work. Owing to causes very difficult to understand, missionary work in India scarcely ever attracts Europeans possessed of even a small independence, and the number of those who maintain themselves and work for the cause, seeking no pecuniary aid from the churches, may be counted on the fingers of one hand. The churches, therefore, acting for the most part independently, but still acknowledging a federal tie of good-will which induces them to avoid interfering with one another, have organized what is practically a proselytizing "service" for India, consisting now of about seven hundred men, differing, of course, greatly among each other, but most of them as well educated as average English or Scotch clergymen, most of them married, and all of them honestly devoted to their work. The charges sometimes brought against them in England, but never in India, are not only unfounded, but nonsensical. Now and again a missionary, tempted by the high rewards offered for his special knowledge, or detecting in himself some want of true vocation, embraces a secular career, and is thenceforward regarded by his brethren as a backslider. Now and again a missionary, disenchanted or conquered by that disgust of India which with some Europeans becomes a mental disease, returns to the West to commence the ordinary life of an Established or Dissenting clergyman. Now and again, but very rarely, a missionary falls a prey to some temptation of drink, or desire, or gain, and is cast out, his comrades "inquiring" in such cases with all the severity and more than the care of any judicial court. But the churches are, for the most part, admirably served. The missionaries lead excellent and hard-working lives, are implicitly trusted by the whole community, European and native, and rarely resign until warned by severe illness that the period of their usefulness is overpast. Many of them become men of singular learning; many more show themselves administrators of high merit ; and all display on occasion that reserve of energy and devotion which more than any other thing marks that the heart of a Service is sound. Most pathetic stories are told of their behaviour in the great Mutiny, but I prefer to tell a little anecdote which is known to me to be true, and is most characteristic. The Rev. John Robinson was, in 1850 or 1851, an unpaid missionary, recognized as such by the Baptist Church, but maintaining himself as a translator. He was suddenly summoned one day to the Leper Asylum to baptize a dying convert. The message was intended for his father, but the father was sick, and my friend went instead, in fear and trembling, baptized the dying man, consoled him, and then was seized with a throe of mental agony. It is the custom of many missionaries on receiving a neophyte, especially if sick, to give him the kiss of peace. Mr. Robinson thought this his bounden duty, but he was himself a half-breed, his mother having been a Malay convert, and he was

absolutely persuaded of the Indian theory that leprosy, though noncontagious in the case of a white man, is frightfully contagious in the case of one with native blood in his veins. He hesitated, walked to the door, and returned to kiss the leper on the lips, and then to lie for days in his own house, prostrated with an uncontrollable and, as experience has often proved, not unreasonable nervous terror. A superstitious fool, the doctor thought him, when he had wormed the truth out of him during his fit of nervous horror. True soldier of Christ, say I, who, when his duty called him, faced something far worse than shot. The body of the missionaries have that quality in them, and those who deprecate or deride them do not know the facts. But, excellent as they are, it is not for the work of proselytism that they are adapted. In the first place, they are too few. Every missionary has a wife, a house, a conveyance, children who must be sent home; and must, being so situated, live the usual and respectable European life. That costs on the average £500 a year per house ;* and the churches, which, if they are really to reach all India, need at least 5,000 agents, cannot, or at all events will not, provide for more than 700. In the second place, the missionaries are Europeans, divided from the people by a barrier as strong as that which separates a Chinaman from a Londoner, by race, by colour, by dress, by incurable differences of thought, of habit, of taste, and of language. The last named the missionary sometimes, though by no means always, overcomes, but the remaining barriers he cannot overcome, for they are rooted in his very nature, and he does not try. He never becomes an Indian, or anything which an Indian could mistake for himself: the influence of civilization is too strong for him. He cannot help desiring that his flock should become "civilized" as well as Christian; he understands no civilization not European, and by unwearied admonition, by governing, by teaching, by setting up all manner of useful industries, he tries to bring them up to his narrow ideal. That is, he becomes a pastor on the best English model: part preacher, part schoolmaster, part ruler; always doing his best, always more or less successful, but always with an eye to a false end, the Europeanization of the Asiatic, and always acting through the false method of developing the desire of imitation. There is the curse of the whole system, whether of missionary work or of education in India. The missionary, like the educationist, cannot resist the desire to make his pupils English, to teach them English literature, English science, English knowledge; often-as in the case of the vast Scotch missionary colleges, estab

*I defy living man, not being secretary to a Mission, to state accurately what a missionary costs. His salary can be easily ascertained, but in addition to this he receives an allowance for his house, for his conveyance, and for passage money when sick. Add the cost of his share of general expenses, the charitable allowance for his widow, and the grant-in-aid to the school for his children, and the total will, I feel assured, not be less than the sum I have mentioned.

