thirty-five hundred years ago. The Glacial Age in the valleys of the Thames and the Somme had ended a short space earlier. We thus fix the date of the Glacial Age. And I do not believe any reply can be made to this.

That remarkable epoch in the geological history of the earth closed certainly less than six or seven thousand years ago in the north of Europe. And there is probably good reason to believe that Mr. Lenormart is right in thinking that the tradition of it is preserved in the venerable records of the Zendavesta. JAMES C. SOUTHALL.

ART. III. REV. WM. TAYLOR AND INDIA MISSIONS. Four Years' Campaign in India. By WILLIAM TAYLOR. London: Hodder & Stoughton. New York: Nelson & Phillips.

THERE are certain great problems in modern missionary work in the light of which this book will be read, and the work of which it is a narrative will be judged. Christian missions to heathen nations are no longer to be considered as an outburst of "puritanical fanaticism," or as a mistaken but harmless benevolence, but rather as the highest manifestation of the "faith, the philanthropy, and the power" of the Christian. Church. Of their ultimate success few persons well informed of their past history and present power and opportunities could be found to seriously doubt. Quite apart from the question of their steady and certain triumph, however, is the specific one, whether a general Christian "awakening" or "revival" is possible among great bodies of heathen people, or whether we may hope for sudden or simultaneous movements toward Christianity among them; and if so, at what stage of Christian endeavor, through what means and methods, and under what circumstances, or with what force and hope, may we use the phrase, "A nation shall be born at once?"

It was because of their hope to find some agency highly adapted to excite such general "awakening" that the India Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church invited Rev. William Taylor to labor with them. After having worked. with them and other missionaries in India, and subsequently independently of them-four years in all--he wrote this book,

which, he says, is "the first published report of a new soulsaving mission in a great heathen country, with specimen incidents and illustrations of the first three years of its eventful life."

The book has been more criticised than the man or his mission work. The "Indian Evangelical Review," for January, 1876, says: "As a Christian workman Mr. Taylor undoubtedly stands far in advance of many; as an historian, at least of his own labors, he falls as far behind." It says, "It is a most unfortunate production," and "regrets that he should have published it." The uncharitableness of the assertions and assumptions concerning other missionary agencies has been considered in bad taste, and as incongruous with Mr. Taylor's Christian professions and known general character. Our writer thinks the "flings" at other missions to be the equivalent of asserting that "their course has been one of failure, their results nothing, their policy a blunder." Exception has also been taken to the irreverence, as it appears to be to some persons, of some of the phraseology. How "God intends to run" this mission work, and "the Holy Spirit being allowed to test his Pauline methods," with much like phrase, is not acceptable to the taste of many people.

On the other hand, there has been much hearty commendation of, and great interest in, the book. To our own taste and judgment the publication of the detailed moral and spiritual history of persons who sought an interview with Mr. Taylor as a spiritual adviser is of very questionable propriety. Yet to many these may be a source of profit.

Incidentally this book treats-and treats pretty fully--of the manners and customs of the people of India; and is, herein, entertaining, instructive, and accurate. (For illustrations, see pages 90, 91, 95, 96, 105, etc.)

The book has the character of a journal of the author, of whom we may safely say that his simplicity, sincerity, selfdenial, integrity, great faith, and devotion to the cause of Christ, have but rarely been questioned; while his tact, his dash, his courage, his perseverance, and his pluck, have attracted the attention and challenged the admiration of men who, besides being without appreciation of his preaching or regard for his piety, downrightly disliked his evangelistic methods. But however excellent, he is too unique to pass uncriticised. His

friends have defended his eccentricities and deficiencies by saying that "he is Taylor," and that "the culture which would remedy his glaring faults" might strip him of the "power to do the peculiar work which God has committed to his hands." There are few but will admit that his faults are of the head, and not of the heart or intention. His renown as a revivalist occasioned his being invited to India. He had seen a great "revival of God" in a half dozen of the West India islands; had, he says, twelve hundred colonists and seven thousand Kaffirs converted in his meetings in South Africa, and had the official report by others of the conversion of six thousand persons at his meetings in Australia.

While laboring in connection with our North India missionaries no such general results attended his efforts. If one may judge from the tone of his entries the review does not seem to have been wholly satisfactory to himself, for he thus summarizes: "A few hundreds of nominal Christians professed to find peace at our meetings, and also a small number of Hindus and Mohammedans, and God gave a fresh divine impulse to the work which thrills on with increasing power year by year." This is scarcely to be considered remarkable success.

