at least twenty millions sterling, instead of two every year on the many-sided manifestation of Christ to the nations. But the world is a hundred years older in numbers and wealth since he wrote.

If the cost of administration is not put too high at 834 per cent. if the cost of mission literature, for instance, is not included and only salaries, which we doubt then criticism may here do a service to all the churches and societies. It should go farther, and they should grapple with the whole question of missionary remuneration at home and abroad. The work of evangelization abroad has become so extended, and the progress of civilization in most of the lands has been so rapid, that some may be driven for a living to the one career which demands, as the first condition of success, selfabnegation. The foreign missionary all through the century has been, and is still, the noblest, because most disinterested, worker for the race in the spirit of his Master. What has been called missionaryism is, of all forms of selfishness and hypocrisy, the most repulsive and pernicious. The century has, on the whole, been free from it. In this, as in most other questions, the Church has been impressed by the economic and spiritual teaching and example of Carey. The danger of the harvesting, which will soon qualify the joy of the reapers, is that that teaching and example may be ignored. generally, the whole subject of missionary finance, abroad as well as at home, needs constant review. If the pioneers and founders of missions made a mistake, it was in their inability always to realize the fact that they were founding not small or individual congregations of their own sect, but the Church of India, of Kafraria, churches of the future, which must support themselves, become missionary agencies in their turn, and live their own spiritual life. The later churches of Burma (Karens), China, and Japan, are able to profit by early mistakes. If not the teaching of Christ himself on this point, then at least the comparatively large sums which the converts used to spend on their own heathenism should be a measure of their Christian self-sacrifice.

More

We know no direct results of the century's Foreign Missions more significant and satisfactory than these two: (1) That in 1884 there were no fewer than 2,322 ordained native ministers, or nearly as many as the whole number of foreign missionaries, officers of an army of 26,637 native workers of other kinds, catechists and teachers; (2) that the number of native communicants was 769,201, and that they had increased in the year by one-fifth. The two together mean that, at the

present rate of increase, in this year, the ninety-fifth since the first Englishman went out as a missionary, there are outside of Christendom Reformed Christian communities more than three millions strong, led by 2,500 ordained ministers of their own speech. In India alone, the census of 1881 showed nearly two millions of Christians of all kinds, and an increase of the reformed native Christians at the rate of 86 per cent. in the decade. The growth of the dark races who are coming under the power of Christianity is beginning to form a striking parallel to the increase of the English-speaking races to whom they have been entrusted for their civilization in the highest sense.

What Foreign Missions have done all through the past century has been to supply the spiritual force, the living purity, the civilizing salt to the expansion of England. That the great fact of modern English history, the increase of our race, is for good and not for evil, is due to this Divine enterprise. The men it has called forth, often from the humblest social positions, and has sent to live and die for the peoples that sit in darkness, are at last coming to be known and appreciated even side by side with those whom the world delights to honour. Schwartz, Carey, and Duff, Henry Martyn, Bishop Heber, and Bishop Cotton, Judson, John Wilson, and a living apostle like Bishop Caldwell, are men whom even the most secular historians will place beside the greatest of India's rulers, like Wellesley and Bentinck, Edwardes* and the Lawrences who delighted to honour them. Are there worthier names in our national biography than those of Williams, and the other martyrs of Eromanga, of Marsden, Geddie, and Hunt, of Selwyn and Patteson, who have taken. possession of the Australasian and the Pacific Islands for Christ? Not in the annals of the early Church while it still could recall the human presence of the Son of Man, and tell of the wonders of the first Pentecost, as heard from the lips of the Virgin and the Apostles, shall we find more or better witnesses for the truth than those whose graves have already marked Africa with so many milestones. Livingstone, whose heart lies at Bangweolo, near where the Congo rises, while his body is in Westminster Abbey; Robert Moffat's daughter, his wife, Robert Moffat himself, Mackenzie, Janson, James Stewart, and many others in the region around Lake Nyasa; not a few heroes, worn out like Mullens, or slain like the latest victim, Bishop Hannington, on the weary way from the east * Mr. Ruskin has at last done justice, in his Knight's Faith,' to Herbert Edwardes.

coast to Tanganyika's and Nyanza's waters-these, and such as these, who have fallen in the Congo valley and amid the blood-stained villages of the Western Coast for the slaves, have been the missionary offerings, annually renewed, for the highest good of the many lands entrusted to England. If the churches, that is, each member of them, prove equal to the charge given them, and the calls made upon them by the course of history, the truth will be recognized, as since Abraham it has been divinely taught, that on Foreign Missions depends the future of each race.

GEORGE SMITH.

ART. VII.-Church Reform versus Disestablishment.

