by white ones."

FOUR YEARS' GROWTH IN METHODIST

MISSIONS.

The total membership in the foreign Conferences of the M. E. Church (including probationers) has grown from 182,104 in 1899 to 216,476 in 1903-an increase of 34,372, or seventeen per cent. The regions most fruitful in accessions to membership have been: Korea, from 3,897 to 6,915; the Philippines, from a handful to 7,842; North-west India, from 34,469 to 42,672; Gujarat District, Bombay Conference, from 3,443 to 10,985. The number of Sunday-school pupils has grown from 191,917 to 230,158-a gain of 38,241, or nineteen per cent.

-Ram's Horn.

tion." Viscount Watanabe, a prominent statesman and a Buddhist, warns Christians against the idea that Christianity must be modified to meet the needs of Japan. One reason for the deterioration of Buddhism, he says, has been its modification to suit Japanese ideas. His conclusion is a striking testimony to the religious decay of his own faith: "I do not say that Buddhism is not a religion, but when I ask myself how many modern Buddhists there are that have religious life in their souls, I answer, None !"

CONCERNING THINGS IN THIBET.

Interesting things about Thibet are told in The Strand Magazine, by M. Tsybiko. Commissioned by the Russian Imperial Geographical Society, he visited Lhassa, and, strange to say, returned to Russia unharmed. He was struck by the lowness of wages. An ordinary laborer receives three halfpence a day; an expert spinner 3 1-2d.; and a lama, 5d. for a whole day's praying. If well-to-do, a Thibetan invalid engages a lama to read litanies to him: if poor, he gets along with a grain of barley which a lama has blessed-he has more faith in it than in medicine. On account of the immense number of

celibate priests in Thibet, women play a greater part in business than in any other country of the world. "I can recall no occupation that is carried on in the country in which women are not actively engaged, and they often conduct great undertakings quite independently of men."

AN OBJECT LESSON IN THE PROGRESS
OF CHRISTIANITY.

The Rev. G. C. F. Bratenahl, of the Protestant Episcopal Church of St. Alban's, Washington, D.C., says The Literary Digest, has made a series of maps graphically illustrating the progress of Christianity towards its promised conquest of the world. Two of these maps we reproduce from The Churchman (New

York), which comments upon them in part as follows:

"First of all, the world is shown as it was at the end of the first century. The Western hemisphere is, of course, in outer darkness, so is nearly all of Africa, Asia, and Europe. Christianity is practically confined to the southern shores of the Black Sea and the eastern extremity of the Mediterranean."

The first map here shown represents the geographical status of Christianity in 1549.

"Spain has now become, at least nominally, wholly Christian. The entire Scandinavian peninsula is Christianized, the larger part of what we now call Russia in Europe, and most of the territory now covered by the Balkan

K

States. But even after these fifteen centuries and more Christianity is still known only in a corner of the world." The next map represents the world in 1900. Says The Churchman:

"How complete is the transformation when we turn from the situation in 1549 to that in 1900. Only four centuries and a half have intervened, a period less than between the first Crusade and the Reformation, yet now, thanks to that Reformation and to the missionary spirit that it reinfused into the Church, the relation of Christian to pagan is transformed. We do not have to look for light amid the darkness, but rather seek out what still remains of darkness in the flooding light. Africa alone remains still the Dark Continent; subtropical Asia still beckons to missionary emprise ; but the whole North Temperate Zone and almost the whole South Temperate Zone is Christian, and if there are still blotches of black in South America, these districts are not yet Christianized only because they are sparsely inhabited and hardly habitable. Much indeed remains to be done, but it is relatively little in contrast with what has been achieved. No wonder that missionary optimism looks forward to the Christianizing of the world in this generation.'"

CHURCH UNION IN ITALY.

Word has been received, says WorldWide Missions, of the consummation of negotiations which have been going on for more than a year looking toward the uniting of the Evangelical Church of Italy with the Methodist Episcopal Church in Italy, and with the Wesleyan Methodist Church. The churches and stations which come to the Methodist Church by this union are scattered all over Italy, from the extreme north to the southeastern part of Sicily. By far the larger number of the stations, however, are in central and northern Italy, most of them within the bounds of Rome district. By this union there have been united sixteen stations, having a total membership of about five hundred, beside two hundred probationers. There are good schools at three points. In six of the cities or towns there is good church property, estimated to have a total value of about $47,000. The most valuable church properties are in the cities of Venice and Leghorn, in the first of which the Methodist Church hitherto has had no church property. Of the stations already mentioned only two are in cities-namely, Venice and Pisa, where our Church is already at work.

