where a white face is seldom seen, and where the face of a missionary has never been seen at all, it is not difficult to obtain a goodly number of attentive hearers. As there are several brethren, they can take it by turns to preach; and, while the one is preaching, the others will be ready to converse with any who may seek fuller information concerning the truth. In this way many who came to these melás seeking to ease their burdened consciences by their pilgrimage to the shrine of their deity, have gone home with consciences no longer burdened with sin, and with hearts rejoicing in having unexpectedly found the pearl of great price. An open-air preacher at home, at the close of his preaching, if he finds that any souls have been impressed, will converse with them, and give them tracts or gospels, in the hope that, their souls having been softened by the preached word, the written word may enter all the more deeply. Just so does the missionary in India. He will seek to distribute tracts, gospels, New Testaments, to those who wish to know the way of life more fully, so that they may take to their homes the written word, by meditation on which their impressions may deepen into true conversion, and their minds be led more fully into the truth. A very pleasing change has come over the minds of the people of India during the last few years, in reference to their readiness to receive these tracts and gospels. Mr. Bion, one of our most indefatigable itinerant missionaries, says, " One universal feeling exists among the millions of Eastern Bengal, that the days of the Brahmin are soon to be ended. Another remarkable feature which has struck us is the vast change which has come upon the masses of the people with regard to our Scriptures. In former years we had at times to talk and talk till our jaws ached before we could induce people in out-of-the-way places to accept a Bible, a New Testament, or even a gospel, gratis. Now they have in some degree understood the purity and excellence of our Scriptures, and without much persuasion they are ready to buy them at a trifling cost. Nicodemuses we meet with in many places, who, for fear of man, hold back." And we hear this testimony from many quarters. Almost every where there appears to be such a desire to know more of the truth, that it is now a very general rule not to give away copies of the gospels or the New Testament, but to sell them. The price charged is not enough to pay the cost, but just so much as to lessen or destroy the temptation to buy it from any unworthy motive. Hence, in most cases in which the book is thus bought, we may infer that the buyer really desires to know about the truth, and that the book will be read. No people on the face of the earth are fonder of money than the natives of India, and if one of them is willing to give his pice or his anna (13d.) or his four annas to purchase a tract, or a gospel, Testament, it shows that he really values the book and wishes to read it. And when he has the book, he will be sure to value it the more for the simple reason that he has paid for it. Hence it is a very cheering sign that in so many places there is so much of desire to or a New know more of the truth. In the Madras Presidency there is a regular ystem of colportage; and the Report of the British and Foreign Bible Society for last year states that by this agency 7186 towns and villages and 369,310 separate houses were visited, and 34,831 copies of portions of Scripture were sold in the course of the year, in addition to a large number distributed by other agencies. During the past twelve years, In the Madras Presidency alone, 300,000 portions of Scripture have been sold. In Bengal, the North-West Provinces, the Punjab, Bombay, and Ceylon, a large number of copies were in like manner distributed, and for the most part sold. The total number of copies sold in India, in the course of the year, is probably not far short of 100,000. No doubt much of this seed falls on barren ground; but we cannot but believe that a great blessing will rest upon so large a number of portions of God's life-giving Word scattered thus through the land, and that they are preparing the way for the ultimate triumph of the truth, We have heard of many instances of their being blessed. A recent Report of the Bible Society refers to the case of a man who could not read, who received a copy of the gospel of Luke. He had his younger son learn to read on purpose that he might read this book to him. Eventually he became a Christian, and was baptized with his wife, son, and daughter-in-law; and nine other persons in two neighbouring villages have also been led to Christ. Yet the young man himself who learned to read the gospel, is still unconverted! And we may rest assured that many such a case as this has occurred. A man with sin-burdened conscience makes a pilgrimage to a melá at some sacred shrine, he sees there an English Sahib preaching, he goes and listens, he hears of a Saviour who can save the guiltiest; he wishes to know more of Him, receives a single gospel, takes it to his home in a distant village, reads