Thou art the King of all lands and all peoples. Let down thy strength among us to save us. Abide with us; we love thee. Put good thoughts into our hearts and mouths; save her and make her well who is sick [Mrs. Richards]. Help her much. Show us thy path, for we stay in the forest like animals. Keep us; save us from within and without. Wash us thoroughly with strong soap; we love thee, care for us. We ask it earnestly in Christ's name. Amen." Perengi, twenty-five years old, says: "I have often left the King, but I have eaten bitter fruit. I have often stayed well in my heart. I am happy now. I am now the King's. I love his word and his law. I will not again leave him.” At Umtwalume, in the Zulu Mission, Mr. Wilder reported, April 2, 1888, that 116 inquirers had announced themselves within a few months. They have dedicated a new church, into which they will be able to crowd six hundred people. At the dedication thirty-nine were received on confession of faith, many of them parents, two were restored. and thirteen infants were baptized. — Mr. Wilder and Mr. Bates, of the East Central African Mission, had, June 15, 1888, reached the island of Chiloan, on their expedition to Umzila's country. "It is sad to learn that the Portuguese steamer which landed these brethren on their missionary errand landed also hundreds of cases of gin. Half of the porters who brought the cargo ashore were women, many of them with babes on their backs, who were driven to their task by an Arab, horsewhip in hand. These women marched into the water up to their waists, received their loads from the side of the dhow, and carried them to the house of the Portuguese governor. No food was given these porters from morning to night, but in the afternoon whiskey was dealt out to all. Will not Christendom make its voice heard so that these atrocities shall cease?"

The last Annual Report of the American Board says of Africa:

:

"The three missions of the Board in this great continent are well placed, and have a wide and effectual door open before them. The older mission among the Zulus in Natal has suffered a serious depletion of its forces, and calls loudly for immediate reinforcement. The four veteran missionaries, who have been nearly or quite forty years in service, are all either absent from the field on furlough, or laid aside by serious illness. Two of the remaining seven are also temporarily withdrawn from the field. In spite of these discouragements we have good reports from all parts of the work, and a better outlook for the future than in many years past. The churches have been revived and enriched in numbers and Christian devotion. The schools have especially shared in the Christian awakening, and thus there is the prospect that this blessing will be felt for long years to come. Two native helpers have gone from the Umzumbe to Matabele Land, to cooperate with the laborers of the London Missionary Society there; a beginning of that work in behalf of kindred people which is opening before the churches of this mission throughout a vast territory northward to the Zambesi. An exploration is now making by members of this mission in the Gaza country, where new fields for missionary labor, it is hoped, may be found and entered at once.

"It is an extremely interesting fact to find the Zulu language so widely diffused, and the regions occupied by those who use this tongue so accessible. Nothing can give a greater value to the missionary work in Natal, or react more powerfully upon the religious life of the native churches, than this providential call to bear the gospel far beyond their own borders to kindred peoples and tribes, and thus to take their part in Christianizing the heart of Africa.

"The East African Central Mission, though few in numbers, makes a good report for the year in schools and evangelistic work, and in the translation

of the Scriptures. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are already translated and in the hands of the natives, and other books for schools are in preparation. A goodly number at each station give evidence of penitence and faith in Christ, and are under careful instruction to prepare them for baptism and church organization. Miss Jones, of Fisk University, the first unmarried colored woman to be commissioned by the Board, is proving herself well fitted for her work as a teacher here."

Messrs. Bates and Wilder have at last succeeded in securing the consent of Gungunyanu, king of the Gaza country, in southeast Africa, to admit them to an audience. There are such rumors of gold mines, that he has been afraid to give any encouragement to white men to visit him. He is familiar with the Portuguese, but he calls them women, in contrast with the virile and aggressive Anglo-Saxons and Germans. The explorers are very much pleased to have their expectations fully confirmed, that Zulu would be found a language in general use. The king seems to make it a part of his policy to enforce the teaching of it. There are two other great languages, the Isi Senji, spoken from the Buzi to the Sabi, and the Isi Nhlwenga, from south of the Sabi. This, Mr. Wilder thinks, is probably the Sheitswa of Mr. Ousley. There are a few minor languages, and north of the Buzi and Punge to the Zambesi the Senna language is spoken by a tributary nation who only occasionally speak the Zulu. The Isi Nhlwenga is closely allied to the Zulu.

The kingdom of Gungunyanu "practically extends from the Zambesi to the Limpopo, and from the sea to Matabele Land. The centres of the pure Zulu-speaking population are at the King's about the headwaters of the Buzi, and at Baleni on the Limpopo, not very far from Delagoa Bay. So far as we have come in contact with the natives outside of Portuguese influence we find them very cordial and eager to have missionaries among them. We have no definite idea as yet about the population of the kingdom, but if we can judge by that along the Buzi it is very great. The banks here are one continuous garden, with villages every few rods, but not extending far into the plain. The soil is very rich, and would support an immense population. Although we have been for six weeks in what is called the unhealthy portion of the country, we have so far escaped any touch of fever." They have been careful to use all precautions. The Gaza people, it seems, are not mainly of Zulu race, but are more and more inclined to use the Zulu language. The result of this attempt to settle among them will be seen below.

