God, the Father of all mercies, it hath pleased Him to take from me unto Himself my beloved wife. After an illness of only eight days, she died at five o'clock on the morning of November 8th, 1866, of what appeared to be inflammation of the chest, which commenced with an attack of fever, and at once caused such an alarming shortness of breath and pain in the chest as kept her sleepless during all the time of her illness, and also hindered most painfully her powers of speech. When this at last entirely failed, she took leave of me by a most affectionate smile lighting up her countenance only a few minutes before her happy spirit left its earthly tabernacle to be for ever present with the Lord. She was buried on the evening of the same day by Mr. Tüsmann, a Missionary from Esthland (or Esthonia), who was trained at the Chrischona Institution, near Bâsle, and has stayed since his arrival in this country (in June last) as a guest at Ribi. He remained with me for nearly a week, and was a great comfort to me in my bereavement and sorrow. Last Sunday, when I broke down in the very beginning of the English part of the service, he continued it for me, though his knowledge of English is very imperfect; but I was wonderfully strengthened and sustained for the Kinika part. . .

Mrs. Rebmann was in her fifty-seventh year, being ten years older than myself. She had been five years in Egypt before I married her, and was spared to me for nearly fifteen years. She devoutly and faithfully stood by me through the darkest period of the East Africa Mission; and I

shall always look upon her as one who had been especially prepared for a situation which involved so much of privation, and at a time when East Africa was so much dreaded by Europeans. Her memory will still be a blessed one for the East Africa Mission, and I can already see a greater willingness among the women to come to Christ.

West Africa.

BASLE MISSIONS ON THE GOLD COAST.

THE Bâsle Missionary Society has maintained a mission for many years on the Gold Coast, in West Africa, at or near the region which is crossed by the meridian of Greenwich, extending from the port of Christiansborg for a considerable distance to the interior. The last report states that they now have seven stations along the valley of the river Volta, where they employ already thirtythree brethren and sixteen sisters of European race, who, assisted by twenty-eight male and female native teachers, are labouring amongst a population of about two hundred thousand souls, of several tribes, independent of Ashantee and of Dahomey; that their day schools are attended by three hundred and fifty-eight children living with their parents; and at five of the stations are boarding schools, in which are under present training one hundred and twenty boys and ninetynine girls; that of their seven church congregations more than nine hundred and fifty are members who have renounced slave or peonholding.

JAMES HENDERSON* was a peasant's son in Scotland, whose father died young, and left his widow to struggle on with himself and two other children. His father died during a snow-storm, and until the drift had cleared away the mourners were left alone. It was a strange beginning of life. His mother taught him chapters of the Bible, and the Shorter Catechism, elements of the soundest education; and, except for slight help offered in the same direction by his grandfather, who could not read, his knowledge was slender. There was no church, clergyman, school, schoolmaster, or magistrate, within five miles of where he lived; the people administered a rough law of their own; despised writing and arithmetic; and Memorials of James Henderson, M.D., Medical Missionary to China. London: Nisbet & Co. 1867.

stoutly believed in a man's honouring father and mother by being as ignorant as they were. Henderson's education lay in reading the Bible, the catechism, and the hawkers' stories, and spending the Sunday far away by mountain rivulets, with the Bible before him, and a collie dog by his side. Emerging into young manhood, he became successively farmer's boy and doctor's boy, and under butler, remaining in his last situation for five years, and only leaving it to commence the struggle for a university education. These early chapters of his life he relates with great vividness and much shrewd observation from his point of view, in an autobiography that will compare with any of its kind, and in which the heroic, and other fine qualities of the Scottish peasantry, come pleasantly out. His mother's dying charge