there of Jesus, His wondrous birth, His holy life, His deeds of love and power, His death, His resurrection from the dead; and he says, "This Being is infinitely superior to Rám and Krishna and Durga; I will trust in His power and love. He gave His life a ransom for many,' whatever that may fully mean; He has 'all power in heaven and on earth;' He has said, 'Come unto me and I will give you rest.' I come to Him, I trust in Him alone,-—He is my only Saviour." May we not rest assured that, as many of whom we have heard have thus found Christ, so many of whom we have not heard have thus found Him, through the simple reading of His own Word, and have died in this faith; whose names, though not enrolled in any Church book on earth, are yet written in the Lamb's Book of Life above? But let us also consider that, while we rejoice at so many thousand copies of God's Word being thus distributed in India, yet we may well ask, "What are they among so many?" If a hundred thousand copies of portions of the Bible be distributed every year, what are they among two hundred millions of inhabitants-a very 6 small fraction of whom could read, even if they had the book? Oh, how much land is yet to be possessed-how much work yet to be done! But if the Word of God is to be distributed, it must first be translated, and this brings us to another most important agency at work-that of Biblical translation. In The Church for November, 1870, we referred at some length to this most important department of missionary labour; we therefore pass it by with the simple remark, that a very large amount of time and labour has been devoted to the endeavour to give in the fifteen or twenty different languages of India, a faithful translation of the Word of God. Some of the missionaries devote part of their time to the pastoral charge of English Churches. There is a large and increasing number of English and European residents in the large towns of India; and, remembering the preciousness of their souls, and the great help or hindrance they may be to the spread of the gospel among the natives, our missionaries cannot altogether neglect them. Many a child of pious parents at home, after resisting all the Christian influences brought to bear upon him in his native land, has gone out to India, and there, from the lips of some servant of God, has heard the mes sage which has saved his soul. There are many English Churches, more or less strong, in India, to whose care some missionaries devote part of their time and energies, and the members of which, in return, are very efficient helpers in seeking to spread the gospel amongst the idolaters by whom they are surrounded. IS THERE ANYTHING IN IT? BY MRS. H. B. STOWE. "Sure I must fight if I would reign: Increase my courage, Lord; I'll bear the cross, endure the pain, Supported by Thy Word." They were, in fact, about as good people as the average, this Dr. and Mrs. Doldrums; or, to put the thing intelligibly, about as good as you or I, dear reader. When in the prayer-meetings of Exmouth church, or under the vivid oratory of its minister, their souls were often wafted in and prayer praise above things seen and temporal, and triumphed in things unseen and eternal, and had they been caught up just then and there, might have made a very proper pair of angels. A stranger going into the Ex mouth prayer-meeting, and listening from time to time to the things sung there, might suppose that, if all those hings were true, there was, indeed, For those favoured individuals, no need of trouble, no need of sorrow, no need of care under the sunthat the great unsearchable mystery of life, for them at least, was at last solved. An inquirer who beieved all that they professed would say, "Here is a company of true philosophers. They have found the Kalon-the true, solid, indescribable philosopher's stone, which whoso hath, fears nothing, either in this life or the life to come." The very evening before, Dr. and Mrs. Doldrums, standing up in solid column with all Exmouth church, had sung "Head of the Church triumphant, Thou dost conduct Thy people The world, with sin and Satan, In vain our march opposes― By Thee we will break through them all, And sing the song of Moses." How bravely and joyously the words had surged and rung and billowed on the waves of hundreds of hearty voices the evening before, as the members of Exmouth church sang, after John Bunyan's fashion, "lustily and with good courage!" But this morning, nevertheless, Dr. Doldrums, as aforesaid, declared that he had the blues, and that he could hardly see any use in living, and that he couldn't see what such a world was made for. How came this great change? It is true that Dr. Doldrums, on going down this morning, had found in his letter-box an instalment of the "world and the flesh," in the shape of the morning paper, and looking therein, he saw that the stock of the Great Interior Ground Line Company was rapidly going down, and Doldrums was a large owner in that company; Now, it is also true that the good doctor had been courageously singing the night before, that he must not expect to be carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease. He had been rejoicing and triumphing in the possession of a kind of stock that could not fall in value, though every bank and every corporation and company in this world were sunk in the sea; and yet his heart appeared to sink down to his very boots at this news from the Great Interior Ground Line Company. How was this? Were the passion and earnestness of last night's prayer-meeting hypocritical? Not a bit of it. They were as true, as heartfelt and sincere, as anything you or I ever felt in our lives. Were the things sung last night still true? Undoubtedly they were. If you had faced the doctor with the question that morning, he would have told you that they were. What, then, was the matter? We can illustrate it by a phenomenon of everyday occurrence, in the experience of a traveller in the Alps. At sunset you may stand in your cottage-door in Geneva, and see the whole of the Mont Blanc range, together with the distant dazzling rank and file of the Oberland Alps, glistening like jewels, and looking like cities built of gold and precious stones-topaz, ruby, and amethyst. The next morning you rise and look where the dazzling vision was, and, lo, there is nothing there!-no colours, no glitter, no sheen, no mountains, no glory,-nothing but a cool, dull, leaden-grey sky, that seems firmly and honestly to bound that horizon. The wonderful vision may be then behind that grey horizon, but you can neither see nor touch it. It lives by faith alone. Such a double life do we all live who try to live by faith in the invisible, in the midst of this hurrying, bustling, obtrusive, and painfully visible world. The bright visions of our better hours are all gone be hind clouds of earthly reality! The world and the things of the world are all that do appear. Besides this, it is to be remembered that, on the present occasion, it was a cold shivery March morning. Last evening had been treacherously soft and mild, and the doctor and his wife had walked to prayer-meeting under spring-like skies. But, lo, in the night there had blown up a drizzly, sleety, growly east wind, that had filled everybody's bones with rheumatism, and twanged and jangled everybody's nerves. The month of March is well known all over the world as the devil's special vantage-ground for all those temptations which result from disordered nerves. During this month he seems to play with the human race as a cat does with a mouseboxing them contemptuously hither and thither, now relaxing the system with soft breezes and balmy gales, and in a moment twitching it up with a tight freeze. We are all familiar with these changes. Such a one now lowered over the chimneys of Babylon the Great. The soot was falling in little, sullen, streaky flashes through the air, like small instalments from the infernal regions. Now, the chimney in the doctor's dining-room had a mean and treacherous habit of always smoking when the wind was in that particular chilly quarter when a fire is most necessary. The doctor, on entering the dining-room, was made aware that the enemy was charging down the chimney upon him. He seized the waterpitcher, and forthwith discharged its contents into the grate. A fierce hissing and a cloud of wrathful smoke were the result. The white ashes now began settling on all the furniture of the room, and embellishing the doctor's head with a thick Goat of powder. "Well, I hope you are satisfied now," observed Mrs. Doldrums, coming in. "My dear, it had to be done," quoth the doctor, in a high-pitched controversial tone. "The wind east again, and this vile chimney is just going to smoke all day." "I should think," said Mrs. Dol drums, "that you would get that chimney altered." "Get that chimney altered!" said Dr. Doldrums, in a supremely in dignant tone. 66 Yes, get it altered," continued Mrs. Doldrums, with that persistent didactic calmness wherewith good wives edify their husbands when they catch them in a tight place. 'You know, my dear, I have been asking you every time you've been up town for a month, to attend to that chimney." "And haven't I called, and called, and called on Elkins, and hasn't he promised, and promised, and promised to come and alter it, I should like to know?" said Dr. Doldrums. "But I shouldn't let him off so. I should see he did come," persisted Mrs. Doldrums. "You would, would you! I just wish you'd try it. I'd like to see you manage Elkins now," said Dr. Doldrums, with an aggrieved tone. "The fact is, my dear, you don't know anything about it, that's what you don't; and you women are always expecting things to be done just as you think they can be; and they just can't be done your way, that's all." 66 I "Well, I know, if I were a man, wouldn't let things go so," said Mrs. Doldrums, seating herself with provoking calmness. Ugh!—what a cold, dismal morning, and no fire to eat breakfast by," she added, looking round with a disgusted air on the spectacle, and the drabbled grate, and the chairs and sofa all covered with ashes. Now, though she did not say so in so many words, yet Mrs. Doldrums' tone conveyed the idea that |