HOSPITALS IN NORTHERN ONTARIO.

Dr. Bruce Smith, Inspector of Hospitals and Charities, has recently returned from a tour of inspection of the public institutions in the north-western portion of Ontario. The growth of the population on the north shore of Lake Superior makes the maintenance of hospitals in that district an absolute necessity. The building of the Grand Trunk Pacific will still further increase the demand in frontier towns. To meet this demand the hospital at Port Arthur has been enlarged. When completed it will be the largest town hospital in Ontario. Kenora there are two hospitals, and at Fort William, Sudbury, Thessalon and the Soo there are well-equipped institutions doing excellent medical and surgical work.

At

The contractors for the Canadian Pacific from Sudbury to Toronto have established a special hospital near Sudbury for the care of their employees.

Says the Congregationalist and Christian World:

"A personal letter from Pope Pius X. to the Mikado of Japan has been sent conveying the thanks of the Roman Church of Japan for its kindness and justice to the Church's missionaries in Manchuria, in territory where, when Russia was powerful, the opposition of the Greek Church was felt acutely. Japan's tolerance in matters of creed makes friends for her who are not to be despised when political and diplomatic readjustments come."

A MORAL CRUSADER.

With the death of Mary Ashton Livermore, of New England, there passes away one of the noted women of the world. Throughout her life of eighty-four years her voice and pen have been constantly employed in the causes that make for the uplift of men. Mrs. Livermore was one of the heroic figures during the days of the Civil War. Her volume, "My Story of the War," reached a sale of 60.000 copies. She was the first editor of The Woman's Journal, a staunch advocate of woman suffrage; in temperance reform a leader, and a colleague and close friend of Frances E. Willard; a well-known lecturer, and an eloquent preacher. Says Zion's Herald: "She was a combination of Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Edward Everett Hale, a marvellous preacher when a preacher was needed." Beside all these, Mrs. Livermore filled a bright and happy place in the domestic world.

"Seven Supreme Poets." By Robert P. Downes, LL.D. Author of " Pillars of Our Faith," etc., etc. London : Chas. H. Kelly. Toronto: William Briggs. Pp. xi-336.

Readers

of Dr. Downs' previous glad to greet a new This book exhibits

volumes will be work from his pen. the same high thought, the same noble expression, and the same keen sympathies. In this volume he employs these for the study and interpretation of the world's great masters of verse. He exhibits wide scholarship, and what is more, for scholarship may be dry as dust, a vivid sympathy with the great sages and seers of all the ages. Old Homer, whose Iliad and Odyssey have moulded the thoughts of successive generations, is first discussed, then Aeschylus, the father of tragic poetry, as Homer was of epic verse. "If Homer speaks to us as the sea speaks, the voice of Aeschylus," says our author, "is as that of the storm among the mountains." Out of his ninety plays only seven have been spared by the ruthless hand of time. The greatest of these, Prometheus Bound, and the story of Orestes, are here described. Our college experience in grappling with the difficulties of the Greek Chorus rather marred the enjoyment of their lofty poetry; but that is all far behind us now, and in this sympathetic interpretation of Aeschylus and Socrates we find a fresh delight.

Virgil has been described as sweetest, purest, gentlest, best beloved of the poets since the dawn of civilization, yet in our judgment, he falls far below the mighty three of the Greek poets. Sublimer than any of them, in our judgment, is the great Tuscan, who wandered through the realms of gloom. John Ruskin says, "The central man in all the world, as representing in perfect balance the imaginative, moral, and intellectual faculties, all at their highest, is Dante." His cruel and unmerited exile contributed in large degree to that bitterness of spirit in Dante, "the hate of hate and scorn of scorn," from which we sometimes recoil; but in moral dignity and sublimity he surpasses, we think, every other writer.

