"I am unable," said Mr. Strong, "to think of any neighborhood in which a mission school could be started that is not now within reach of some existing church. Round the new brass-works now building, in the south part of the town, a settlement is likely to spring up that will soon need to be provided for; at present every locality is well furnished with churches."

But," said Deacon Squires, "people will often attend mission chapels who would not attend churches."

"The first thing to do in such a case," replied Mr. Strong with emphasis, "is to convert or kill the churches of which this is true. A church into which poor people cannot be induced to go ought to be born again or blotted out. The church whose methods of administration and whose social atmosphere are such as to discourage the attendance of the poor, is driving Christ from its door. Is not this his own word, 'Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these, ye did it unto me'? It is entirely possible to create and maintain in our churches a spirit and a way of working that shall make the poorest people feel perfectly at home in them. The church in which these are not found needs a missionary as much as the Patagonians do. It has not yet learned the alphabet of Christianity." "You wax warm, Brother Strong," cried Doctor Sampson. "Haven't you got a missionary or two up at the Second Church, that you can send to some of your neighbors ? " "Not one. We need them all," answered the parson, laughing. "But I suspect that I have already scattered abroad a few, to whom my doctrine on this subject was too hot, and who have gone forth preaching quite another gospel. Whatever help you can get out of them you are welcome to. Good nddance to them, I say. One or two of them have taken refuge with you, Strickland. I hope you will convert them."

I'll do my best to convict them, at any rate," said the rector, warmly. "If they expected to hear a softer doctrine on this subject at St. Mark's, they have probably found out their mistake by this time. Our practice is not quite up to our theories, but I am happy to say that the spirit of a genuine Christian democracy is growing among our ecclesiastical aristocrats. The churches are not few in which the poor are coddled or patronized; those in which they are respected and frankly put upon the same level of consideration and responsibility with the rich and well-to-do are not yet a multitude. This is our standard, and, although we have not reached it, we shall not lower it, please God, under the present administration."

"This discourse is edifying," said Mr. Peters. "Go right on, brethren. It is good to hear such testimony from the pastors of such churches."

"We sometimes hear of a saying hard to shape in act," said Doctor Phelps, "and this is one of them. The theory is sound; but, whenever thought is wedded to fact, there will be a bridal dawn of grumbling, if nothing worse, in some of our congregations."

"The more shame to us," cried Mr. Strong, if we have suffered our people to forget the true function of the Christian Church, and have allowed the fellowship of the Spirit to degenerate into a chartered snobbery."

"But," said Mr. Thorpe, "is it not wiser to recognize existing facts, and adapt our methods to them? It is certainly a fact that the poor people generally think they are not wanted in the churches. They greatly exaggerate this inhospitality; in many of our churches they would find a cordial welcome; but they think that the place where the rich and the stylish people worship is not the place for them. Many of those who stay away from the churches could be gathered into mission chapels. Is it not better to reach them in this way than fail altogether to reach them?"

"I think not," was the answer. "The one injurious and fatal fact of our present churchwork is the barrier between the churches and the poorest classes. The first thing for us to do is to demolish this barrier. The impression is abroad among the poor that they are not wanted in the churches. This impression is either correct or incorrect. If it is correct, then there is no missionary work, for us who are pastors, half so urgent as the conversion of our congregations to Christianity. If it is incorrect, we are still guilty before God in that we have allowed such an impression to go abroad; and we are bound to address ourselves, at once and with all diligence, to the business of convincing the poor people that they are wanted, and will be made welcome, in the churches. But every mission chapel planted in the neighborhood of a church, and intended for the poor, is an ostentatious proclamation to the poor that they are right in their impression; that we freely consent to the separation of the rich from the poor in worship; that we approve of the religion that is founded upon caste. To that proclamation I will never put my signature. The time has come when judgment should begin at the house of God, and when the paganism that masquerades in our stylish churches, in the guise of Christianity, should be stripped of its disguises and banished from our altars."

Mr. Strong had risen from his seat, and his

ENGLISH NOTIONS OF AMERICA AT THE

TIME OF SETTLEMENT.

THE age of Elizabeth and James was a new point of beginning in the history of the people who speak English. The revival of learning, the invention of printing, and the reformation of religion, had awakened the men of that time to unprecedented intellectual activity, while the discovery of America by Columbus, and the dazzling adventures of the Spaniards in Mexico and Peru, had profoundly stimulated their imaginations. At this period of renascence, English literature found the glory of a magnificent spring-time in Shakspere and the group about him; the principles of modern scientific investigation were first formulated in the writings of Lord Chancellor Bacon, while men of action were everywhere set upon deeds of adventure and discovery. The world had regained the vigor and spontaneity of its youth. Much, also, of youthful credulity and curiosity it had at the same time, delighting in marvelous stories the more in proportion to their incredibility. Books of travel suited the prevailing taste; the great black-letter folios of Hakluyt's Voyages and "Purchas His Pilgrims," were favorite literature with those who could afford to buy them, and the popular taste was gratified by little fly-leaf publications and pamphlets, describing remarkable voyages and remote countries, with the strange peoples and animals inhabiting them. After the austerities and other-world speculations of the middle age, the jocund earth had been newly discovered by its inhabitants, and men were as full of knightly fervor in efforts to redeem the remote parts of the world from the oblivion of human ignorance as they had been before to recover Jerusalem from the infidel.