There was, however, a great disparity between the other fields in which he had labored and that which he found in India. In those the populations were small, the territory limited, the Christian laborers relatively more numerous, and the people better instructed in Christianity. In the six West India islands on which he labored are five thousand acres of territory, containing a population of about a million, administered to spiritually by three hundred and eighty-six European and colonial missionaries, and among whom the Wesleyan Church alone reckoned some eighty thousand hearers. Religion was in a state of decline; the Wesleyans, he says, had in the six years preceding his visit struck from their Church records the names of six thousand Church members. There was opportunity for revival.

Old Cape Colony and its dependencies, in South Africa, contain twenty-five thousand acres, and have a population, including Zulus and Bechuanas, not reaching two millions, among whom are thirty-five thousand Church members, three hundred and fifty European ministers, and fourteen hundred lay agents -"a proportion of Christian laborers unequaled anywhere in

the heathen world. New South Wales comprises say three hundred thousand acres of land, with a population of but little more than half a million, three hundred thousand of whom are recognized "adherents" of Churches; the average attendance on Christian worship reaching a hundred thousand. An eminent authority says that there is here "a larger proportion of well-educated people than can be found among the same number of people in the British Isles." In the whole of Australia are eight colonies of English-speaking people, the vast majority of whom are Protestants.

How dissimilar from this India was may be seen at a glance. (1) Here were only six hundred foreign missionaries, with a proportionate number of native agents, in a population approaching three hundred millions, occupying a territory twenty-three times larger than England and Wales, and equal in area to all Europe, exclusive of Russia and Scandinavia. There were (2) the proclivities and prejudices of diverse races. Remnants of two race-waves of Turanian tribes, sustaining a relation to later invaders similar to that of the North American aborigines to the Anglo-Americans, are found in widely separated, and often remote, portions of India. Aryan, Mongul, Portuguese, Dane, French, and Briton have followed, and form at present a mosaic of twenty-one races and thirty-five nations. (3) More than a half hundred languages and dialects add to the hinderances of evangelistic labor. A hundred millions of the people of India are speaking Hindi and Urdu; thirty-six millions use Bengali; to Tamil Telugu and Marathi are to be assigned a population of fifteen millions each; while the Punjab clains but three millions less. Among those of lesser prominence the Canarese claims ten, to the Gujerati are given seven, and to the Oriya five, millions. (4) Diversity of forms of faith and worship add to the complications. Ten thousand Jews are in India. A hundred and fifty thousand descendants of the old fire-worshiping Geubre are present in the Parsee, the merchant prince of India. Seventeen millions engage in the dismal orgies and rayless rites of demonolatry and aboriginal nature-worship; forty millions are fired with the furious fanaticism of the false prophet of Mecca, and follow his green flag ; and one hundred and seventy millions are molded by the principles and practices of Brahmanisın. (5) The influence of the

Indian social organization is not to be discarded in its relation to Christian revival. Partly from religious causes, and partly owing to a highly artificial distribution of labor forces, there exist class divisions of society, which classes think and act with unparalleled compactness. These "castes " are hereditary, the parents and priests through infant marriages perpetuating the distinctions. Property is held by the family as a whole, and violation of caste usages is legal ground of disinheritance. The peace of the dead is dependent on ceremonial observances of the living, which may not be performed when class obligations are omitted. Such a system not only perpetuates institutions, but evils and errors as well. It does more. It destroys independence of action and individuality of thought. It incapacitates for personal assertion. The individual comes to have but little comprehension of the possibility or the duty of the desirability of other action than that of his class. There is but little room for conviction of personal sinfulness when conscience as well as conduct is communal.

Taken all in all-for we have but hinted at the bulk of hinderances to a Christian awakening or revival in India-we do not wonder that Brother Taylor says (p. 75) "the combinations of opposing forces in India probably exceed those of any other part of the globe." But the question still recurs: What is possible to Christian faith and effort in this direction? Taylor says: "The brethren got an idea that I would at once attack the masses in the street and mow them down like grass." Precisely so. This indicates just what it is all-important the Christian Church shall not allow to slip from its thought, and hope, and aim-to wit: the possibility of a simultaneous movement of masses of heathen toward Christianity. Taylor thought the obstacles we have enumerated, combined with the feeble force and low intelligence of a first generation of Christian converts from heathendom, and the antagonistic influences of unworthy representatives of Christian countries, resident in India, offered for the present insuperable obstacles to a general Christian awakening. He says: "We cannot expect very great results among the natives in the presence of a nominal, ineffective Church. If there were no such Church we might hope for immediate results among them; but now our only hope is to make the Church more effective."-P. 69.