which, according to a return made in 1909, has a strength of 158,932 men, as compared with the 75,751 men of the European army in India.

Beyond such methods of assistance as these, it is difficult to see what can be done. The Sikhs must work out their own salvation as a community. Under the Pax Britannica their religion will have the fairest chances. In its civil aspect, it has been said, the Sikh religion connotes unquestioning loyalty, and in its military aspect the highest heroism and self-sacrifice. A late Lieutenant-Governor of the Panjab expressed an opinion that the Government should take advantage of every legitimate opportunity offered to promote the cause of Sikhism. If the difficulties of the Gurumukhi and other languages of the Granths have hitherto proved obstacles to the spread of their religion, this impediment will no longer operate. Mr Macauliffe's elaborate and sympathetic work will supply an authorised translation, which should find its way into every Sikh school and family; it can easily be expounded to any one with a knowledge of English, which is not uncommon and will spread; the translation will facilitate the study of the original Granth. The existence of the Granth, the maintenance of the temple, the separate worship and ritual, will always be rallying points for the religion against Hinduism. It is a manly faith for which much sympathy may be felt. Whether Sikhism is increasing numerically or diminishing will be shown by the forthcoming census of 1911. It will be desirable that the census returns should carefully distinguish between Gobindi Sikhs, Nanaki, and other Sikhs, and Hindus respectively.

Art. 9. THE FIRST CONTACT OF CHRISTIANITY AND PAGANISM.

1. The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire. By T. R. Glover. London: Methuen and Co., 1909. 2. Zur Frage nach dem Ursprung des Gnostizismus (in the 'Texte und Untersuchungen' of Gebhardt and Harnack, vol. xv). By W. Anz. Leipzig: J. C. Heinrichs, 1897. 3. Poimandres. By R. Reitzenstein. Leipzig: Teubner, 1904.

4. Die hellenistisch-römische Kultur in ihren Beziehungen zu Judentum und Christentum. By Paul Wendland. Tubingen: Mohr, 1907.

5. Hauptprobleme der Gnosis. By Wilhelm Bousset. Göttingen: Vandenhoek, 1907.

6. The Origins of Christianity. By the late Charles Bigg, Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909.

THE development during modern times of what is called the historical imagination,' the growth of descriptive psychology and accumulative anthropology, has made the task of the historian seem far more delicate and difficult than it was in former generations. What we now want to do with the documents of the past is something more ambitious than what our fathers attempted, and yet we must realise in a way they could not have done how hard that ambition is to satisfy. The facts' of history in the narrower sense of that word the issue of a battle, the promulgation of a law, the establishment of a religion-have a rational interest, we perceive, only in connection with a larger context of human life, a life which was actually the experience of individuals, and involved a whole world of ideas, of emotions, of desires. What the battle, the law, the religion really were is events in such a life, in such a stream of experience; only as such have they any significance for us. We want to re-live that experience imaginatively ourselves, to feel how it was affected by the events, or the statement of them does not give us anything real. Even where history seems to occupy itself with statistics or naked facts' which can

have no imaginative content, it does so only because these things ultimately bear upon a life which we can more or less realise in imagination, because they serve to explain causes which made it what it was. And it is just this context of past events, this atmosphere of ideas, emotions and desires, that it is so hard to recapture. Not only because the millions of individuals in whom they existed have, with the exception of some one or two here and there, left no record of themselves at all. More than that, modern psychology has taught us to realise in truer measure the disconcerting variations between individuals in their inner life, and in a still greater degree the variations in the mentality (that is the convenient catch-word) of different races and different ages. We can never completely understand the person closest to us. And what are we to say of an ambition to understand the buried world of a thousand or two thousand years ago from the scraps of writing, shreds merely of their life and thought, bequeathed us by some score or so of individuals? We must acknowledge at the outset that our end can never be more than very imperfectly attained. Probably, however intelligently anyone had read up modern India or Japan, he would find, on going there, a good deal to correct, a vast deal to supplement, in his impressions. But the accessible literature in England on India or Japan is far more extensive than the literary remains of any period of antiquity. The most finished modern scholar would, no doubt, find much to surprise him if he were dropped into the Athens of Euripides or the Rome of Augustus. And yet our ambition is not utterly vain. We may hope to achieve a measure of success. And that for the reason that these variations are, after all, variations in a common human nature, differences in the relative proportion of elements, none of which are wholly absent in ourselves. This feat of entering into another mentality than our own we have to achieve in studying both alien peoples of to-day and the men of old time. And in the case of the latter there is the added difficulty which comes from the niggardly amount of our data. We can hold intercourse of question and reply with living Indians and Japanese, but for the past we have to make what we can of the limited number of words set down in writing once

