led bis followers into Spain, and there, with all the due formalities of an Imperial commission, founded the independent monarchy of the Spanish Goths. The allegiance even of Gaul became nominal; a small portion only of the country retained any practical allegiance to Rome; the Gothic kings of Spain ruled over Aquitaine, and the Franks and Burgundians began to establish themselves in the eastern parts of the country. Armorica for a moment actually fell away, the only spot within the Roman dominion which seems ever to have willingly thrown off the honours or the burdens of the Roman name. How, then, should Britain still cleave to an empire from which its nearer provinces were daily being lopped away? The Roman legions were recalled by Honorius for the defence of nearer interests, and Britain, after more than four hundred years of Roman dominion, was left to shift for itself as it might.

Now comes that great gap in the history of the island, which has no parallel in the history of Italy, or Spain, or Gaul,—the gap which divides Celtic and Roman Britain from our own Teutonic England. Now comes the time of historic darkness, through which we have to grope our way by the flickering light of legend and tradition, helped only by the light one degree less dim of the single chronicler of the vanquished race. No time in European anuals opers a wider field of conjecture, no time gives us less of safe historie ground to walk upon, than the years when Britain had ceased to be Roman and had not yet begun to be English. There is no period that we should be better pleased to know in minute detail, there is none of which the recovery of a single detail is so thoroughly hopeless. And yet our very hack of knowledge is instructive; the thicker the darkness, the clearer is the light that it gives us. It is this very darkness, this very want of knowledge, which shows us, more plainly than anything else, how wide was the difference between the English conquest of Britain and any other Teutonic occupation of a Romanized land. By the light of our darkness, by the teaching of our ignorance, we are

enabled to see that, while the dweller in Gaul is still a Romanized Celt, while the dweller in Spain is still a Romanized Iberian, the dweller in the widest and richest part of the isle of Britain is not a Celt or a Roman, but an Englishman.

At the state of Britain during this time of darkness we can do no more than guess. The fact that the Latin language nowhere survives, that whatever in Britain is not English is still Celtic; the fact that this same state of things can be traced as far back as we can trace anything at all, may possibly show that Britain was less thoroughly Romanized than Gaul and Spain.......After the withdrawal of the Roman legions, everything would tend to weaken the Roman and to strengthen the Celtic element in the country. The cities, the greatest of all Roman elements, would remain Roman still; but with their connection with the imperial centre they lost their connection with one another; they would remain no longer municipalities of a vast empire, but weak and isolated commonwealths in a disorganized and often hostile land. The powers, military and civil, of the Roman magistracy ceased, and there was no established Celtic system on which men could fall back for government and protection. The sad picture which Gildas draws-the picture of utter confusion and anarchy-is no more than was natural in the case. But it is a picture of a Roman province falling in pieces after the central Roman power had been withdrawn, The language is still Roman; Roman not, as in medieval writers, by imitation or affectation, but by genuine retention. Vortigern, in the later story a king, is still in Gildas a Roman duke. But in such a state of things society must have been pretty well brought back to its first elements. The power which for four hundred years had been the only representative of law and government had suddenly vanished. Every city, every district, almost every man, must have had to fight for his own land. The land stood open for any enterprising invader to seize upon, and our fathers were not slow to take advantage of the opportunity which was set before them.

own.

And now, about the middle of the fifth century, began the English conquest of Britain. From the whole coast from Lake Flevo to the Baltic, the tribes of LowDutch speech began to pour into the land which seemed almost to call for conquerors. Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Frisians, other tribes, no doubt, whose names have disappeared, pressed on to have their share in the work. They came not now for mere momentary plunder, for the hope of gain, or for the excitement of warfare; they came to make the land of Britain their The keels of Hengest and Horsa led the way; and as Kent had been the first territory to feel the tread of the Roman invader, as Kent was to be the first to welcome the Roman missionary, so Kent was now the first spot in the isle of Britain where the Teutonic conqueror found himself an abiding home. Whether they entered Kent as mercenaries or as avowed pirates, with or without the consent of the British ruler of the province, when they had once made their way into the country, they abode in it; and they abode in it as its masters. With their landing the history of England begins. It is indeed not till long after that the name of Englaland was established as the geographical name of all Teutonic Britain. But the first settlers themselves, though we read distinctly that their proper tribe name was Jutes, are called English from the beginning, and the name Angel-cyn is used from the first as the common name of all the Teutonic settlers. From that small settlement grew up the English dominion in Britain, and the dominion of Englishmen throughout the world.......