had been printed on his heart-Never forsake God, and He will never forsake you—and in March, 1849, he dates his conversion. "I felt I was washed in the blood of Christ." From that time he was overpowered with the desire of working, in some definite way, for his Master; and, when he was 23 years old, appeared as a friendless young student in Edinburgh, to climb undauntedly up the eight years of study required for the Scottish ministry. He secured a situation, which allowed him considerable liberty to continue his preliminary studies; but the length of years, and the general discouragement he received, turned his thoughts from the Church to Medicine. He made steady and rapid progress, rigorously confining himself to two meals a day, and such other expedients as, to the honour of his countrymen, have been used by many a student, whose means alone did not justify him to commence a university career. An address on Medical Missions seized hold of his mind at this time, and he offered himself to the Medical Missionary Society, who adopted him as one of its students; and when he was 29, he was accepted by the London Missionary Society. He was appointed to Shanghai, where his brief mission of five years was spent. It was spent in unflagging work. "Work is life for one," he writes; "and, thank God, I feel strong and fit for anything." And the strong, determined nature of the boy comes out in all he did, in his bold, vigorous way of setting about what was to be done, and his carelessness of everything but that he did it right. He would quote sometimes from the gate of an old castle, "They say what say they?-let them say." Of the hospital itself, he says, in 1864, "Without any invidious comparison, I can confidently say, that no other hospital in China has had such a career of continued prosperity and success. During the first ten years, the annual aggregate attendance was from ten to fifteen thousand; and last year it was close upon 50,000." Working here, quietly and successfully, he contracted a fever that never left him, and to which he succumbed in his 36th year. The book is one that needs no apology; for, though the materials are slight, they are full of interest, and are simply and intelligently put together. It is by such lives that the enterprise of missions is carried to its success.

It is some years since Messrs. Longman published a Year Book of Missions to meet what every one was felt to be a want-a handy and accurate record of the progress of the Church. The Christian Year Book, which now offers to take

its place, will excite a brief interest, and unquestionably disappoint it. The essential requisites of such a book have been overlooked; and it comes to us without method, without arrangement, and without accuracy. It is more comprehensive than its predecessors, containing statistics of all existing churches, as well as of their missions, and professes to do for Christendom what Mr. Martin has so admirably done for politics. Nor could the compiler have taken a better model than Mr. Martin's book. Its succinct sketches, its admirable tables, its fullness of information, its ease of reference, its lucid arrangements, and the care shown in the sifting of its statements, and, besides all these, its excellent, compact, and readable type, are a model of what might be attempted, on a less ambitious scale, for the Church of Christ: to the compiler of the Christian Year Book they seem to have been a model of what to avoid. Mistakes appear to have been recklessly made, and but a few of them corrected in some hasty errata. It appears that the Methodist New Connexion Conference has neither government nor association; that the Primitive Methodists are in the same predicament; and, while Bible Classes have a government, Presbyterians have none. This meets us on the 7th page; and though we find a true statement of the case when we turn to Scotland- a matter of some difficulty-there is no reference to guide us. Funds are mentioned, without any information of what they are and whence they rose; sometimes missionaries are lumped together without detail; so times detailed, without affording us the total; and mission churches are hinted at without a word to localize them. Was there any translation or revision of the Bible last year? How many tracts were issued by the Tract Society? How many persons were baptized in this mission and the other? These are questions that are naturally put, but to this book in vain. The information is full or meagre, well or ill arranged, just as it chances to be in the missionary report. Of the origin of the missions we have not a word nor a date. Irish missions, so important as the Irish Society, and the Presbyterian, are simply ignored. Such work of the Church as orphanages, and the like, finds, if any review, one so incomplete as to be valueless. Trivial incidents are recited at length, and those of importance commonly omitted; while, if serious

some

*The Christian Year Book: containing a Summary of Christian Work, and the Results of Missionary Efforts throughout the World. London: Jackson, Walford, & Hodder. 1867.

naccuracies are frequent in the record of home progress, we are not surprised to find them in the record of churches abroad. There is no trace of any effort to analyze and reflect on the large mass of materials which the editor accumulated, or to arrange them on some definite, well-constructed plan; and "an outline of the operations of the Christian world” is drawn up without a word on China literature. The first sentence is a clumsy blunder "The year 1866 has not been remarkable, in a directly religious point of view"-and so the writer blunders on to the end. In fact, there is scarcely a fault with which such a volume could be charged, that does not belong to it. Yet it has one great merit, and that is in the conception of the book itself. A Christian Year Book so much needed, that the disappointment of finding it ill done is the greater. We trust the excellent publishers will persevere in their undertaking, but that in future it will be committed to competent hands. Fairly executed, with brief historical notices, a clear survey of the year's work, full tabular statements of each Church and Mission, a record of Christian literature, a proper obituary, and some knowledge of authorities, it would be a singular boon, and a successful publication.

