that he had any such hope for men. Neither does Mr. Rhys-David in his lectures, although he gives us some tender and pathetic legends of Buddha's consolatory presence with his weary and discouraged followers. We see great resemblance in the character of Gautama to Jesus, and rejoice in it; but this last crowning hope in immortality, the inspiration of Jesus, the faith in his Father's house of many mansions, is wanting, or only a dreamy longing that baffles the seeker of the past as well as the agnostic of to-day.

The beginning of the last great movement for reform in India Mr. Mozoomdar traces to the distinguished Rammohun Roy, the friend of Channing, the man who won all hearts by the sweet persuasiveness of his religious spirit and his wise judgment. Mr. Mozoomdar speaks truly, when he says that all religions need a great personality. "What is Christianity," he says, " without the Son of Man?" He goes on to show how the Brahmo Somaj really sprang into being when Rammohun Roy "laid the foundation of his great church." After a while came the decline of the Brahmo Somaj, culminating in 1860. "They were crippled with cold rationalism and the pride of intellect." Then came the new life through a young leader, Keshub Chunder Sen. Says Mr. Mozoomdar: "Repentance, faith, and prayer became the battle cry. They introduced the sweet, serene figure of the prophet of Nazareth, and Christianity mixed with their old, Oriental, rationalistic cold faith. Churches multiplied, reforms grew, schools and newspapers were started, and missionaries labored ceaselessly."

Mr. Mozoomdar then tells us of four schools of piety in India, which it is not necessary for us to repeat here, as they have been shown on these pages. We fall into the error at first of supposing that they are prevailing modes of thought and action that have existed some time in India. But, as we read them, we think we perceive that these four schools of piety are the code of religious laws and observances laid down within the last few years by Keshub Chunder Sen in his new dispensation, which has won many adherents, and at the same time split asunder the Brahmo Somaj, and lost Mr. Sen a good many adherents. The great distance between us and India prevents us from getting a clear view of this controversy. The truth will prevail, whatever may be the errors of its partisans; and this activity of disagreement among the Hindus is far better than stagnation.

Our business is, however, with what Mr. Mozoomdar himself says; and here we take issue with him somewhat. We are a most remarkably tolerant people in this country; when Englishmen, like Mr. Matthew Arnold, tell us virtually that universal suffrage is a failure, our audiences hear it in a most bland way, and appear to think he is all right. But we observe that Americans go on voting and governing themselves in their bungling, democratic way, as though no oracle had been uttered. So the "Institute of Unitarian Ministers," not only with propriety enjoy the eloquent earnestness and piety of their Hindu guest, but they are perfectly willing that he should knock to pieces all their cherished ideas of individual liberty, intellectual progress, simplicity of religious forms, and social life in the Church. There is a kind of pleasure in this strong antithesis, in this ardent utterance from a Hindu brain. Who would check it? It would not be the part of hospitality perhaps at the time. But the masses of men are so constituted that they sway back and forth to extremes. If one admired leader or thinker goes to an extreme, there should always be a constituency of just thinkers in a church to warn the public mind, and bring it back to the juste milieu. Such a constituency we know exists among us, but it is often from its very catholicity of spirit too silent.

When Mr. Mozoomdar says that poverty in India is not considered a curse, and criticises England because poverty is looked upon there as a shameful reproach, we say it is a shameful reproach. The poor must be with us, the humbler working classes, the thrifty toiler for small gain, but he is oftener happier than we, and on the road to advancement for his children, both in England and America. But pauperism is "a social and moral leprosy," no matter whatever our Hindu friend may say to the contrary. We have seen the poor wretches crawl out of their holes of mud in Spain, and run like dogs for a bone in Italy. There is not much sainthood in them, although Mr. Mozoomdar says that poverty has always been the badge of learned men and pious saints in India. We will go further, and say that the poor, naked fellow, who lives in his hut on the banks of the Nile, and has his food left there by the chance traveller, is not very much of a saint either, although he is canonized by those very Eastern religions, whose monastic spirit of self-absorption and prayer Mr. Mozoomdar so much praises in opposition to our cold intellectualism. Our intellectualism does not hurt us much, we are

inclined to think, nor our rationalism. It is our selfishness, our worldliness, our insincerity, our unfaithfulness to the truth and right, sins which we fear are as common in Eastern countries as in our own. What are the effete Oriental religions doing for the world to-day, however pure may have been their origin in the minds of great prophets? Let not the Brahmo Somaj copy their mummeries, their rigid ceremonialism, their monkish austerities, their trances, their dancing dervishes, or "God-intoxicated" saints. Some forms of worship are undoubtedly necessary, not only for the masses of men, but for all of us, high or low. We need places, rites, symbols, creeds even, to hold us together as religious believers, and call back our wandering spirits. But let them be as simple as possible, and encroach little upon the work of our lives. Let not the Brahmo Somaj be turned away from its works of enlightenment and love by an elaborate ceremonial of worship. A spasm of new forms and ceremonies will never restore a defunct body, dying of "cold intellectualism." Even the High Church party see that all their mediæval ritual will not keep them alive as a church. Individuals may be willing to fast and pray most of the time; but their leaders see that deeds of charity are what unite men, and so, to-day, they ask for "mercy, and not sacrifice," when they appeal to the world for helpers.

