tures and other forms of entertainment will help pass the time for these poor wretches who have nothing to look forward to but a lingering death from a loathsome disease.

A large number of the patients who are in the incipient stages showed, to the ordinary observer, no effects of the disease. There were others who at first glance seemed perfectly normal, but on closer scrutiny revealed the absence of one or more toes or fingers. Others had horribly swollen ears; some had no nose left and were distressing objects; but it was not until we visited the various wards. of the hospital that we saw leprosy in all of its horror. Here were

CONCRETE KITCHEN AND LAVATORY BUILDINGS AND NATIVE RESIDENCES.

dozens of cases so far advanced that they were no longer able to walk; they were lying on their cots waiting for death to come to their release. Some were so emaciated as to look almost like animated skeletons. Others, except for and sometimes in spite of their bandages, looked like horrid, partially decomposed cadavers. It was a sight to make one shudder and devoutly hope that a cure for this awful disease may soon be discovered. These extreme cases are cared for carefully and their last hours are made as comfortable as possible.

As we came out three Catholic sisters entered the women's ward to do what they could for the patients there.

Shortly before leaving the colony we were led to a small concrete structure (near the furnace where all combustible waste is burned), and as the door was opened we saw before us on a concrete slab four bodies so wasted and shrivelled that they seemed scarcely human. These were those who had at last been cured in the only way that this dread disease admits of cure. About forty per month are released by death, and those we saw were the last crop of the here merciful not “dread reaper.”

At the back of the colony we met four lepers of incipient stages carrying a long box on their shoulders. Just as they came abreast of us they set it down, to rest themselves, and we saw that in the box was another "cured" leper. He was being carried to the cemetery not only "unhonored and unsung" but also "unwept": not a single friend nor relative followed his wasted body to its final resting place. After this pitiful spectacle, added to the horrors of the hospital wards, we were not sorry to turn our steps back toward the boat. As we passed through the fence at the "dead line," going away from the colony, we were compelled to wade through a shallow box of water containing a small percentage of carbolic acid which disinfected the soles of our shoes, the only things about us that had come in actual contact with the leper colony. In this way all visitors when they leave the colony are compelled, not to "shake its dust from their feet" but to wash its germs from their soles.

As an antidote for dissatisfaction with one's lot in life, or as an object lesson for the pessimists who claim there is no unselfishness in the world, or as an illustration of the value of the medical missionary, this little island, lying "somewhere east of Suez” between the Sulu and the China Seas, is not easily surpassed.

THE MISSING LOG-BOOK OF ST. PETER'S MISSIONARY JOURNEYS.

BY F. W. ORDE WARD.

ONG ago it was finely and indeed plausibly suggested that the Odyssey represented the log-book of some ancient Greek merchant captain. And it is by no means improbable that Homer, with his knowledge of the sea and his passion for it, was a sailor himself or a seafaring traveler and explorer, who wove into his wonderful epic the adventures of his hero at a time when legend and history

were one and the borderland between fact and fancy was peopled with strange imaginations and the two worlds overlapped each other. The visible and the invisible, the possible and the impossible, were not sharply divided then, and anything or everything might happen at a moment's notice. Inconsistencies and incongruities would not be noticed. As a matter of fact all old histories and myths, and no less all sacred books, abounded in flagrant contradictions. But logic was undreamed of, and poetry in art and science reigned supreme. If a tale was pretty and pleasing, if a marvel only stirred the mind or aroused the emotions of awe and admiration, it soon found a public and a permanency, and went from land to land, acquiring fresh embroidery as it passed. No one criticised, no one objected. Pity or fear or the sense of beauty was touched, and the inventions found a home in the hearts of men, by the marauder's camp fire and the shepherd's tent and at the hearth of the lowliest farmstead. There were giants in those days, but the thoughts of men were the thoughts of children.

Now, as every one can see for himself, the Acts of the Apostles, while being records of the early church, are to a great extent a log-book of St. Paul's missionary travels through the GrecoRoman world. Were these cut out of the book little would remain -it would resemble the play of Hamlet with Hamlet left out. In the Acts, as we have the chronicle, there is no real end apparent. It may fairly be conjectured that Luke intended to write a third book and give us some account of St. Peter's wanderings and evangelization.

Even from the beginning we find traces of various parties in the Christian communities. There was, we are expressly told, a Cephas party and a Pauline party, and even a Christ party, to say nothing of Apollos, but the Pauline party seems to have been much the strongest and most influential. They may have gone so far as to suppress any published account of St. Peter's missionary journeys and activities. We know that the two apostles had their differences, and St. Paul's more aggressive and enterprising character naturally inspired more enthusiasm and attracted a larger body of admirers and followers. In the Acts it is clear enough that the call for a crusade to the Gentiles was given not to St. Paul but to St. Peter. And none can have failed to wonder why the latter afterward disappeared from prominent notice, and how it was that the former "cuckooed" his rival out of his appointed office. St. Paul was no doubt the best speaker and the best writer, and carried all before him with his soul of fire and his infectious zeal.

