than positive precepts, should be the aim of the patient upholder of missions, who does not believe that his religion compels him to ignore the philosophy of mind, and to go contrary to the conclusions of history. This at least, it must be confessed, was the Divine order of proceeding. How long a period should elapse ere the second great fact be added-ere the second tint of the great painting be laid on -ere the Incarnation of the Word should be revealed, must, according to this theory, depend in each case on the length of time needed firmly to impress the preliminary truth. But this second revelation once made, the progress of our development of objective teaching (for subjective growth should be left to the native church itself) might be more rapid. We might copy any of the brief catalogues of the Apostle, such as those in 1 Corinthians xv. 3, 4, or in Hebrews vi. 1, 2.

I have endeavoured rather to decide a principle than to enter into details. A few illustrations in detail may nevertheless be given. When, for example, we find missionaries demanding from a Hindu, previous to baptism, experiences or beliefs which were not known to, or fully understood by, the Church until many generations had been baptised, served God, and been gathered to their fathers, I am forced to entertain the fear that in the effort to secure much they risk the loss of all. Thus Calvinism, and those more or less under its influence, err, I think, in withholding baptism from persons to whom the Apostles would have administered it, by demanding experimental tests of faith which could not have been employed when thousands were baptised at once, and which we do not find to have been thought of when, for example, families were baptised on the faith of their parents. So, too, those who postpone baptism on the theory of Augustine and his day-that sin, which is venial before, is mortal after its administration-err to the prejudice of their final success.

Once more, the English clergyman must not go out to the heathen either as an officer of the Church of England or as a philosopher who seeks to impress a mature and scientific faith upon his converts. He should rather aim, I think, to put himself into the position of an elementary teacher, not scorning the very hornbook and primer. Thus the Divine Being appears to have condescended at the first initiation of Revelation, and suited himself to the level of his people, "when Israel was a child." His aim appears to have been, not to produce a systematic belief in the mind of the chosen race, but to call forth certain elementary ideas, by the use of symbols, natural phenomena, thunders, earthquakes, smoking altars, and tottering city walls. This was to teach ideas, not to convey full and correct representations of himself, such as would meet the demands of civilised philosophy; it was necessary to teach that infant nation as you teach your child, not as religion or theology is taught in the divinity school

of a university. It is absurd for us, then, to reject the teaching thus wisely given, because it does not convey to us the same elevating ideas which it was the sole means of conveying to that uncivilised people. On the contrary, we should regard that mode of dealing with the uncultured as a priceless example or hint to ourselves. Let us seek to produce ideas of God as correct as we can, but let us not fall into the foolish error of endeavouring to impress them as we should do upon a congregation in a civilised land.1 Better, surely, that they should heartily embrace the one tenet, Monotheism, the one duty, self-denial, for generations to come, than that by a system of forcing they should apparently embrace the whole circle of our Church doctrine, only to forget it or repudiate it as an extraneous and impossible system for them to follow when left alone.

The grand aim should next be to put the keeping and teaching of revealed religion by means of a good translation of the Scriptures, into the hands of a native ministry, leaving them, unshackled by our ideas, to develop churches for themselves; and by stern self-denial, forbearing to interfere with or reproach them, even if we found them developing their creed by these aids in a direction different from our own. Such were a difficult task, but surely a duty. If we regard the Church as under the control of its Author, we shall not be afraid to commit to a zealous native pastorate our converts, and our Scriptures, apart from any of our theories of inspiration or of Church government. This, it seems to me, would be a noble and a faithful thing for us to do. A sample of its probable success seems to be furnished, as I have said, by the history of the Church in Madagascar.

If the work of missions be, as I am sure it is, something nobler than the mere love of proselytising, if it be in its essence a Divine duty, we should do our part by seeking to conduct it in a spirit according with sound sense and history, and leave the rest to God.

G. R. WYNNE.

(1) We have a judicious example in the case of the missionary, H. Martyn, who commenced his public preaching to the beggar-crowd at Dinapore, by expounding the text, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," and amply catechising them upon that ere he proceeded to higher truths. This was laying the foundation of Monotheism, and laying it aright.

RUSSIAN SOCIETY.

PART II.

IF the contents of the secret Court Almanack I mentioned above, account sufficiently for the otherwise inexplicable docility of Russian Chancellors, Ministers of State, Actual Privy Councillors, &c., there are other reasons which render the second far more numerous, and still more insignificant half of Russian society quite as pliant and obedient. In the first place, the mass of so-called "nobles by descent" (in contradistinction to the "personal nobles," i.e., subaltern officials) about half a million souls-have never lost the sentiment of their origin, viz., of being nothing more than the hereditary servants of the throne. The majority of them obtained their nobiliary privileges1 during the second half of the last century, when a service of some twenty-five or thirty years (twelve years to obtain the chinn of the 14th class, and three years more for each following class up to the 8th, that of "Collegiate Assessor") was sufficient to obtain for a man who had had the good fortune not to die or be dismissed before the time, the honour of adding his family to the roll of Russian hereditary nobles. Since the accession of Alexander I., the Caucasus offered a still shorter road for arriving at this much-desired goal: besides being moved up one chinn on his appointment to a post in one of the Caucasian provinces, every official sent there received an additional chinn every year or every year and a half, so that the Caucasus became a very hot-bed for producing a yearly crop of nobles. At last Nicholas, anxious for the purity of blood of his aristocracy, attached the privilege of nobility to the chinn of the 5th class, that of Councillor of State. But even the comparatively few families, whose origin dates from a time previous to the accession of Peter the Great, owe their nobility to the very same cause; with the exception of the twelve princely houses descended from Rurik, they had lands and titles given to them for their services by the Tsars of Moscow, just as their younger brethren received both, or the right to both, from the St. Petersburg Emperors. This feeling of owing all they have and are to the Emperor, is so deeply ingrained in the minds of the Russian nobles, that it has given rise to the following extraordinary legal fiction, or rather tradition: it is a universally received opinion in Russia, that a noble family, of which three successive generations do not enter the service of the State, loses its patent of nobility; now, no such law has ever been made, but the tradition which has