It

The "Missionary Herald" for December, while justly remarking that some of the measures proposed by Cardinal Lavigerie for the repression of the slave-trade are inadequate, and others fantastic, cordially acknowledges the good service done by the Archbishop of Algiers in arousing the conscience of Christendom, and in pouring a flood of accusing light upon the inherent complicity of Mohammedanism with this abomination. seems that the Turkish minister at Brussels, Cathareorody Effendi, acknowledging the guilt of Mohammedans in this matter, protested that the Cardinal ought not to make Mohammedanism itself responsible. But Mgr. Lavigerie, who has been in constant intercourse with Mohammedans for thirty years, gives a crushing reply. He says, that he does not know in all Africa a Moslem state, great or small, whose sovereign does not permit, and more commonly practice, slave-hunting; that it is only Mohammedans who now organize these hunts; that where restrained. by Christian law, Moslems universally refuse their moral concurrence

with this; that slave-marts, tolerated by the Turkish authorities, are found in a large number of places in Africa and Asia, belonging to the Ottoman Empire. The Cardinal says, moreover, that he has never known a cadi who gave a judgment respecting slavery or the slave-trade in which he did not assume. as of course, that it is sanctioned by the Koran; and that he has never known any theological teacher of the Mohammedans who failed to recognize them as sanctioned by the Koran for true believers as against infidels.

Whether this Cathareorody Effendi is a Moslem or not, I do not know. Turkey prefers as her envoys to Christian powers a class of nominally Christian Greeks, who, as Mr. Freeman says, have been among the most unscrupulously servile instruments of Turkish brutality and Moslem fanaticism. The truth is: as Christianity is the true development of Israel, Islam, as Ewald says, is Israelism perverted into hopeless moral corruption. When shall we be willing to recognize that there are cancerous growths in religion, which it is the duty of the world to cut out? The profession of Mohammedanism no one thinks of forbidding, but of abating its abominations.

The "Herald" for December extracts from the "Free Church Monthly" a more particular account of the evidence referred to above, that the gospel is practically laying hold of the Boers in their relations to the blacks.

"Three years ago a religious awakening began among these Boers in the northern part of Natal, and the genuineness of this interest was shown by their desire to reach the Zulus, whom they had regarded as little better than animals. There are now fifteen preaching places where the gospel is proclaimed, and which Mr. Scott says are simply the farmhouses of the Boers. He speaks of seeing eighty Boers and three or four hundred Zulus gather together for worship. The Zulus come from kraals and villages, both old and young, some clothed, but most of them heathen in their blankets. Over one hundred in Greytown have been formed into a native church in connection with the Dutch church. This work is now being carried forward under the direction of a committee of the Dutch farmers, employing three native evangelists. One of these evangelists is the son of the Zulu warrior who in 1836, at the signal from Dingaan, the cruel tyrant, fell upon the Dutch leader Retief, and his party of about seventy men, murdering them all in cold blood. This father still lives, and is a member of the Christian Church, and listens gladly to his son as he preaches the gospel of peace."

After everything had appeared so hopeful for extending missionary work into Gungunyanu's kingdom, the final interview with the king dashed all these hopes. A single school, of thirty scholars, had been opened by the Portuguese, and on the ground of this they claimed to have a mission already established in the kingdom, although there had been no religious instruction whatever given. The king's sentence was : "Tell those who sent you, your feet have delayed too long; had you been the first here to mourn the death of my father, yours would be the place now occupied by the Portuguese. They first came to mourn the death of my father. They are my teachers, and the teachers of my people. I cannot manage two sets of teachers at one and the same time." French or German Catholics might have been expected to take hold of the work in earnest, but who can trust the Portuguese? They are not likely to be anything else than mere dogs in the manger. It does not appear that they have a single priest in the kingdom.

The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel has missions in South

Africa, and so have the Wesleyans, that is the English Methodists. But both are accused of somewhat reckless encroachments upon other churches: the English High Churchmen, of course, from their wellknown disdain of all other missionaries in British territory, as both schismatics and dissenters; the Wesleyans, from the disposition which they have brought with them from the circumstances of their origin to look doubtfully upon the Christianity of others, but especially upon that of the German Lutherans, who have a good many missionaries in South Africa. It may be that the people of both the High Churchmen and the Wesleyans are genuine gains from heathenism. But a taint of suspicion resting upon their results makes us less inclined to inquire into them, and more inclined to reserve our inquiries into their labors for fields of which they have the prior occupancy, and in which, therefore, they have the best right. As respects the High Churchmen, or Anglo-Catholics, if that is what we are to call them, the broad fraternity of the Universities' Mission shows how entirely practicable it is for them to avoid schismatical intrusions under the name of opposition to schism upon other men's line of things made ready to their hand. Bishop Selwyn, too, when in New Zealand, although he represented this school of Churchmanship, or something not far from it, declared that St. Paul's principle, of proclaiming the gospel only where Christ had not been proclaimed before, was one which he had religiously made his own. Better proof this of his being in the apostolic succession than if he could have established an unbroken line of ordinations up to St. Paul himself, which Cardinal Newman concedes to be something impossible without a miracle. For, as Origen says, "He that has Peter's virtues has Peter's keys." High Churchmanship and Low Churchmanship are both very good things, but only within the limits of Christianity.