lishments as large as universities, and as successful in teachingthrough the medium of English alone. He wants to saturate Easterns with the West. The result is that the missionary becomes an excellent pastor or an efficient schoolmaster instead of a proselytizer, and that his converts or their children or the thousands of pagan lads he teaches become in exact proportion to his success a hybrid caste, not quite European, not quite Indian, with the originality killed out of them, with self-reliance weakened, with all mental aspirations wrenched violently in a direction which is not their own. It is as if Englishmen were trained by Chinamen to become not only Buddhists, but Chinese. The first and most visible result is a multiplication of Indians who know English, but are not English, either in intellectual ways or in morale; and the second is that, after eighty years of effort, no great native missionary has arisen, that no great Indian Church has developed itself on lines of its own and with unmistakable self-dependent vitality, and that the ablest missionaries say sorrowfully that white supervision is still needed, and that if they all retired the work might even now be undone, as it was in Japan. Where 3000 preaching friars are required, most or all of them Asiatics, living among the people, thinking like them as regards all but creed, sympathizng with them even in their superstitions, we have 700 excellent but foreign schoolmasters or pastors or ruling elders. What is wanted in India for the work of proselytizing is not a Free Church College, an improved Edinburgh High School, teaching thousands of Brahmins English, but an El Azhar for training native missionaries through their own tongue, and in their own ways of thought exclusively a college which should produce, not Baboos competent to answer examination papers from Cambridge, but Christian fanatics learned in the Christianized learning of Asia, and ready to wander forth to preach, and teach, and argue, and above all to command as the missionaries of Islam do. Let every native church once founded be left to itself, or be helped only by letters of advice, as the churches of Asia were, to seek for itself the rule of life which best suits Christianity in India, to press that part of Christianity most welcome to the people, to urge those dogmatic truths which most attract and hold them. We in England have almost forgotten those discussions on the nature of God which divided the Eastern Empire of Rome, and which among Christian Indians would probably revive in their fullest force. It is the very test of Christianity that it can adapt itself to all civilizations and improve all, and the true native churches of India will no more be like the Reformed Churches of Europe than the churches of Yorkshire are like the churches of Asia Minor. Strange beliefs, strange organizations, many of them spiritual despotisms of a lofty type, like that of Keshub Chunder Sen, the most original of all modern Indians, wild aberrations from the truth, it may

be even monstrous heresies, will appear among them, but there will be life, conflict, energy, and the faith will spread, not as it does now like a fire in a middle-class stove, but like a fire in the forest. There is far too much fear of imperfect Christianity in the whole missionary organization. Christianity is always imperfect in its beginnings. The majority of Christians in Constantine's time would have seemed to modern missionaries mere worldlings; the converted Saxons were for centuries violent brutes; and the mass of Christians throughout the world are even now no better than indifferents. None the less is it true that the race which embraces Christianity, even nominally, rises with a bound out of its former position, and contains in itself thenceforward the seed of a nobler and more lasting life. Christianity in a new people must develop civilization for itself, not be smothered by it, still less be exhausted in the impossible effort to accrete to itself a civilization from the outside. Natives of India when they are Christians will be and ought to be Asiatics still-that is, as unlike English rectors or English Dissenting ministers as it is possible for men of the same creed to be, and the effort to squeeze them into those moulds not only wastes power, but destroys the vitality of the original material. Mahommedan proselytism succeeds in India because it leaves its converts Asiatics stiil; Christian proselytism fails in India because it strives to make of its converts English middleclass men. That is the truth in a nutshell, whether we choose to accept it or not.

THE HOMERIC HERÊ.

I. HER OLYMPIAN RANK.

HE Herê of Homer exhibits to us in the liveliest form several important principles: partly, the reflection of divine and supreme prerogative from the husband upon the wife; more largely, the foundation of a great personality upon the ruins, as it were, of other personalities, handed down by older traditions, but with aspect, character, and attributes essentially recomposed; and lastly, the incorporation, in a figure of the first majesty and queenliness, of the largest amount of the weaker feminine peculiarities.

She represents nothing that was grand or noble in prior mythologies. She is made up of more incongruous materials than any other among the greater Olympian gods, and thus there are elements of conflict grouped together in her character. She is a powerful instrument in the hands of Homer for a particular purpose, but it is plain that she did not command his veneration.

If we compare her with Pallas, the one goddess who besides herself enters powerfully into the theurgic action of the "Iliad," the contrast is even more glaring than the association is close. Herê has a marked titular superiority, with not only an inferior measure, but a total absence of the qualities, excepting energy, which make Pallas so majestic and so great.

If we compare her with Leto, whose position is so much less conspicuous, and whose action in the poems is almost null, we nevertheless find that Leto attracts the deep reverence of the poet, that she is never mentioned but with honour, never treated but with care; that she is on all occasions carefully shielded from disparagement. Herê, on the other hand, is exhibited in lowering aspects, and is even made the subject of a legend, that she has been severely wounded in the