ingless to one who has never seen or heard. Pain is nothing to one who has never suffered. So also the language of moral judgments is absolutely unintelligible to one who has not learned their meaning from the motions of his own soul. We must conclude then that this law is not earth-made but heavenborn. Man's chiefest dignity is in being placed under this law, and his greatest glory lies in obeying it. All below man are ruled without their knowledge or consent, but man is taken into his Maker's counsels and asked to obey. "Henceforth I call you not servants but friends, for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth."

The sum of our argument is this: Conscience judges actors; reason judges actions. Conscience selects the motive; reason selects the act which will best express that motive. Conscience gives the principle of action; reason applies it. To misapply the law is error; to disobey it is guilt. Reason detects the first; conscience judges the second. The sense of error is never the sense of guilt. The former arises from an examination of consequences; the latter from comparing purpose and motive with the ideal law of action. Both schools are thus seen to be necessary to a complete science of morals. When the intuitionist attempts to construct an à priori code, he falls into the most ludicrous extravagances. When the utilitarian denies that we have the power of moral insight, he reduces morality to the lowest selfishness, and does violence to universal experience. Conscience is absolute in its sphere; but its sphere is only the determination of the true order of the soul, or the relative rank of motives. The end of all action is not to do right, but to do good, either to ourselves or others; but what kind of good we shall do will depend more upon our moral affections than upon our sensitive nature. In physics the mind must constitute its metaphysical data and the laws of formal logic; perception must add the facts. Without these two elements, the internal and external, no science is possible. Science without the fact is void. Science without the law is chaos. So, too, in moral science, there must be the moral pos tulates of conscience, the fixed principles of action, and there must be reason, foresight, experience, to determine their application. Skill and prudence come with the years, but the fixed order of the soul is given as the original datum of action.

ARTICLE III.-THE GOSPEL IN BIBLE LANDS.

Republication of the Gospel in Bible Lands. History of the Missions of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to the Oriental Churches. By RUFUS ANDERSON, D.D., LL.D., late Foreign Secretary of the Board. In 2 vols. Boston: Congregational Publishing Society, 1872. 8vo, pp. xxiv, 426, 532.

THE union of soul and body is typical of the conditions underlying all healthy religious life and all successful propagandism. The soul, we doubt not, has the capacity of separate existence, but not of earthly work and recognized influence, apart from the body. In like manner, piety, though isolated, may be genuine, fervent, growing; yet without Christian institutions it has much less than its normal luster of manifestation, scope of service and power of self-diffusion. Religious history in all ages verifies this statement. Even the incarnate Word of God, while in this world, was "a light shining in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not," a light for which there was no candlestick of ordinances and organization; and after the crucifixion there remained no center or bond of union for the few and scattered disciples, who, but for the reappearance of their risen Lord, would have lapsed speedily into an improved Judaism, and would have left no traces of their better faith and hope in the succeeding generation. But after his resurrection, the eucharist which he evidently renewed at Emmaus, thenceforth never to be suspended, the establishment of baptism as a seal of discipleship, the union of the band of believers as they awaited the ascension-promise, and the recognition of the apostles as official heads, gave to the new religion a body and form, an earthly habitat, a position from which aggressive movements could be made on surrounding unbelief and misbelief, a nursery for the nascent and immature faith of fresh proselytes. From that time onward the Church (which before had existence only in the plan and foreknowledge of its Founder) had a rapid growth, and in its growth soul and

body were equally cared for. The apostles seem never to have sought to multiply sporadic conversions. Wherever they went they gathered churches, ordained elders, and made provision for the stated administration of Christian instruction and worship.

But Christianity might (so far as the ordinary laws of causation are concerned) have lingered long in obscurity and inanition while its body grew, had not God provided for it an already adult body. The soul had left the institutions of Judaism; but its body remained entire, and possessed all the members essential for the new life of the Christian community. The organization of the synagogue hardly needed change to be adapted to the Church; there is no little ground for believ ing that the baptism of proselytes was practised among the Jews of that age; and the eucharist was but the paschal supper with its spiritual significance developed. Wherever the apostles went, the synagogue had preceded them, and either offered them its hospitality, or expelled from its congregation members enough to be the nucleus of the new church, and to perpetuate the form and order of the synagogue in the constitution of that church. Here we may trace one of the providential preparations of the world for the advent of its Redeemer, in the dispersion of the Jews, and the consequent establishment of synagogues in divers and distant lands; for without them the constructive work of the Christian teachers would have been too slow for the spiritual needs of their converts, and large numbers of the flock would have been left to the sole care of the chief Shepherd, with neither under-shepherd nor fold.

