those years there was a denominational increase. Perhaps the decrease of 1825 (the year of the panic) was caused by the West India Mission being kept in abeyance! "When Moses held up his hand Israel prevailed: and when he let down his hand, Amalek prevailed."

But instead of taking certain years, and moving backwards or forwards as the establishment of a theory may require, let us extend the period of our observation over decades, (and in so doing we will take the Secretary's own tables), a course which, in my humble opinion, is more likely to lead us to a correct conclusion. Beginning, then, with the fifth decade of our denominational existence, i.e., from 1810 to 1820, we find that during this period our Foreign Missionary Society was established. The average increase of the denomination was 235. During the sixth1820 to 1830-the Mission to the West Indies was commenced, and the average increase 320. During the seventh1830 to 1840-the staff of missionaries was unusually large, and the average increase was 404. During the eighth1840 to 1850-the China Mission was established, and the average increase 337. Taking, therefore, these four decades, during which strenuous exertions were made to send the Gospel to the heathen, our average increase was 324, as against 107 in the other six decades of our denominational history. Again, if we extend our observation and take a survey, not of ten, but of twenty-five years, the result is equally remarkable. Take, for example, the third twenty-five years, during which the foreign missionary spirit was at its height among our home churches, and during which, if at any period, the denomination exerted itself beyond its strength to send the gospel to the heathen-sending out, as it did, thirty-eight missionaries: viz., twenty-nine to the East Indies, six to the West, and three to China, and what is the result? Why, during this very period our average increase was 410, as against 62 in the first twenty-five years, 180 in the second, and 126 in the fourth, or greater than during the whole of the other seventy-five years of our denominational existence. ting, therefore, the histories of the denomination and of the Foreign Mission side by side, the lesson I read isnot the one suggested by the secretary, but this-that in proportion as the de

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nomination has exerted itself to send the gospel to the heathen, in like proportion has it been prosperous at home; and the inference I draw is, that if as a denomination we would renounce the scepticism, the bickerings, the depreciation, which have of late years unhappily existed amongst us; if we would cultivate the faith, the prayerfulness, the self-sacrificing love exhibited by the fathers of the Mission; if we would act on the noble principle of the immortal Carey-attempt great things for God; expect great things from God; if we would display a little more of the "soldier's spirit, the chivalry, the dash, the effervescing enthusiasm," the want of which is suggested as one of our conspicuous faults; if we would do this, not only would our Foreign Mission be relieved and strengthened, but the reflex influence would be seen in the renewed vigour and prosperity of our home churches, 66 The liberal soul shall be made fat." Apparent exceptions there are of course; but as a rule those ministers and churches have been the most prosperous at home that have exerted themselves most to send the gospel to the heathen. Of the accuracy of this remark the secretary's own church is a conspicuous example. If, therefore, there are signs of weakness and decay amongst us as a denomination, my opinion is, that the cause is to be traced, not to those who have exerted themselves most, but to those who have exerted themselves least, to spread the gospel amongst the heathen. Whether there have been any ministers or churches who have so laboured, and prayed, and given of their substance, on behalf of foreign missions, that it has "induced weakness, and decay, and difficulty," it is not for me to say, but I never heard of any, and consequently infer that such cases are exceedingly rare. Certainly a confession of this character will not come from those who have the greatest cause to make it. The indolent and not the industrious, the niggardly and not the liberal, the fearful and not the courageous, the carnal and not the spiritual, are the men who complain of having worked beyond their strength. Instead, therefore, of entertaining the idea for a single moment, that the "affairs of our Foreign Missionary Society, in certain years, have caused to any extent the decrease of the denomination at home," let us aspire after greater faith, greater liberality, and greater heroism in connection with the

salvation of the heathen, and the result shall be, not weakness and difficulty, but strength and prosperity amongst our home churches.

Touching this subject, will you permit me to conclude with an extract from the "Sword and Trowel" for June, 1870, and which is in reply to a minister who thinks his people will be strained and impoverished by numerous foreign appeals for help, and who deems it wiser to "shut the door against all outsiders and look at home ?"

"Nonsense, brother! Let your people give till they get into the habit of it. It does not injure bees to have their honey taken from them; they only set to work and make the more. If the sheep are sheared, it is no trouble to them, for another and cleaner coat is sure to grow. It does not hurt cows to milk them; let them be milked dry, they will give the more next time. Nor is there anything lost by dipping a spring dry; it will fill again with water even more fresh and sweet than the first. If we do not clear out the old mercies they will grow musty, and will prevent the new ones from being sweet when they come. Old misers and covetous people dry up and die, having known only old and stale blessings; they never, by parting with the old, prepared the way for God to replenish, refresh, and bless them as He does the benevolent with new manifestations of His faithfulness.