'ALL Establishments die of dignity. They are too proud to think themselves ill, and to take a little physic,' wrote Sydney Smith in The Edinburgh Review' three-quarters of a century ago. But, if they were true then, it is true no longer; for, according to one bishop, * a mad craze,' and according to another, † an almost panic-stricken desire for sweeping measures of Church reform,' has taken possession of many members of the Church of England. If, however, the clergy are losing their heads upon the subject,' the dementia is a thing of but very recent date; for there is truth as well as exaggeration in the statement made last autumn, that 'six months ago not a soul troubled himself about it, except to desire in a decorous sort of way that a few manifest abuses might be remedied without much delay-(say) not more than a few years,' whereas 'now everybody is screaming for reform.'§

To what is the change attributable? In part, no doubt, to the growth of conscientious feeling among members of the Episcopal Church; in part, to an increase of spiritual life and activity which have rendered intolerable abuses and restrictions formerly regarded with indifference, or endured with passive submissiveness. Public opinion also, which in recent years has displayed an Argus-eyed propensity to spying out evils of every kind, has not, in reforming the State, been indifferent to the need for reform in the Church also. But it is idle to deny as there is a disposition in some quarters to do that the loud cry lately raised for extensive changes,

*Bishop of Peterborough,
Church Review,'

Bishop of Lichfield.
Ibid.

both structural and administrative, in the English Established Church, has been the result of a conviction that nothing else will avert the dreaded catastrophe of Disestablishment and Disendowment. For proof of that fact it is necessary only to refer to some of the incidents which occurred in connection with the General Election which occurred at the close of last year.

The franchise had been extended, and it was known that the redistribution of seats would effect immense electoral changes; yet the upholders of the Establishment made no sign of unusual alarm, and even the declared intentions of the Liberation Society in regard to the approaching election were regarded with composure, if not with contempt. Suddenly, however, it was discovered that the great majority of the Liberal candidates already in the field-and they were unusually numerous-had, in some form or other, declared themselves to be favourable to a policy of Disestablishment, if not in England, at least in Scotland or in Wales, or in both. Then it was that the columns of The Times,' which had previously been almost silent on the subject, were thrown open to Churchmen of all shades who could, by means of fact or argument, strong invective or passionate rhetoric, help to thwart the designs of Liberationists and to strengthen an institution now felt to be in serious peril. And the letters which appeared were of two kinds; the one serving in a curious way to neutralize the effect produced by the other. While one set of correspondents lauded the Establishment in terms befitting only an admittedly perfect institution, another set exposed its weaknesses, its abuses, and its failures, with a thoroughness which could not have been exceeded by the most painstaking of Liberationists. Clearly there was no need for these candid Churchmen to exclaim—

O wad some power the giftie gie us

To see oursels as others see us!

for in both keenness and comprehensiveness of vision they could not be surpassed by unfriendly critics outside the pale. It was also equally clear that, in the case of most of these zealous Church defenders,' it was an ideal and not an existing institution which was defended; so that an uninformed reader might have been led to say of the Church Establishment, The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it.' And, coupled with these fatal admissions, came the demand for large and thorough reforms in almost every de

partment of the Church's system, so far as it is affected by its relationship to the State.*

The irresponsible correspondents of The Times' and other journals were but the skirmishers of the army of Church reform-if such a name can be given to so unorganized and heterogeneous a body as those who are now calling for what is, virtually, a reconstruction of ancient ecclesiastical arrangements. Presently collective action and official utterances followed. Memorials, declarations, and manifestoes emanated from various quarters to an extent which, to the general public, has been somewhat bewildering. Bishops have declared themselves in charges, pastorals, or letters. The two Convocations, diocesan conferences, various Church organizations, and the newly constituted House of Laymen,' have discussed the question of Church reform, either in general, or in connection with particular measures; while newspapers specially devoted to Church questions have abounded in letters and articles indicative of the interest which the subject of reform has, among a certain portion of the community, unquestionably excited.

And the practical result, immediate and prospective? That is a question to which, we think, it is already possible to give a reply which will, at least, approximate to the truth. Whether it be the fact or not, as The National Church' with strange exultation asserts, that the mad rush for Church reform has well-nigh spent itself; it is certain that the desire for Church reform is no longer at fever heat, and that, the General Election being over, both the anti-disestablishment cry and the Church reform cry have been heard with less frequency, and less urgency, than when they seemed likely to aid in securing the discomfiture of Liberal and the success of Conservative candidates. The Times' when the election was over, promptly declared that the question was not ripe for immediate treatment by either party in the forthcoming session of Parliament.' The Pall Mall Gazette,' which has done its best to promote a movement for Home Rule in the Church,' and at one time congratulated itself on progress, which it described as being remarkable and likely to be effective,' had no idea that the matter would be treated by the Conservative Government as an immediate question of

* The electoral origin of the recent demand for Church reform was acknowledged in a pastoral letter of the Bishop of Gloucester, in which he said: We haye all great cause for thankfulness that the subject of Church reform has been brought out by the menaces to the Establishment of imprudent politicsans.' There had, he added, been many previous proposals for reform, but they had failed from various causes.