Unfortunately, as Sir W. Ramsay has remarked, "The earliest Christians wrote little or nothing." Yet we may well believe that St. Peter wrote many more epistles than the first, of which alone we can be sure. Were these destroyed by the more vigorous and combative Paulinists? To say the least, it looks strange, and we may almost think startling, that after the consecration of his charge to the Gentiles and the vivid drama of his experience with Cornelius St. Peter simply drops out of the story and subsides into obscurity and insignificance, eclipsed by the exploits of St. Paul and silenced by the noisy clamor of the Paul party. In one chapter, the tenth, St. Peter is everything and from that point he becomes practically nothing.

And yet here and there we get bright glimpses of his energetic presence and power in the mission field. Even before his call, we discover him busily at work, Acts ix. 32, “And it came to pass, as Peter passed through all quarters, he came down also to the Saints which dwelt at Lydda," and we know he was intimate with the Hellenistic Jews. In the famous scene recorded in Acts xv., St. Peter himself in so many words claims with all boldness the apostleship to the Gentiles. He evidently smarted under the ascendancy of St. Paul and resented his somewhat selfish predominance. "Men and brethren, ye know how that a good while ago God made choice among us, that the Gentiles by my mouth should hear the word of the Gospel and believe."

Anyhow we must all recognize here the presence of a proble:n which remains to be solved, and urgently demands explanation. Hitherto it has been entirely ignored and theologians have been more enamored of the otium than the odium theologicum, by a singular laziness in leaving a difficult question severely alone. The old proverb told us to let the sleeping dogs lie, but not the sleeping dogma "lie."

We gather little help from "The Preaching and Doctrine of Peter," "The Revelation of Peter," and the legends contained in the "Recognitions of Clement." Tradition alone can help us, though we may fairly read between the lines of Acts and expand hints thrown out here and there. Whatever we may think of the Pseudepigraphical literature, it seems absolutely certain that the wildest documents must possess a core of truth. Error can only crystallize round a nucleus of fact, and it is fact that keeps it alive, so that it sometimes appears almost imperishable. As the water-drop condenses out of mist and forms round a particle of dust-to which indeed, as Tyndall taught us, we owe all the beauty of our blue sky

St. Paul was the stormy petrel of the infant church, pugnacious, it may be with a touch of epilepsy that so often accompanies genius and which eugenics would soon stamp out if ever carried into effect, and perhaps a little overbearing and unscrupulous in his missionary methods. But, if we may credit Jerome and Eusebius, St. Peter played even a larger part than St. Paul in the establishment and extension of Christianity at first, though his movements may have been considerably hampered by the companionship of his wife. Though even before his call to the Gentiles, he must have entertained very liberal views, as we know he was lodging for a time with Simon the tanner-that is to say, a man who conducted an unclean trade.

The date of the Acts is somewhere about 62 A. D. So the incidents related there must have been fresh in Luke's mind and memory, though he was plainly obsessed by the masterful personality of St. Paul. And if the author ever wrote a third book, it must have been suppressed at once by the strenuous Paulinists, that the more popular presentation of Christianity, which absorbed so much of the dearly loved mysticism from the East, might reign without a rival. But it is just possible that some day the explorer's pick and spade may unearth a lost Petrine Gospel or missionary log-book in the treasure house of Egypt and the receptive and retentive Fayum.

St. Paul once seems to have felt some conscientious scruples in Romans xv. 30: "Yea, so have I striven to preach the Gospel, not where Christ was named, lest I should build upon another man's foundation." This can only refer to St. Peter's previous work in Rome, which was in the summer of 42 A. D. when he paid his first visit to the imperial city. In his earliest recorded speech at the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Pentecost feast, he addressed "strangers of Rome" among many others, and there were probably some from the synagogue of the Libertines. His friendship with Cornelius and the soldiers of the cohors Italica must have given him a leverage for dealing with men from the governing center of the empire, and the liberty conferred by great benefits bestowed, almost equal to the advantages of his rival's Roman citizenship or freedom. Travelers, merchants, the Graeculus esuriens, the Stoic and Cynic itinerant philosophers, might easily have carried the news of the conversion of a Roman officer to the metropolis. It must even then have made something of a sensation at any rate among the Jews resident there, before the decree of Claudius. But when we consider how well the empire was policed and the great trade routes