Moreover, brother, those who try to reserve their strength for home work usually grow weaker and weaker. The heart would not be strengthened if it were to store up the blood, but by sending it forth as it comes in, it abides in a healthy condition. There is that scattereth and

yet increaseth.' Generosity is economy. Selfishness is not thrifty."

Believe me, yours sincerely,
W. HILL.

Barton Fabis, Sept. 7, 1870.

THE BIBLE IN ROME. From the "Monthly Reporter of the British and Foreign Bible Society." It is with no ordinary joyfulness that the committee make the above announcement. Strange it is that in a few weeks after the formal declaration of Papal infallibility, with a solemn anathema against all who withhold assent from the blasphemous dogma, the Pope should find himself stripped of his temporal soverignty, and the territory over which he ruled thrown open to the long

excluded Bible. In anticipation of the change that has occurred, the committee had sent directions, many weeks since, to their agent for Italy to be prepared to enter Rome the earliest moment it was practicable to do so, and to place colporteurs ready for immediate service. It appears that their wishes have been fulfilled, and as soon as the gates of the imperial city admitted the Italian troops, the work of the Bible Society commenced. Mr. Bruce, writing under date September 22, remarks:

"It is with no small thankfulness and gratitude to the good Lord that I am able to announce to the committee that at last the Bible is in Rome, and that four, if not six, of their colporteurs are in this city. Having marched with the soldiers from beyond the frontier, they entered with a portion of them on Tuesday, soon after a breach had been made in the walls by General Cadorna. The first to get in-and he was determined to be the first-was Frandini, who was exiled in 1860, and who was keen to see his parents once more, and to carry the Bible back with him to his native city. I have not seen all the men yet, but expect to do so this evening.

"It is premature to say what reception the Bible may receive from those to whom it is is offered for the first time; but from the little I saw when with one of the colporteurs at Viterbo, Corneto, and Civita Vecchia, the prominent feeling in the minds of the people is disgust at all that is 'Sacra.' Such prejudice, such confounding of the false with the true, will, I trust, soon give way to feelings and views that are wiser and more enlightened.

"As you may suppose, this city is in a state of great excitement.

"It is exactly ten years this very day since the Bible was openly offered to the Neapolitans in the city of Naples."

In a later communication reference is made to some difficulties that were experienced, but as the circumstances pleaded in explanation of those difficulties have passed away, it may be presumed that there will be no further interference on the part of the authorities, and that from one end of Italy to the other the Bible will be free. It is gratifying to observe that priests are found amongst the purchasers of the Scriptures.

"From my two letters I think you would gather that seven colporteurs

accompanied the troops in their march to this city, and that on the 20th ult., at the first possible moment, six of them entered Rome with the Bible, but not all at the same time, nor yet at the same gate. Five entered by Porta Pia, and one by Porta S. Giovani. Three of the men, finding it unsafe where they were, retreated to the fields, and returned to Rome next morning. A few days after they were joined by the youth from Civitia Vechia, so that there were seven men with Bibles together in the Sevenhilled City. I had quite made up my mind to be in Rome before the colporteurs, but could not accomplish it. I came on the 22nd, by the first train by which civilians were allowed to travel, so I consoled myself with thinking that, after all, it was only right that the Bible should be first carried into Rome by Diodati's fellow-countrymen, who, brought up in the errors of Papacy, had learned to value it, and had, I trust, received into their hearts its saving truths.

"I am sorry to say that for the present our operations are suspended. Yesterday the police took away the books from two of the colporteurs, and have given orders that none are to be sold until after the citizens have declared by vote that they wish to be under Victor Emmanuel. The plebiscito comes off to-morrow-on the Lord's-day as

usual-so that we shall not, I hope, lose much time. The excuse is that the priests are ready to make a handle of anything to get up a disturbance. Soon I expect we shall be able to begin the work in right earnest. Four of the men have applied for leave to have a table in four of the most frequented squares, and in a day or two we shall have the answer of the municipo. I am glad to say that among the purchasers of the Bible here have been several priests,"

But even after the votes had recorded such an overwhelming majority in favour of Victor Emmanuel, and the laws of Italy had become applicable to the territory recently under the rule of the Pope, some other difficulties were raised to the free circulation of the Scriptures in Rome. Fresh supplies on arriving were detained at the Custom House, and the colporteurs were forbidden to exercise their calling. These interruptions are now happily at an end. Full permission is given for the sale of the Scriptures, but the authorities enjoin upon the colporteurs to act with prudence, and avoid giving unnecessary offence to anyone; advice which the committee feel assured the colporteurs will scrupulously respect. It is intended to open a public depôt in Rome, and efforts are being made to secure a suitable locality.