for all, whose inexorable silences no questioning of ours can ever fill. How often it is just where we want most to question that the silence comes! And yet even in reference to this there are considerations to encourage. For one personality is not always revealed to another according to the amount of speech. Often a single phrase of our friend has in it a world of revelation. It is not impossible that the broken speech which has come down to us from the men of old may bring kindred spirits into touch across the gulfs of time, may carry a real communication of personal life, quick and powerful, far beyond the dead letter. So to charge words with personality is indeed the magic of great literature.

At any time between eighteen and nineteen hundred years ago some millions of souls were going through the experience of life in the countries ruled by Cæsar round about the Mediterranean Sea. In some cases where the cities of to-day-Rome, Smyrna, Alexandria-are full of eager and various life, a life no less eager and various was being lived on the same soil, in sight of the same hills and seas. In other cases, Ephesus, for example, a place which was then covered with streets and marketplaces, a great hive of men, is now silent, marsh and field and barren hill, where the wild grasses grow among what is still left of marble colonnade and theatre. All that life is what lies behind the few volumes of written matter which the age has bequeathed to us; that life was the context of which they are torn fragments. To some extent the interests which made up that life need no special illumination in order to understand them. They were the same as in any other human society which is concentrated in great cities. Thousands of those generations also were mainly occupied, during the years allotted them, with the hopes and anxieties of industry and traffic, the state of the Roman or Alexandrian market, or the mood of the tumbling sea between Brindisi and Durazzo. Thousands lived for the excitement of loose adventure in the dark archways and lascivious lanes. For thousands the happiness of life lay just in the daily return from dull mechanic labour to the evening meal with wife and child. There were the periodic festivals when the cities kept holiday, days looked forward to by poor men and slaves, full of the

noise of flutes, of glittering processions with the city's idols, lewd buffooneries in the theatre and bloody fights in the arena-the abundant gaieties of the children of the South. There was little in all this to distinguish the men of nineteen hundred years ago from the populations of Southern Europe to-day.

These things made up a great part of the world into which the men of that day found themselves born, a world large and shining and manifold. But for us this particular world round about the Mediterranean nineteen centuries ago has an interest of an altogether peculiar kind. Something happened in it so momentous, it is believed, that it marks a new beginning in human history. Our popular reckoning, looking back upon the past, divides it into the years before and the years after an event which took place at that moment of time. Into the stream of the passing generations there entered just then, there was seen for about thirty years, Someone who has been ever since the great problem. He was not among those who, while they were here, wrote down words which men may still read. He wrote nothing. All we know of what he was, of what he said, is from the memories of his friends. But what was written in those memories was of such a sort that the world has never since been able to escape from the personal force which grasped it through that reflection.

This is why men to-day take up more intently than ever the scraps of writing through which we can get broken glimpses into the past, trying whether a more determined concentration of mind upon the old phrases, a more minute analysis and classification of the contents, a fresh straining of the imagination to read between the lines, may not enlarge, even if ever so little, the opening through which we look into the world where the name "Christians" was first heard. We know, for instance, with fair assurance, that in one of the years of the Emperor Claudius, some nameless person in the harbour-town which is now Salonica received a letter, to be read aloud in the little religious association of which he was one of the presidents, beginning 'Paulus and Silvanus and Timotheus to the Assembly of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Iesus Christus,' the first time that the Name appears in the literature of the world. We can