We must never forget how essentially our own settlement in Britain, differing from all the other Teutonic settlements, was a settlement of heathen and barbarian destroyers. The Briton had not, like the provincial of Gaul or Spain, the chance of retaining his life, his personal freedom, the protection of his national law, the possession of a certain fixed share of his landed property. He was not overcome by a conqueror of the same religious faith as himself, who respected the political and social order of the land which he invaded.

Before the invasion of our own forefathers all went down. The worshippers of Woden and Thor felt not that reverence which even the Arian Goth felt for the Christian churches and their ministers. Things were now exactly as they were when the heathen Danes came four huudred years later. Christianity, and all that belonged to it, was a special object of hatred to conquerors who had unlearned nothing of heathenism and heathen ferocity. Our one nearly contemporary picture sets before us the overthrow of churches, the slaughter of clergy, as one of the special horrors of the conquest. Our forefathers had none of the reverence of a Goth or a Burgundian for the laws and speech of Rome; they had no sympathy with the municipal organization which Rome had spread over her provinces. They cared nothing for a speech which they did not understand, and for laws which to them were meaningless. To them a city was simply a prison; freedom in their eyes was lost within the boundary of a stone wall; in their view the place for an assembly of freemen was not the temple or the council-house, but the open moor unfettered by barriers, and with no roof but the roof of heaven. went down : art, religion, law, all perished. A Roman town with its walls and towers was, in the first stage of conquest, not a coveted possession, but an obstacle which blocked the path of invasion, which needed more time and labour to overcome than the land around it, and which, when it at last was won, was left, forsaken and dismantled, as a witness of the utter havoc which our fathers knew how to work.......

All

After all, there is no point in which the English conquest of Britain stands more completely by itself than in its religious aspect. What made it so specially fearful in the eyes of the conquered was that it was a heathen conquest. No Anglian or Saxon invader dreamed of bowing himself to the faith of the conquered; no Remigius stood ready to lead Hengest or Cerdic to the waters of regeneration. Our forefathers were converted in the end, and there is no country in the world where the manner of conversion was more

honourable alike to the missionaries and to the converts. But they were not converted, like their brethren on the Continent, by those whom they subdued. All speculations as to the ancient British Church, its origin or its doctrines, concern us, as Englishmen, as little as speculations about the Churches of Armenia or Ethiopia.......Elsewhere Christianity and its hierarchy are continuous. Since the earliest days of the Christian Church, the ancient cities of Italy, Spain, and Gaul have never failed in the unbroken succession of their bishops. Save where modern legislation has wrought a change, their sees still remain where they were fixed in the days of Constantine; the limits of their ecclesiastical jurisdiction still represent the Roman civil divisions of the fourth century. In England there is not a bishopric which can trace its succession further backward than the last days of the sixth century.......

In Britain, then, a great gulf divides us from everything before our own coming. We kept our own laws, our own tongue, our own heathen creed, aud, so far as they have been thrown aside or modified, it has not been through mingling with the conquered, but through later and independent influences. We changed our faith, but not at the hands of the Briton; the Roman

sowed the seed of truth, and the Scot watered it. Our laws and language have, in later times, been greatly modified; but they were modified, not at the hands of the conquered Britons, but at the hands of the conquering Normans. Elsewhere the conqueror was gradually absorbed in the mass of the conquered; here, if any of the conquered survived, they were absorbed in the mass of the conquerors. Elsewhere, in a word, the old heritage, the old traditions, of Rome still survive; here they are things of the dead past, objects only of antiquarian curiosity. All that is most truly living among us, all that most truly forms our national being, we brought in the rude germ from our old home beyond the sea, and it has grown up to an independent life in our new home in the conquered island. The Briton has vanished utterly; the Roman and the Norman have left their ruins, but the Englishman still abides. He has passed from the mouths of the Weser and the Elbe to the Thames, the Severn, and the Humber. And thence he has passed to wider lands in other hemispheres, and has carried the old Teutonic speech, the old Teutonic freedom, to the mighty continent beyond the ocean, and to the far islands beneath the Southern Cross.-Abridged from Magazine.