THE CONGO FREE STATE.

The English Baptists have twenty-two missionaries and one female school-teacher on the Upper Congo. These, of course, are as yet principally doing pioneer work. They have, in their little steamer The Peace, done a good deal of exploring work. One of them, Mr. Grenfell, in a speech made in England in 1887, put the amount of navigable waterway on the Congo and its branches at not less than 6,000 miles. He says: "What we know concerning the Congo and its tributaries proves it to be one of the most wonderful systems of natural canals on the face of the globe. If we take a quarter of a million of square miles, occupying the central portion of the basin of the Congo, we can find no place within that area more than fifty miles away from one of the navigable arteries. If we extend that area to half a million square miles, we cannot reach any point more than a hundred miles away from one of the navigable channels in communication with Stanley Pool. These channels are the routes by which commerce and civilization and Christianity — and we must take care that Christianity is not the least of the trio have access to the Southern Soudan, to the Egyptian Soudan, to the Empire of Uganda, to Tanganyika, and the Albert Nyanza, and to the Empire of Muatayamvo in the South."

Mr. Grenfell protests energetically against the shallow notion that anybody will do for a missionary to the negroes. An inferior man will not do for a missionary anywhere. Only a strong personality can break through the narrowness of imagining his tribal peculiarities to be iden

tical with human nature. A missionary to the negroes need not always be what is specifically called intellectual. But a strong will and strong good sense he must have, for strong good sense is almost specifically a negro characteristic. "Uncle Remus" is a true type of the negro. Wherever a pious weakling may be in place, it certainly is not in Africa. And, as Mr. Grenfell suggests, the negroes are not, as some call the Indians, evening race." They seem to be rather a morning race. Africa belongs to them in the future as in the present. Men of a master-instinct for laying foundations will find enough to engage them to the full in the Dark Continent.

"an

Banza Manteka is one of the stations of the American Baptists. Mr. Grenfell says of it: "When I last past through Banza Manteka, three years ago, it was the stronghold of many gross forms of superstition. It seemed the most unpromising place on the whole route, and one of the last places to give us any hope of a harvest. It seemed as though the Lord had chosen the most unpromising places to reveal Himself in might and power, and to encourage us to go forward. As we neared the town, before entering into it, we encountered a band of native evangelists' going forth,' constrained alone by their loyalty to their Lord. They had not been sent by the missionary; he did not know anything about it till we told him we had met the men. When we got inside the town we found ourselves in quite a native Christian atmosphere, — people had forsaken their old state, they had burnt their idols, and were earnest and attentive to all the outward observances of Christianity." -The "heavy and bewildering losses" of European missionaries on the Congo have been a great drawback. How far acclimatization is possible and what is to be done in view of its limitations are very grave questions. The case of Mr. Shindler, one of the English Baptist missionaries, seems at least to show that it ought to be treated as a very grave offense in a white man on the Congo to walk where he can be carried. Americans, used to torrid summer heats, will probably endure better than EnglishThe following is a little touch of description: "Presently we came to daylight, and emerged on a narrow ridge. On one side a steep forest slope, on the other a grand sight- a gorge 900 feet deep and half a mile wide, extending far into the plateau; the blackest forest everywhere in it and on its sides, except a cliff of gleaming white sand of about 200 feet in height, commencing from about 500 feet up. In front lay the beautiful valley of the Ntsele, flanked on either side by the plateau, 1,100 feet above the river."

men.

A convert of the Baptists, named Nlemvo, had "learnt that his uncle was dead, and that he was once more chief of his town, and a noble of Congo, having the style and title of Ngudi-ankama Tulante. But he made up his mind to have nothing to do with it, for he had already found that to be chief he must follow country custom, and authorize, indeed instigate, witch palavers. His people would not have him as a Christian, and he would not sell his soul for the chieftainship of an African village." - Nlemvo's mother had just died, and he gave her an honorable funeral, which is thus described: "The body was brought out of the house wrapped in leaves and twenty-four yards of cloth as the first wrapping. Then they spread on the ground Nlemvo's part of the shroud, one hundred and fifty yards of cloth; with this the body was enshrouded, and then outside of all came my gift of six yards of cream satin, fastened with scarlet braid. The firing of guns had announced to