ART. III.-GYPSIES AND RELIGION

THE appearance in our cities of an evangelist who prides himself upon being Gypsy by birth and upbringing, and who received the call to service when an unlettered lad, living the wandering life of his people, is an event of some historical significance. The Christian community throng to hear him, and are enriched by his message; his mission, indeed, seems rather to be among the saints than the sinners. While he awakes enthusiasm and stimulates religious life, conversions are comparatively few and the accessions to the church are insignificant, in number at least. He marks a definite change in the theological attitude of our Protestant churches; and his work must be regarded as primarily intensive rather than extensive. The theology he preaches is a theology of life more than of doctrine; he wholly drops the old outworn terms that meant so much to our forefathers of the Reformation, and speaks to us in the language of to-day, a language permeated with the scientific activity and realism of the age.

The Gypsies came into Europe at the same time as the scholars from Constantinople who started the Renaissance, that influx of pagan thought and ideals which found its reaction in Protestantism. The Renaissance defied nature and extolled the senses; it was a return to the life of the Muses and the Graces. The Greek temple was no place for worship; it was not an auditorium, but a shrine. The highest in the life of Greece was in the open, among the trees and under the blue sky. With the Hebrews, the temple and the synagogue were the holy places and religion abandoned the groves and the glades as homes of paganism. Both the Reformation of Luther and Calvin and the CounterReformation of Loyola and Xavier were a reaction against the Renaissance; they were a return to the holiness of the temple, a call to the Christian auditorium. The God they proclaimed was a God of the sanctuary, whose favor was to be gained by right doctrine and instruction in and through the sanctuary, and by special observances, at stated times.

Romany, the true name of the Gypsies-which is a nickname -is generally supposed by scholars to be identical with Romani,

people of the Eastern Roman empire, who were not Saracens nor Goths. We can trace them back to Armenia, historically, and all the linguistic and other indications would point to an Indian origin. The Western movement of Mohammedans which culminated in the capture of Constantinople in 1453 drove before it this restless race of wanderers, one division passing up the valley of the Danube and reaching France by way of Bohemiahence the name "Bohemian"; the other division taking a more southerly course by way of the Levant and Egypt until they arrived in Spain. The Spanish Gypsy in known as Gitano, or Egyptian, but he calls himself Zincalo, a term supposed to come from a Greek word, apothinganoi, "touch-me-not," applied to certain heretics, people who were out of the fold. This is the German Zigeuner and is found wherever the race wanders, in some form or other. In Hungary, where the Gypsies are found in great numbers and have profoundly affected the national music, the Magyar name is Cigány, which comes closer to the Greek than the other forms. Of course, the lisped Greek th in apothinganoi becomes a sibilant in most other European languages; hence Cigány.

When George Eliot was writing her Spanish Gypsy fortyodd years ago, the origin and psychology of the Gypsy people were not of prime interest to her. Certainly she did not regard them as coming into the sphere of religious inquiry, except in a negative way. To quote from one of her characters, the Gypsy chief, Zarca: Yes, wanderers whom no god took knowledge of To give them laws, or fight for them, or blight Another race to make them ampler room; Who have no whence or whither in their souls, No dimmest lore of glorious ancestors

To make a common hearth for piety.

There were two motives at the back of this literary effort of hers. A visit to Spain had greatly interested her in the romance of the peninsula, and she longed to give this a poetic expression. Again, she had been pondering over the subject of Destiny and the call of Duty to the individual. She states in a paper found among her manuscripts:

My reflections brought me nothing that would serve me except that moment in Spanish history when the struggle with the Moors was attain

ing its climax, and when there was the gypsy race present under such conditions as would enable me to get my heroine and the hereditary claim on her among the gypsies. I required the opposition of race to give the need for renouncing the expectation of marriage. I could not use the Jews or the Moors, because the facts of their history were too conspicuously opposed to the working out of my catastrophe. Meanwhile the subject had become more and more pregnant to me. I saw it might be taken as the symbol of the part which is played in the general lot by hereditary conditions in the largest sense.

Her interest in the Gypsies was thus entirely of a secondary kind. She obtained the main facts of their history and habits from a learned German writer, and took care that she was not inaccurate in her details. But the other two questions are always in the forefront of her treatment; the individual in the face of Destiny, as represented by hereditary claims; and the witchery of the Spanish landscape, aglow with romantic memories. George Eliot was a devotee of a cult that would make religion come wholly within the sphere of the intellect; to wit, the creed of Positivism. The Spanish Gypsy is a tragedy in terms of this cult. It is a deification of Duty. She says in the same passage from which I have quoted:

There is no moral “sanction” but this inward impulse. The will of God is the same as the will of other men, compelling us to work and avoid what they have seen to be harmful to social existence.