We must look a little further into our friend Mr. Mozoomdar's pages. In arraigning Protestantism, he says, "You have dethroned the pope, and all ministers have lost their hold upon their flocks." We do not believe this. The clergy have lost temporal power, the dominion of fear; but we believe that Protestant ministers have to-day as strong a moral and spiritual influence upon their people as the clergy had in any age of the world. "A hundred churches," he says, "crowd the waysides, ... each congregation flying at each other's throats," etc. All honor to our country that hundreds of churches are scattered everywhere, when we can travel leagues in the East and hear no bell to call us to prayer, except in the crowded marts of civilization. "You protest against the Bible," he says, "until the Sacred Scriptures become as any other vulgar book, a mass of printer's ink and waste paper." We believe that the Bible was never more truly valued among thinking people than it is to-day, when it is fast becoming divested of the foolish verbal idolatry thrown around it. "A cold, loveless, dogmatic, carnal, socialistic spirit overruns the (Western) world," he continues.

And here he brings us to an attitude of self-defence, when he adds, as a result of this carnal spirit, that "men in the abodes of devotion patronize tea-parties and dances and all sorts of social profanities."

If there is any one thing that the Church of to-day takes satisfaction in, it is that she endeavors to sanctify amusements by her presence, and not sit aloft in holy horror and let the devil take charge of them. Hence, our tea-drinkings, our church kitchens, our charades, our dances even, our unity clubs, our fun, our frolic, our studies of poetry, our talks about great men and women, our social and fearless study of the most human book in the world, the greatest book,- our Bible.

Let no foreigner touch with his destroying scalpel these sweet humanities born of our age. He may attack our dogmas, our creeds or no creeds, and we shall not care. But let no Oriental blind his eyes to the spectacle of a free church and free people, amid many imperfections and shortcomings working out their religion in the greatest practical and social reforms that the world has ever known.

We know that we have need of more love, more faith, more prayer. If our brethren of the Brahmo Somaj have these great gifts, we reach out our hands in fellowship across the seas. Our sympathies are with this Eastern land, yearning for higher light and wisdom. But we cannot exchange all the great results of our present religious civilization for the rapt piety of solitary Eastern seers, even though they may come closer to the being of God than we, stumbling through this work-day world, and trying earnestly to do his will among our brethren of every name.

MEMORIES.

This month brings round again the season when our beloved senior editor, Rev. E. H. Sears, departed from us; and we love to recall his image, sweetly associated in our minds at the holiday time with the sound of Christmas bells, the jubilee of the glad New Year, and the great hope of immortality.

We cast also a flower of remembrance on the newly made grave of Rev. W. H. Cudworth, the valiant and devoted soldier of Christ, who died at his post, and spends his New Year with his Master in the heavenly mansions,

MARTHA P. LOWE,

REVIEW OF CURRENT LITERATURE.

TWO RECENT BIOGRAPHIES.*

It is almost ten years since the departure of the rare and lovely spirit, who will be most widely remembered as the wise and efficient Secretary of the American Unitarian Association, the story of whose work is at length before us in this full and tender record by his wife. The retirement of Dr. Dewey from the active work of life is still farther back. So that he is known to the majority of this generation only as one of the famous preachers of the earlier period of the Unitarian Church in this country; and his works, now just republished in a large, single volume by the Unitarian Association, stand with those of Channing among the classics of our pulpit literature. Yet his life went on, in the quiet of his beloved Sheffield, serenely and with small abatement of intellectual interest and enjoyment, until within the last two years; and loving hands have gracefully joined a careful selection of his letters, wisely mingling the graver and the sportive, with the autobiographical sketch Dr. Dewey prepared near twenty-five years ago.

We are sure of the interest of the readers of this Review in the lives these books enshrine, and in calling attention to them shall follow the method, wisely chosen by both biographers, of letting them speak for themselves, as far as possible. Yet it should be said that, while of Dr. Dewey preaching was, as Dr. Bellows we think has said, the great action of his life, Charles Lowe's work was something infinitely better than any words of his that can be recorded, and that his character and spirit showed an essence and aroma of something finer still, that must, for the most part, escape delineation. Those who knew him well, and who worked with him in the causes that commanded his interest

[Memoir of Charles Lowe. By his wife, Martha Perry Lowe. Boston: Cupples, Upham & Co. 1884.

Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. Edited by his daughter, Mary E. Dewey. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1883.]