Macmillan's

As was

through their missionaries; his lot had been cast for the most part in those parts of India where the visits of Wesleyan Missionaries were few and far between. well known, the length and breadth of India were prodigious; British India was probably two thousand miles long, by one thousand five hundred miles wide, containing an area of something like one million five hundred thousand square miles, with a population of two hundred millions. When these facts were remembered, it would be obvious that a man might pass many years of a long life in India without meeting with many of his countrymen whom their friends at home might think were almost neighbours. He had lived in that country for nearly twenty years before he met one of his own brothers. Although they desired to meet each other, they had been unable to do so in consequence of the emergencies of the times and the duties each had to discharge. Although he had not much personal acquaintance with the Wesleyan missionaries whose lot had been cast in India, he could, nevertheless, say that they bore a good report, as did all Protestant missionaries in that country. He believed the Wesleyan Mission lay chiefly in Southern India. He would be sorry to have to decide which body had done most in the cause of God, of Christ, and of religious truth in India; he believed they had all worked with great zeal, great energy, great spirit, and great selfabnegation, and if there was any body of Englishmen par excellence who might be said to go to India from pure motives, without any self-interest, it must be said of the missionaries; for they had to suffer heat, privation, and exile, and there

was nothing in a worldly way to compensate them for the hardships, difficulties, and dangers, which they had to undergo. Not only did they expose their health and wear away their strength in struggling in a distant country among a strange people, but in many cases their lives were held in their hands, and in some cases, to his knowledge, they had laid down their lives after having, in the course of years, done everything they could, directly and indirectly, in religious and secular things -in

any material way-to benefit the people among whom they had laboured. He did not think anything could be said too strongly in favour of the missionaries who had lost their health, and lived and died, in India. He believed, notwithstanding all that the English people had done to benefit that country, the missionaries had done more than all other agencies combined. They had had arduous and up-hill work, often receiving no encouragement, and sometimes a great deal of discouragement, from their own countrymen, and had to bear the taunts and obloquy of those who despised and disliked their preaching; but such had been the effect of their earnest zeal, untiring devotion, and of the excellent example which they had, he might say, universally shown to the people, that he had no doubt whatever that both individually and collectively, in spite of the great masses of the people being intensely opposed to their doctrine,

he had no doubt whatever that, as a body, they were remarkably popular in the country.

In a few words he would en. deavour to give some slight idea of the work of different mission

ary bodies who had come across his path during a career of something like forty years in India. In North-Western India, and more particularly in the Punjaub, he met with missionaries of the Church of England, Presbyterian missionaries from America, missionaries from Germany, Baptist missionaries, and others of various denominations; and he found them all aiming at the one great object of converting the people and spreading the Gospel of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. He could recollect the day when a missionary could not live in the city of Lahore, and no Englishman could resort there without an armed escort; but now Sunday. schools were established, and missionaries were looked up to with respect and gratitude by many individuals among that population. This place was the hot-bed of fanaticism in that part of the country, and now that the missionaries had so far worked among the people as that they sent their children to the missionary school, he need not say that a very considerable and remarkable progress had been made in influencing the minds of those people. If he ran his mind's eye down the Himalaya range to the eastward, he came to the great mountain-tract in the neighbourhood of Thibet. In that part of the country there was a missionary establishment of Germans, consisting of three German missionaries, with their wives and children they were living in a valley from eight thousand to ten thousand feet above the sea, only to be penetrated from passes of fourteen or twenty feet; the place for six months of the year was a perfect Siberia, and they had literally a bare existence; but they

underwent all this for the sake of the cause which they advocated. He need hardly say that nothing but the strongest desire to do good to mankind and convert the people, to civilize them and bring them the truths of the Bible, could induce men to live, and he might say to suffer, as these missionaries had done. They not only endeavoured to teach the people the way of eternal life, but they had a most civilizing and beneficial influence upon them; they gave them hints in agricul ture and horticulture, taught them how to build their houses in the best way, and gave them a knowledge of that which would be most useful to them in life. And not only had they done all this, but they had written a grammar of the Thibetian language, and a considerable part of the Mongolian. It seemed to him perfectly astonishing that men could live and do what these men had done in that wild and barbarous country.

In the city of Lahore, the American missionaries had established themselves, and it had been his good fortune to be acquainted with many of them for nearly the whole of his stay in India; and he must say that they vied in all matters, in all toils and labours, with the missionaries from our own country. In that city these missionaries had established schools at which, when he was residing there, from two hundred to five hundred boys and girls were systematically present; and after a time those schools grew, until, in spite of the missionaries teaching the Christian religion, to which the people were strongly opposed, so highly was the education valued which they obtained from the American Pres