least half a dozen nations of this stock, the ancient Etruscans, the Chinese, and the people of ancient Akkad,― the predecessors of the Chaldeans, and founders of Mesopotamian civilization,-and in later times in the Finns, Turks, Japanese, Siamese, etc.,- a high grade of civilization has been attained.

Originally, the Mongoloids seem to have been spread over most of Asia and Europe. Wherever the Aryan and Semitic nations migrated, they found the Mongoloids already settled, and from them much of ancient civilization was derived. The race is one distinguished for intelligence, industrial power, and social capacity. We find among them, accordingly, religion much more elevated than in either the black, brown, or red races.

Among them there is, to be sure, animism in abundance still to be seen. The spirits of ancestors are believed to hover about the tomb or shrine consecrated to them, and to have great influence over the destinies of their descendants. He who would prosper must not neglect their worship. Every heavenly body, each great object or feature of the earth, every city, tribe, class, family, has its animating spirit or guardian divinity. These spirits are continually consulted by various divinatory processes, and their aid sought by means of a great variety of magic rites. But, above all these, rise the greater gods of earth and heaven, of whom all the others are servants.

The Mongoloids seem, as a general thing, to be lacking in imagination. As they appear to us in their best known representatives, the Chinese and Japanese, they exhibit a talent for analysis and details, are steady-going and formal, attentive to the concrete, but with little taste or ability for the ideal, for comprehensive grasp or sympathetic constructiveness. Their genius is for the practical, the useful, the embodied form, seeking to make the most of the earth, and with little curiosity about higher things, except as these are supposed to have a bearing on their temporal interests.

Now, we find in their religion the same traits. It is prosaic, dull, utilitarian, narrow of compass, and mediocre in

range; as Matthew Arnold would say, "a religion of the Philistines," not of the children of sweetness and light. Its mythology is barren. It seems to have been nipped in the bud by this frosty atmosphere. We miss all that picturesque dramatization of the nature forces, in which they take living form and present such vigorous or graceful impersonations, such romantic or beneficent careers, such piquant or pathetic episodes, as we find in the literatures of the Aryan nations.

The conception of Deity was petrified before it had hardly got beyond the animistic stage, and is, therefore, devoid of majesty, fulness, or grace. The gods are mostly guardian spirits, each the patron of some class of phenomena, kind of object, art, district, city, or family. They are worshipped, not out of grateful impulse, but from prudent calculation.

Religion with the Chinese-whose religion we may take as the fullest development of Mongoloid faith—is a matter of policy and self-advantage, not of spontaneous feeling. It is for the people's sake or a man's personal benefit, not for the deities; and there is a strange indifference to other aspects of religion than those which may be of practical profit.

It is domestic and civic, not ecclesiastical, therefore. Divination and sorcery, and all sorts of magic practices to get desired advantages from the spirits, abound, and have, of course, their skilled professors of the black art, sorcerers, shamans, and soothsayers of all sorts. But priesthoods, properly speaking, bands of religious servants and worshippers, set apart for the honor and use of the gods, are rarely found, I believe, as native developments among Mongoloid

nations.

The lowest in rank of the shin, or spirits, are the ancestral. But, nevertheless, these are foremost in popular affection, and really constitute the basis of Chinese religion.

As Chinese civilization has for its central force the patriarchal system, the continuity and unity of the family,―so, in the sphere of religion, this same continuity of the family ties, services, and affections, is extended on beyond the gulf

of death. The home attentions and associations are prolonged with but slight changes into ancestral rites. The tomb becomes a temple or family chapel, where the venerated departed sit as immortal spirits to receive the worship of their descendants, and where all family festivals and ceremonies are solemnized.

The home of departed spirits with the Chinese is not thus, as with Aryan or Semite, some distant abode beyond the wide sea or in the bowels of the ground, on sky-piercing mountain-top or above the blue dome; but it is the most familiar spot of earth. Among the Mongoloids, we find the conception of Deity rising quite high; but it is at the same time ill-defined, imperfectly personalized, and the spiritual element hardly disengaged from the material object.

