breast an infant is vainly seeking to suck nourishment. Ignorance sinks beneath his flabby flesh in a careless attitude, and makes to appear conspicuous his shallow skull crowned with hairy ass's ears, like the head of King Midas or of Bottom. Violence swells his bloated muscles, contracts his knotted sinews, arches his athletic back, with the stolid indifference of a murderer or hangman. The neck of a bull joins his huge shoulders to a bestial head which lacks brain. Hypocrisy holds a painted mask, with which to conceal at will her livid visage, and the feet, which fold beneath her, end in the claws of a demon. These four monsters, are they not the persecutors of these great men, and is not their proper place at the base of the pillory?

We see standing on the right of the central figure, Christ, Socrates holding the cup of hemlock and pointing heavenward; beyond him Æsop the fabulist, who was made a slave, and hurled from the rock, Hyampea, by the angry Delphian priests, in spite of the divine wisdom that dwelt in his distorted frame; still further on, the beautiful and learned Hypatia, whom fanatical ecclesiastics, becoming in their turn persecutors, dragged from her chariot, tore in pieces, and whose palpitating members were drawn through the streets of Alexandria and burned. Beyond her, Kepler, who discovered the laws of the celestial mechanism,