It

The modern history of the missionary enterprise is rich in instruction as to every theory and mode of propagandism. has shown that the soul cannot be developed from the body, that a spiritual faith and piety cannot grow out of an institutional religion, nay, that institutions, however extensively received, tend of themselves to die out, unless they represent belief and sentiment. This has been demonstrated by the Roman Catholic missions in both hemispheres. Never have there been more self-devoted men than the Jesuits who first planted the cross in China, in Japan, in Canada, in Paraguay.

They were backed, too, by the entire, virtually limitless resources of the Church in men and treasure. They were eminently wise in their whole policy, both in their conciliatory relations with all descriptions of people, and in securing permanent sites and spheres of operation and influence. They made millions of idolators familiar with the Christian ritual, and reckoned their adherents at least by tens of thousands. But the religion which they taught was little better than fetichism. Salvation was to be ensured by a compliance with certain consecrated forms, and so little importance was attached to a Christian life, that sometimes in China whole companies of priests employed themselves solely in behalf of children exposed by their parents, baptizing them to exorcise the Divine wrath, and then deliberately leaving them to perish, that the grace of baptism might not be forfeited by mortal sin. What traces have they left? In the great Orient there remains scarce a vestige of their toil and sacrifice. On the western continent we can hardly say that the case is otherwise; for the feeble hold which Romanism has on the aborigines of North and South America is no more than what might be expected from the influence of the dominant European races, even had there been no special missionary labors for their express benefit.

On the other hand, it has been seen that the soul has no power of self-diffusion apart from the body. The missionary expeditions of the Quakers, from first to last, would constitute one of the most edifying curiosities of religious history. From time to time earnest Christian men and women of this amiable sect have been moved to carry the gospel message to strange races and savage tribes. Many of these persons have maintained on cardinal points a belief conformed to dogmatic orthodoxy, have been of an eminently fervent and loving spirit, and have manifested the evangelic graces in their most attractive simplicity and beauty. But we know not that they have ever made a convert from heathenism. They certainly have never established a "meeting" outside of Christendom. Even Penn and his associates, though they exerted so powerful an intenerating influence upon the native tribes around them, and certainly wrought among them a superlatively Christian work,

made few or no disciples among the objects of their philanthropic care. What they lacked was the visible tokens and vehicles of spiritual grace. In abjuring forms and ordinances, the Quakers have not only failed of their part in the conversion of the world, but are fast lapsing from their place among the existing denominations of Christians.

The history of organized Protestant missionary operations illustrates the same principle. The first steps, even where wisdom and love have their most desirable combination in the missionary, are depressingly slow and unpromising. The earliest converts are won at a cost and toil that could be justified only by the infinite worth of every single soul, and it is only with the utmost difficulty and by unslumbering vigilance that they can be restrained from apostacy,-nay, in some instances, the losses at the outset have well nigh balanced the gains. But when these initial discouragements have been surmounted, and a church has been established, with its fencing and hallowing ordinances a fold with its walls around and its stores of healthful sustenance within-the word of God has had free course, old converts have been strengthened, new converts have been rapidly multiplied, and the ways of Zion have been thronged. The apparent exceptions to this order of things have been of a kind to prove the rule. Thus, in the Hawaiian Islands the work of evangelization was so rapid as to seem a fresh Pentecost, and we would bate not one jot of the tribute of praise to Him without whom even Paul and Apollos plant and water in vain. Yet, even here we may discern the wonted method of His grace. The missionary band was sufficiently numerous in that small and dense population to be in itself the nucleus of a church, while the abandonment of their previous idolatry left the people without any religious ties or interests which could blind them to the attractive spectacle of that nascent church, or deter them from seeking its shelter and its blessing.

If there be any truth in these considerations, it is perfectly obvious that existing Christian organizations from which the breath of life has been exhaled, furnish a most hopeful point of support for missionary enterprises. Let there remain the stated gathering for worship on the Lord's day, though the worship be but the droning of a liturgy in an unknown tongue,