America was discovered in the first instance because it lay between Europe and India by the westward route, and Columbus, seeking the less, found the greater by stumbling upon it in the dark. Most of the succeeding explorers of the American coast regarded the continent chiefly as an obstruction. Purchas suggests that it might rather be called Cabotia than America, since Cabot, the famous pilot, under the patronage of Henry VII. of England, visited North America in 1497, before Columbus or Amerigo Vespucci saw the main-land of South America. But Cabot meant to find no other land but China, and thence to turn toward India, and he sailed along the American coast, not exulting in that he was first finder of a great and fertile continent, the future home of nations, but "ever with the intent to find said passage to India."

For a century the notion of a passage to the Pacific by means of some undiscovered strait severing the continent of America possessed the minds of navigators and geographers, and promoted discovery; though the hope of finding such a passage, and of coming thus into a new and rich commerce, blinded the adventurers to the real value of America, and retarded colonization. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth this South Sea theory had become a superstition, probably from the belief that in 1524, Verrazano, in sailing down the eastern coast of America, in the employ of Francis II. had seen in latitude 40° a narrow isthmus about five miles wide, with the ocean beyond it. This isthmus was incorporated into some of the maps of the sixteenth century, and Verrazano's sea, as a part of the Pacific, is shown upon charts published long after the discoveries on both coasts of America had rendered it impossible. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who spent and lost his life in the exploration of the American

coast, wrote a treatise to prove "that there is a passage on the north side of America to go to Cataia, China, and to the East Indies," and this he demonstrated elaborately, first, by authority; secondly, by reason; thirdly, by experience of sundry men's travels; and fourthly, by circumstance. But, though the argument was so exhaustive, devout Sir Humphrey sailed in vain through the cold Newfoundland seas to find a way to China, as others did about the same time,-Sir Martin Frobisher, for instance, who was so possessed with this one thought that he believed the discovery of the north-west passage to be "the only thing of the world that was yet left undone, by which a notable mind might be made famous and fortunate."

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The failure-often disastrous—of the many explorers of the sixteenth century to find a quick passage through America to China, did not lessen the hopes of the English. No matter how difficult the voyage to China by the north-west," it will become as plausible as any other journey if our passenger may return with plenty of silver, silkes and pearle," jauntily writes Richard Willes in 1577. But the most remarkable setting forth of the general faith of learned cosmographers on the subject is found in the "Discourse on Western Planting," written in 1584, by that great advocate of American colonization, the Reverend Richard Hakluyt, apparently for the express purpose of persuading the miserly Queen Elizabeth to aid in sending forth colonies. He tells his readers that a man of St. Malo had, that very year, according to report, discovered the sea on the backside of Hochelaga,"-the island on which Montreal now stands,-and quotes the report which Jacques Cartier heard from the Indians at Montreal, of a river navigable three months to the southward, by which we clearly recognize the Mississippi. But Hakluyt thinks that this report confirms not a little the existence of the South Sea in that vicinity. Not only is the Mississippi transmuted into a tributary of the Pacific in this argument, but the great Laurentian lakes suffer a sea-change as well, for the Indians, he says, had told Cartier of a sea of fresh water beyond Montreal, "the head and end of which was never man found that had searched." Hakluyt also has recourse to old maps, and thus reveals to us the geographical ignorance of his time. The King of Portugal had shown him "a great olde round carde," that had the north-west strait plainly set down in latitude 570. He had also seen "a mightie large old map in parchment," traced all along the coast with Italian names, which map showed in latitude 40° a little neck of land "much like the streyte neck or isthmus of Darienna." On an old globe in the Queen's

privy gallery at Westminster, he had seen the same isthmus, "with the sea joynninge hard on both sides, as it doth on Panama," and adds: "which were a matter of singular importance, if it should be true, as is not unlikely." In another paper, Hakluyt mentions, under his breath, the proximity of the South Sea to Florida, and says that it is not good that the report be made too common !

Nor did the South Sea delusion vanish when the period of colonization was reached. Ralph Lane, the governor of Ralegh's first plantation on the Island of Roanoke, having probably inquired of the savages for some trace of that sea which Hakluyt had seen so plainly laid down "on the mightie olde mappe in parchment," was told by the inventive savages that the Roanoke River sprang from a rock so near to a westward sea, that the waves in time of storm often dashed into this fountain, making the river brackish for some distance below. They mentioned at the same time that there was gold there, and that the walls of a town in that land were made of pearls. Nothing dispirited by the extravagance of these tales, Lane and some of his men, like boys seeking the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow, set out to immortalize and enrich themselves by ascending the Roanoke to find the Pacific Ocean, the Indians meantime plotting the destruction of the colonists left behind. Lane and his followers pursued their quest until they were obliged to eat their dogs, and then returned fasting, just in time to rescue the colony from destruction. But Lane went back to England believing that the Roanoke rose near to the Bay of Mexico "that openeth out into the South Sea," and the map of the country which the colony brought back shows a strait leading into the Pacific from Port Royal.