Tien-i.e., heaven-and Shang-ti, the Sovereign Ruler, are the two chief names by which the Chinese designate the Supreme. This highest god of the Chinese must, in fairness, be regarded as the moral and personal Sovereign of the world; and yet the conception of him is quite different from that of the Hebrew Jehovah.

He is no being apart from the material sky. He does not possess those attributes of external creative power, selfexistence apart from time and anterior to matter, that we attribute to the Supreme Deity, but is inseparable from the substance of things. Material things are born from him as the bud from the bush.

Creation is not from any outward creator, but occurs by the slow action of inherent natural powers. Even sorceries, divinations, and the occult powers of Fung Shui are regarded as natural rather than supernatural. And as the material sky and the supreme God are one and the same, both in name and in idea, so in general the divine is not separated from the physical or the human. Our human nature and human reason contain the law of our destiny and duty. Devotion to human duties, interests, and hopes, constitutes the wise worship. The interests of good government and domestic welfare supply the principles of faith. Even the one rare shoot of idealism, the Tauist philosophy of Lao

Tsee (which, by some strange exception, started to grow on this intensely utilitarian stock), instead of flowering out, as it would have done in any Indo-European race, into a rich cycle of mystical philosophy, like the Vedanta in India or Sufism in Persia, rapidly faded into low forms of divination, exorcism, and necromancy.

Confucius was a man far inferior in insight and power to Lao-Tsee. If he is to be called a man of genius at all, it was only a genius for the commonplace that characterized him. But just because of this intense commonplaceness, this pedantic, timidly conventional, and prudential spirit, which he embodied so thoroughly, he met exactly the national temperament, and became the most venerated teacher of all that have ever spoken among the black, brown, red, or yellow races.

To sum up, then, the characteristics of the Mongoloid religions, we find them distinguished by great formalism and a strong materialistic leaven, making overmuch of ritual and ceremony; very imperfect in theological conception, and with a predominant utilitarian and worldly spirit. As the language of the Mongoloids is monosyllabic or loosely agglutinative, not fully systematized, like the inflected languages of the Aryans, so their religion lacks concentration. and strength. The divine idea is everywhere prematurely precipitated into manifold discreet and petty forms, instead of by a slower crystallization, giving us a more completely organized product. JAMES T. BIXBY.

THINGS AT HOME AND ABROAD.

ANNIVERSARY MEMORIES.

As we gathered once more in the old Hollis Street Church for the Tuesday morning Association meeting, and afterwards in the room above the chapel, to meet the ladies and friends of the Sunday School Library work, our pleasure was mingled with some pain. We felt how soon these old landmarks might fade away, and their places be taken by the noisy traffic of the world.

Can it be that we shall never be allowed to keep anything that is old in this New World? We shall never arrive at any true dignity as a nation until, as families or institutions or churches, we can abide for more than one or two generations in the same spot. There is strength, there is wisdom, there is beauty in permanence. It is a waste of money, of time, of sentiment, to be always uprooting.

We have not only this old historic church in view, but several others in Boston that are in danger of being swept away, to rise, it is hoped, again upon the new-made land at the Back Bay, which has such a fascination for church corporations. Dangerous quicksands! Some of these churches, as we know, have risen like enchanted towers in a mirage, and sunk away from our vision in the slippery ways of debt. Others may find it hard to preserve their own identity, or keep their heads above the water.

Can it be that there is no need of Unitarian Christianity in Boston, except among coteries of elegant and cultivated people, who live side by side in blocks, want to sit side by side in church, and have an easy walk back and forth one-half a day in the week?

We say nothing against beautiful new churches when the society is new, houseless, and able to pay for them; nor would we censure the natural spirit that likes even in worship to be in congenial company; but are there not other kinds of Unitarian churches which have the right to exist, are full of honored associations, and are needed to-day in Boston?

What is to become of the people who live in the neighborhood of the Hollis Street Church, the West Church, and other old places of worship? Shall we surrender them to our Orthodox or Baptist or Methodist friends? If we have no preaching