Now Gipsy Smith's religious message represents the reaction against this excessive intellectualism, this reduction of the deepest things of life to the logic of humanity. His Christianity is not elaborate scheme of salvation, but a simple mysticism, the presence of the divine life in the human heart. The only deity that will appeal to a Gypsy soul such as his is a God of Nature and Life, after whom the whole creation yearns.

The troublous times of the Reformation were unfavorable to the Gypsies In the easy-going times of the Renaissance they were granted a place in society as vagrant peddlers and tinners. This trade indeed became so entirely theirs that the terms Caird, Gypsy, and tinner-changed to tinker or even tinkler (Zincalo?)-came to be synonymous. This is why we are inclined to class John Bunyan as a Gypsy; otherwise how could he have been a tinker's son? His astonishing imagination has in it something of an

Oriental glow, differentiating it from other Puritan literature. His Pilgrimage is God's life in the open, such as would naturally have come from a soul whose ancestors from far back had refused to sleep elsewhere than under the blue canopy of heaven. And we must remember that the sermon entitled "The Religion of Common Life,” called by Ruskin the finest pulpit deliverance of the nineteenth century, was the masterpiece of a Gypsy, the Rev. John Caird, D.D., who became professor of divinity in the University of Glasgow, and later its principal. When he preached it for the first time at Balmoral Castle, in the year 1856, before Queen Victoria and the prince consort, it made a profound profession. Caird's dark complexion, raven-black hair, and glowing eyes betokened his race. I remember him well in the university chapel.

This famous sermon, which would not have been printed but for the royal insistence, well repays analysis. Taking as his text the passage in Rom. 12. 2, "Not slothful in business, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord," the preacher proceeds to declare that, while it is comparatively easy to be religious in the church, the greatest difficulty of our Christian calling is to be religious in the world, to carry our good and solemn thoughts and feelings into the throng and thoroughfare of daily life. It appears sometimes "as difficult to maintain the strength and steadfastness of religious principle and feeling when we go forth from the church into the world as it would be to preserve an exotic in the open air in winter." We are prone to make religion altogether "a Sunday thing a robe too fine for common wear, but taken out solemnly on state occasions, and solemnly put away when the state occasion is over." It is thus jostled aside in the daily throng of life as if it had no business there. But religion, he goes on to say, is primarily for the ordinary man. The salvation the gospel offers is not the prize of a lofty intellect, but of a lowly heart. The rude, the untutored, the toilworn, if they have wit enough to guide them in the commonest round of daily toil, have wit enough to learn thẹ way to be saved. For religion is the art of being and of doing good. "Religion is not a perpetual moping over good booksreligion is not even prayer, praise, holy ordinances; these are necessary to religion . . . but . . . is mainly and chiefly the

glorifying God amid the duties and trials of the world." So far is religion from being incompatible with business activities, it "consists not so much in doing spiritual or sacred acts as in doing secular acts from a sacred or spiritual motive." (The italics appear in the printed sermon.) Again,

The heavens are not open to the believer's call only at intervals. The grace of God's Holy Spirit falls not like the fertilizing shower, only now and then; or like the dew on the earth's face, only at morning and night. But at all times on the uplifted face of the believer's spirit the gracious element is ready to descend.

There occurs a rich passage almost at the end of the closing paragraph:

The world's scenes of business may fade on our sight, the noise of its restless pursuits may fall no more on our ear, when we pass to meet our God; but not one unselfish thought, not one kind and gentle word, not one act of self-sacrificing love, done for Jesus' sake, in the midst of our common work, but will have left an indelible impress on the soul which will go out with it to its eternal destiny.

This is almost exactly Gipsy Smith's message, who in his trilogy of three prime requisites in the Christian character lays emphasis first on Loyalty "for Jesus' sake"; then on Purity; and, lastly, on Wisdom. The call is rather to those within than those without the church.

Great as was John Caird as a preacher and a thinker, his brother Edward exercised a still wider influence as a teacher. During several decades at Glasgow University, in the important chair of moral philosophy, he molded and inspired the students in a wonderful way he was facile princeps as an intellectual influence in the institution, nay, even in Scotland. After infusing a new vigor into philosophy, touching it with Oriental imagination, and replacing for good the humdrum Scottish philosophy of Reid, he removed to Oxford and became the successor of Jowett at Balliol College. This, the most influential scholastic post in the British empire, was actually held by a Gypsy! These may be regarded as brilliant, though not solitary, exceptions to the general character of the Gypsy, who rejected even a common education and preferred to live as a letterless vagrant, never allowing his children to enter a parish school. Naturally the race found its proclivities bringing it more and more into disreputable associa