The Religious Tract Society has added to its valuable missionary hand-books, one on China, and a more timely volume could not have appeared. The writer reminds us that China has been shorn of half its mystery; Englishmen are beginning to roam at will through the Middle Empire, and tens of thousands of Chinese are at work in our colonies. The relations between ourselves and that interesting people have undergone rapid and most important charges, and have assumed, within the last few years, an entirely new phase. European soldiers have camped in the palaces of Peking, and Chinese Christians are issuing commentaries on St. John. revolution in the habits and traditions of a people that numbers a fourth of the population of the world has been accompanied by political disturbances on a scale that has convulsed the empire. China is notoriously unsettled in mind and state, and one natural result appears in the singular readiness with which whole villages are opening to the preaching of the Word. A mission to China, and not to the few open ports only, where Europeans have been contemptuously shut up, issues in work so vast, and suggestive of such

This

* China: its History, Country, and People. London. Religious Tract Society.

triumph for the kingdom of Christ, that it is no wonder if the mind of England is turning with a new and general interest to the East; and a handy book like this is just the one to meet the general enquiry. The history, religions, and social polity of the people are clearly traced, and the closing chapter relates the story of foreign intercourse and the story of Christian Missions. The last might have been enlarged with advantage, but no doubt the compiler felt that the real history lies still in the future, and that we only stand on the threshold of change.

While the East is opening to the Christ that it sent forth to the West, western thought is still revolving around Him in ever-widening circles; nor has it ever been plainer that He is the centre of the western world and of modern life than in these days when faint-hearted men have cried out that His influence was passing away. Men search for Him with eager quest, explore the creeds of the Church, or, leaving them, hurry back to the Scriptures themselves. The wise men still lay their treasures at His feet; busy lives outside the Church are touched by His arrest; philosophy, speculation, science, infidelity, cannot tear themselves from Him. Affecting to explain the phenomena of His life and kingdom, to include them in their system, they find they are included. And it is the sign of a grave and earnest time when the press enriches us with lives of Jesus, and below all the varying problems of social life, this of His remains to be solved. Now it is Strauss or Renan, or Ecce Homo; now it is Lange, or Pressensé, or Ecce Deus. The age does not weary of them. Each brings out some new feature, asks some new solutions, or answers some new question. It would be superficial and untrue, therefore, to say that a new survey of the life of Christ was unnecessary, that the track was now so beaten that we needed no more guides. Professor Plumptre professes no more than his predecessors; yet he is just as welcome, and his book has many special merits.* Even when compared with Bishop Ellicott, which it most resembles, it is fresh and original, and the order pursued combines with the history of Christ a philosophy of Christendom. Accurate scholarship and perfect fairness and a keen perception of the slightest links of thought and circumstances, and of their value, are eminent throughout; nor has Mr. Plumptre's large reading ever shown itself to more advantage. The language seems to have

Christ and Christendom: the Boyle Lectures for 1866, Delivered at the Chapel Royal, Whitehall, by E. II. Plumptre, M.A. London: Strahan. 1867.

risen with the subject to a mastery and vigour not attained before, while preserving all the old, rich, grand sweetness, and is alive with echoes of the Word of God. It is no more to be accepted blindly than other lives of Christ, but at the same time there is more in it than in most of a judicial summing up of many controversies, a wise and calm setting forth of what modern criticism has confirmed.