This is a clever, ingenious, and unsatisfactory book. It is the expansion of the author's thesis for the degree of Ph.D. at Columbia University. He describes religious revival as essentially a form of impulsive social action, analyzes the character of primitive man, and describes the mental traits of a psychological "crowd," which follows a leader for good or ill like a flock of sheep. He describes religious revivals of the old-fashioned, tumultuous sort, as in essence akin to the ghost dance of the North American Indian, or to the morbid enthusiasm of a primitive race emerging from barbarism like the American negro, an emotional, but not ethical, movement. He finds analogies to this in the Scotch-Irish revivals in 1800, in Kentucky and in Ulster in 1859, and in the New England awakening under Jonathan Edwards, largely caused by the tremendous and menacing preaching of the revivalists. He even finds much of this in the English revival under John Wesley, and in the great revivals of Finney and Moody. The emotion aroused by these great leaders he describes as a sort of hypnotism-the people followed in spite of themselves. Wesley was saved from fanaticism by his sturdy English common sense, so was Moody.

The effect of rhythmical sounds and motions conduce, he explains, to this emotional revival, as does the power of

He

suggestion and contagious example. affirms the conviction that one of the secrets of Moody's success in the field of revival was his past-mastership in the art of hypnotism. The big, burly, prosaic, and common-sense Moody a hypnotist, forsooth!

The author learnedly describes how "the motor and sensory reflexes are always correlated with strong imagination and emotion." He gives a diagram o the nervous system especially influenced The clever essayist by these agencies.

errs, we think, like one before him, "in not knowing the Scriptures and the mighty power of God." So shrewd an observer as William T. Stead finds no explanation of the mighty wave of revival in Wales than this same power, and the reformed lives, the closing of the public-houses, the payment of long overdue debts, the renovated condition of wide communities show that it was the result of no mere tempo.ary hypnotism, mesmerism or magnetism. This is strikingly true of the moral revolution caused by the Wesleyan movement which saved England from a bloody physical revolution, which followed in France.

Of course there are psychological laws which can be discerned in every great religious revival, but that does not eliminate its supernatural character.

What though He thunder by law? Yet is the thunder His voice. This, indeed, the author admits in the words: "All's law, but all's God."

The New Evangelism, to which he devotes a chapter, is one of education and training, especially of children. He lays much emphasis upon their native religious impulse, its guiding light is the psychological insight of Jesus, "Suffer little children to come unto me." Religious instruction in church and Bible school should, of course, be brought up to the psychological and pedagogical ideas of our time. The fruit of the Spirit is not the subliminal uprush, the ecstatic inflow of emotion, the rhapsody, the lapse of inhibition, but rational love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, self-control, which he specially emphasizes. While containing much that is good and some wise criticisms of wrongful methods of revival, still the great failure of the book is the refusal to recognize the divine and supernatural element of the Holy Spirit, and its convincing and converting power.

66

'Back to Bethlehem." Modern Problems in the Light of the Old Faith. By John H. Willey, Ph.D. New York: Eaton & Mains. Toronto: William Briggs. Pp. 286. Price, $1.00 net.

In this book the author has sought to consider some of the problems of the their modern world, and solution as wrought out by the slow process of time. He finds everywhere Him of whom the Moses and prophets did write. Christ is not only the author of our faith, but the author of our civilization. He not only saves us from sin and littleness and atrophy, but he saves us to the largest and fullest life. The influence of environment, the true significance of the survival of the fittest, the unity and development of the race, the curse of militarism, the law of service, Jesus and the new age, the evolution of the Book -that is, the development of the Bible as a library throughout fifteen hundred years, as God in times past spoke unto the fathers by the prophets, in these last days by His Son, all find lucid and luminous exposition.

"Every-Day Evangelism.". With Personal Incidents and a Plea. By Vallance C. Cook. Author of "The Pastor as an Evangelist," etc. London : Chas. H. Kelly. Toronto: William Briggs. Pp. xvi-201.

The author of this book has had large and successful experience as a Methodist evangelist. The volume is the substance of a paper on "Ten Years' Evangelistic Ministry," read before the Wesleyan Methodist Council of Huddersfield, England. The discourses are strikingly fresh and vigorous, a marked note being their aggressive evangelism.