The Jamestown colonists were gravely instructed to explore that branch of any river that lay toward the north-west-perhaps because the charmed latitude of 400 might be reached in this way. The colonists were especially to ascend any river running out of a lake, in hope of finding another river having its head in the same lake and "running the contrary way toward the East India Sea." Even John Smith could not but hope that his second exploration of the Chesapeake might lead him into the Pacific. This notion. of a passage into the South Sea in latitude 40°, just north of the limit of his own explorations, Captain Smith communicated to his friend. Henry Hudson, who was so moved by the information that he sailed to America in direct violation of his orders, and it was in seeking the passage to the Pacific that he penetrated the solitudes of the beautiful river that bears

his name, and perished the next year in the great northern bay which is a second memorial to his courage.

In a time of such ignorance of geography on the part of learned men, when America was not so well known as the antarctic continent is to-day, popular notions of the lands to be colonized were yet more strange. New England was long believed to be an island and the same notion prevailed regarding Virginia. Ten years after Jamestown was settled we find Captain Smith assuring his readers that “Virginia is no Ile (as many doe imagine), but part of the continent adjoining to Florida." Official ignorance was probably the last to yield, for almost a century after the beginning at Jamestown, and when almost the whole eastern margin of America had been planted with prosperous English colonies, an order of the Privy Council appointed Dudley Digges a member of the council of the "island of Virginia."

As the mistake made by Columbus, through the common misapprehension in his time of the size of the earth, had left behind an almost ineradicable passion for a way to Japan and China through the American continent, so the vast treasures of gold and silver, which the avaricious Spaniards had drawn from Mexico and Peru, produced a belief in the English mind that a colony planted anywhere in America would find gold. Here, too, the geographer Hakluyt, and many others were ready with ingenious and learned deductions from very slender premises. If an Indian had been seen wearing a head-piece of copper which "bowed easily," this flexibility proved it to be tarnished gold. If a savage told a voyager that the copper of a certain country was too soft for use, was somewhat yellow, or was of a good luster, it was enough to demonstrate that the country was rich in the precious mineral. The geographer Purchas even expounds the divine purpose in thus endowing a heathen land with gold,- that the Indian race might, "as a rich bride, but withered and deformed, find many suitors for love of her portion," and thus the pagans be converted. Again and again ships were laden with shining earth or worthless stones, believed to contain gold even by the clumsy goldsmiths who were sent with the explorers as assayers or experts. The seekers after South Sea passages brought home ship-loads of glittering earth from arctic islands,-"fool's gold," as the mineral is now called. Captain Newport well-nigh ruined the Jamestown plantation by consuming its supplies while he' took a lading of the "dust-mica," so abundant in the Virginia sands. One of the earliest of the documents relating to the planting of colo

nies, in the English State Paper Office, is the fragment of a report about America, made in 1580, the extravagance of which puts burlesque out of countenance. The American women are spoken of as "wearing great plates of gold covering their whole bodies like armour." "In every cottage" pearls were to be found, "and in some houses a peck. About the bar of St. Maries"-perhaps the Chesapeake, so called at that time-are to be seen fire-dragons, “which make the air very red as they fly." In these we recognize the fire-fly, while the buffalo is no doubt intended by an animal " as big as two of our oxen." But these faint resemblances to truth vanish quickly when we learn that the streets in this region are broader than the London streets, that there are banquetinghouses built of crystal, with pillars of massive silver and some of gold. "Pieces of clean gold as big as a man's fist are found in the heads of some of the rivers; there are also iron and silk-worms in abundance, and one mountain, thirty leagues farther northward, is very rich in mines."

The proposed conversion of the natives to Christianity was often a cloak to more selfish enterprises, but religious zeal was also an active motive at the time of the first planting of North America. Europeans regarded the Indians sometimes as sun-worshipers, but more commonly as worshipers of Satan himself, who, through the conjuring of the pow wow, gave them knowledge of distant and future events, and frequently appeared to them visibly, either as a calf, or in some other beastly form.

The early explorers, from the time of Cabot, had a habit of kidnapping Indians without scruple, and transporting them to England, where the sight of such barbarians served to quicken greatly the interest in American adventures and colonization, and particularly to awaken a philanthropic desire to civilize and Christianize a people who were so benighted as not to wear trowsers. The Indian man and woman taken over by Frobisher excited great attention, and pictures of them were made for the queen and others. When Weymouth, on his return from the coast of Maine, in 1605, brought into Plymouth five kidnapped Indians, with "all their bows and arrows," and with two beautiful birch canoes, Sir Ferdinando Gorges took them into his own custody, and joyfully declared that "this accident had been the means of putting life into all our plantations." In our age of great commercial activity and extended geographical knowledge one can form but a weak conception of the excitement caused by Weymouth's reports, and