It is still to keep in that most divine tour of all the world, but with a very different companion, when we follow Mrs. Webb into the household of Cæsar in the days of Paul.* Emboldened by past success, Mrs. Webb has made a large venture, and mingled the possible and natural of history together under the full blaze of imperial Rome. Pomponia is the wife of Aulus Plautius, left by the Emperor Claudius in the government of Britain, and between whom and little Claudia, daughter of the British king Cogidunus there springs up the warmest friendship. Claudia learns to read and write, and "in her beloved grotto" to "understand poets, historians, and philosophers," Latin or Greek. Aristobulus has heard Paul preach at Lystra, and has come over to Britain as a missionary. He stumbles on Claudia, and is almost torn to pieces by her dog, and she learns in the first startling interview all of the missionary's life, and gazes up at the heavenly beauty which shone in his face. He passes away, and is afterwards burned at the stake. Claudia is betrothed to her cousin Emrys, but a young Roman, Pudens, comes in, and Emrys will not forsake his post. So the betrothal is broken off, and the story of the lover begins. Claudia's mother becomes a Christian through Claudia, and on her death he learns that the Emperor has sent for his daughter to visit Rome. To Rome the story shifts, and after much vicissitude Pudens and Claudia are married, and soothe the last days of Emrys, who has himself been converted through Pudens. Aristobulus is not the only New Testament character that is introduced: Claudia, Pudens, and Rufus are all identified: and their adventures and biography sketched on the plan of Mrs. Cowden Clarke in the "Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines." It requires less skill on the one hand; for the characters are very numerous out of which we may build a life at pleasure; but on the other it requires more, for they need to be identified with a time that can

* Pomponia; or, the Gospel in Cæsar's Household. By M. WEBB, author of Naomi, &c. London: Religious Tract Society. 1867.

only be reconstructed by minds of the highest power. Pomponia is an interesting and readable book for girls; but as a work of art it is feeble. It has received much pains, and yet the description, the dialogue and the setting, fail to realize the Romans, the Britons, or the Christians of the time. A selection from the writings of South brings us into a different atmosphere.* This man of honest English preaching has fallen into unaccountable neglect, and no better illustrations of the Wisdom of Our Fathers§ could be found than in his writings. "South's faults and excellencies lie on the surface"; and we may say of the book what the editor says well of the man, "His sincerity, and his earnestness, his uncompromising honesty, his shrewd clear insight, his sound judgment, his robust vigorous common sense appear cn every page."

The last volume of Exeter Hall Lectures reminds us, by its thinness, of the thinness of the audiences, and of the decay, at least for the present, of the popular institution of the public lecture.† Private reading is taking its place among the thoughtful, and the passion for amusement and spectacle has carried off the undecided and indifferent. Some of the lectures are as good as any of the last twenty years.

To Mr. Binney, who delivered the last of them, Mr, Baldwin Brown dedicates a volume of sermons that have sprung out of the strife with ritualism, freer from mannerism than the volumes from the same hand, plain, vigorous, thoughtful teaching, and not of that superficial kind that passes away with the controversy as before it, but mental ideas that underlie the conflict. So Mr. concerned with true principles, and the fundaBrown clears his way by determining the essential principles of idolatry, and thence advances to the idolatry of the priest and of the Sacrament; nor which he does not mean so much Bibliolatry as does he stop short of idolatry of the word, by the bowing down before mere authoritative teaching and the words of creeds, as if they alone must settle the restlessness and searching of the tual freedom of Judaism, a truth scarcely acknowheart. Among the closing subjects are the spiriledged, although it is not difficult to prove the paradox, "how profoundly Christian the spirit of Judaism was" the living way and the aspects and aims of ritualism.

*The Wisdom of our Fathers; Selections from the Writings of Robert South, D.D. With a Memoir. London: Religious Tract Society. 1867.

Six Lectures delivered in Exeter Hall, 1866-67, at the request of the Committee of the Young Men's Christian Association. London: Nisbet & Co. 1867.

Idolatries, Old and New: their Cause and Cure. By JAMES BALDWIN BROWN, B.A. London: Jackson, Walford, & Hodder. 1867.