tween the religious life of the present age and of the times of Dan Taylor and his colleagues so marked and decisive as on Creeds. A hundred years ago the churches of this country had not much to boast of, but of their treasures they guarded none so zealously as the hoary and honoured forms of faith received by tradition from their predecessors. Now tens of thousands of the disciples of Christ are supremely indifferent to articles of theological belief, and not a few others persistently deny that they have any value at all. The religion of the last century was led captive into the land of formula, and it proved to be "a wilderness, a land of deserts and pits, a land of drought and of the shadow of death." To-day the merest tyro in the faith declares himself a Moses, and waits, staff in hand, to guide us to the Canaan of free thought, meanwhile fiercely hurling cruel anathemas against all creeds, as though they never could be anything else than tyrannical Pharaoh's slaying the masculine offspring of unfettered minds. Dr. Gill, John Wesley, and their fellow-workers were extremely tenacious of dogmas, and sought to express, with logical precision and systematic fulness the convictions they held concerning the Word of

VOL. LXXII.-NEW SERIES, No. 12.

advance of many in the State Church when he flings a "stone" from his "sling" at every remnant of those doctrinal times: and Mr. Spurgeon has lately uttered some ominous words as to the drift of thought and feeling amongst Nonconformists. It is not, indeed, too much to say that indiscriminate defence of articles of religion has given place to unreasoning hostility; accurate definition to impalpable sentiment; careful analysis to theological blubber; catechisms to "religious stories;" well-knit and compact bodies of divinity to elegant vacuities "all wind and tongue." Not a few think that as indolence was the demon of the church of the eighteenth, so is definition of the church of the nineteenth century, and as immense good resulted from casting out the former, so nothing but advantage will follow from getting rid of the latter.

It is, no doubt, exceedingly simple on our part, but we cannot appreciate this creed-denouncing fever. The hectic flush is "beautiful and lovable," but after all it is an unfavourable symptom. The pulse beats with fearful rapidity, but not with the regularity and steadiness of perfect health. The intense thirst for sentiment and emotional excitement is a surer proof of increasing

disease than of growing vigour and multiplying strength. Creeds, articles, and formularies of faith obtain in their substance wheresoever the mind acts with freedom and energy. Science does not denounce them. Art does not eschew them. Why, then, should they be excluded from a province worthy to engage the noblest faculties of man in their loftiest and most sustained endeavours? Have Kepler's laws no value to the minds of the disciples of Newton and Herschel ? Do they despise the truths that have been systematized and precisely expressed concerning revolving planets and shining stars? Has the chemist no creed? Open your Miller, or Roscoe, or Williamson, and you will find your answer in the leading principles clearly enunciated and the laws abundantly proved. The botanist, geologist, political economist, each matures his thinking on the facts of nature and life, and the experiments he conducts or observes, until that thinking has taken the most comprehensive range and is expressed in exact and communicable language. He will not be satisfied till he discovers the bond which connects his facts together, and lays hold of the law or truth which accounts for all. And why should not the Christian thinker do the same? Has he no facts? Does human life offer no equivalent for experiment?

Has

the Bible no central principles? Without doubt! Why, then, should not the best methods of investigation, and the most useful and acceptable forms of making known the results of investigation, be adopted with regard to religion as well as in the realms of art and science? Because, it is said, the parallel does not hold good. Theology is not a science, some say, in any sense; for its truths are beyond the test of human reason, and no amount of mental effort can ever demonstrate them. Indeed! Is there, then, no science save where there is universal

demonstration?

If the botanist cannot show that the oak of a century is only an expanded leaf, and that trunk, branch, and spray, are all built up on the type of that leaf, and that every acorn is still that same leaf compressed and bound up within an admirable envelope, will you say there is no botanical science? The beautiful theory is only a brilliant intuition flashed from the poetic mind of Goethe, but it is reasoned back to and shown to be explanatory of the facts of the vegetable world, and therefore held to be true. Again, has any wonder-working chemist demonstrated the famous atomic theory? Certainly not in any other way than showing that it explains the laws of definite proportions existing among bodies better than aught else. Moreover who has made known to us the inscrutable quality by which matter attracts matter? Is it known because it is named? every science, in every art, as in theology, the intellect of man having travelled far and mastered much, comes to a point beyond which he cannot penetrate. It is not difficult to demonstrate what water is composed of, or that sin leads to suffering; but the higher the truth the greater the mystery. The

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highest truth is always too high for us. We cannot by searching, with mere intellect attain to it. It is so for Tyndall as for Calvin, for Huxley as for Arminius. All these workers come to principles which they cannot really reason out or fully demonstrate. Therefore the parallel does not fail, and the method for discovering connecting principles and "fundamental doctrines" ought to be adopted in theology as well as in the science of wealth or the art of painting.

But the bitterest hostility to creeds is due to the grievously mistaken uses to which they have been put, and the false functions they have been set to discharge in the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. However, serious as