1 Of these privileges only three had any practical meaning, viz., the right of acquiring and possessing serfs and land, immunity from corporal punishment (introduced only by Peter III.), and the right of obtaining the lowest chinn after three years' service. The first two of these privileges have ceased to exist since the abolition of serfdom and of corporal punishment for all classes.

formed itself upon the subject proves how natural and easy it would have been to make it. Among the few popular names in Russian history one of the first places is held by Minin, a citizen of NijniNovgorod, who in 1613 helped to save the independence of Russia by exciting his fellow-townsmen to take up arms, marching at their head, together with Prince Pojarsky upon Moscow, and driving the Poles from the Kreml. Of course, the Minins of the present day are nobles; but the daughter of the actual head of the family while being educated in one of the Governmental Nobility pensionnats, was teased by her companions, even her superiors and governesses, with not being a real noble, with being merely a bourgeoise, because her ancestor had merely served the people, and not the Tsar!

Another reason of the utter helplessness, in a political sense, of Russian society is its stupendous ignorance. The comparatively few Russians whose means permit them to visit Europe, should not be taken as samples of the society to which they belong, neither in respect of their education, nor of their manners and habits of living. In this respect the reign of Nicholas has left deeper traces on the social life of Russia than perhaps in any other; his systematic persecution of all education but that which prepared fit officers for his armies, went at last so far as to limit by law the number of students in each of the five Russian Universities to 300, and it will take a long time before the consequences of this and similar measures will have disappeared. The regular subaltern official, who has no property of his own, and whose only patrimony is the service, has no time to occupy himself with anything besides the requirements of this service, and his ignorance of almost everything beyond the narrow bounds of his daily occupation is therefore perfectly natural. The average landed proprietor is, however, intellectually not much better off; he has, as a general rule, passed a few years at the Government gymnasium of the chief town of the province, and, after having served the Emperor during some time in the capacity of an officer or civil official, he returns for the rest of his life to his estate, either to ruin it by running into debt, or else by allowing it to run to ruin of itself through his neglect and laziness. In one of the easterly districts of the Government of Nijni I came across two landed proprietors-father and son-who would make no bad pendant to the famous Baron of Brittany, who, at the election of members for the French States-General in 1789, signed the cahier d'élection by sealing it with his sword pummel, having never had an opportunity of acquiring the more complicated art of signing by means of a pen. The father and son I am speaking of passed every day of their lives in hunting in the enormous forests and shooting upon the moors, which cover the eastern portions of their Government; so exclusively had this become their occupation, that, when the first rumours of the impending emancipation of their serfs

reached the nobles of Nijni, and our two huntsmen wished to find
out "what was being said in the newspapers about it," and, for once
putting off their daily hunt, ordered the Northern Bee to be brought
in from the village comptoir, where the newspaper had been received
and stowed away unread for the last twenty years, it turned out that
both father and son, although the latter had been educated at the
Petersburg Lyceum, had forgotten to read; so that, wishing to know
what was at the bottom of the matter, they were obliged to send
for the bailiff, one of those very serfs whose emancipation was
being debated, and to make him read to them what the Northern
Bee had got to say on the subject! The story was told to me by the
bailiff himself at the fair of Nijni, and the two Nimrods I met some
time after at a general hunt of the district. This, it may be said,
is a mere isolated case, and proves nothing; the same answer can,
however, not be made to the following story. In the South Russian
Government of Kharkof there lived a short time ago, and perhaps
lives there still, a German, a retired physician, who, in serving the
Government, had attained the chinn of Councillor of State, had con-
sequently become a member of the hereditary nobility of the country,
and was living in affluence on his considerable estates.
The way in
which all this was acquired is briefly this. In the beginning of
Nicholas' reign, when the colonisation of the southern provinces by
Germans was still encouraged by the Government, Johann Schmidt
(as I will call him), at the time a journeyman baker, arrived in
Russia across the Moldavian frontier. The official whose business it
was to examine the papers of some hundred immigrants per day,
and give them Russian passports in lieu of their foreign ones, could
not have been a very great proficient in German, for, mistaking the
initial B of the word Bäckergeselle (journeyman baker) in the pass-
port of Johann Schmidt, for the, in German characters, certainly
very similar letter L, and reading consequently Läckergeselle, trans-
lated this latter term in the Russian passport by Assistant-Surgeon,
naturally concluding from the likeness of the sounds of Läcker and
the Russian word Lekarj (a surgeon), that the meaning of the two
words must be the same. The poor journeyman baker being thus
turned loose into Russia as an officially recognised assistant-surgeon,
could find nowhere any employment in his own handicraft, and was
therefore compelled to turn surgeon, or rather physician, against his
own will. Well, this doctor in spite of himself has been able to attain
towards the end of his career, to the position in which I saw him a
few years ago; and he has been able to do this not in some out-
of-the-way corner of the world, where medicine as a science had
never been heard of, but in one of the richest Governments of Russia,
and in the immediate vicinity of a University!

Certainly the leaven of education is gradually working its way even into the class of small noble landed proprietors; the debates