churchism which can record, with grateful and wondering italics, that "in the year 1710 Prince George of Denmark, the consort of the Queen, became a member of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel." Every reader of Macaulay will remember the saying of Charles II.: "I've tried Prince George sober, and I've tried him drunk, and can't get a word of sense from him either way.' The same temper of adulation for the great speaks out in the declaration that "the devoted servant of God, Ziegenbalg, received the countenance of George I., whose autograph letter of royal commendation and support we cannot read unmoved." We do not know which most to wonder at-George I. surrounded with his German mistresses, huge and unwieldy as Flanders mares, writing to Ziegenbalg, or the Rev. Mr. Croly weeping with grateful emotion over his letter. From an historian who writes in this spirit we can hardly expect fair treatment for our own and similar missions, which number among their supporters "not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble." Accordingly we find that our labours are passed over sub silentio. We are getting so accustomed, however, to this clerical impertinence, that we are rather amused than angry at it. The only allusion to our mission in the whole volume is contained in two lines which he feels encouraged to insert, by observing that Dr. Judson had been "honourably named by Bishop Corrie, and more lately by that holy servant of God, Daniel Wilson, Bishop of Calcutta." Taking courage from the precedent thus set him, and screening himself beneath the episcopal lawn from the imputation of excessive charity, he ventures to say that "among the gospel labourers were the London Missionary Society, and the Baptist Christians, the latter chiefly at Serampore, but now they have in Southern India a large body of converts"!! Is not that a flattering notice for a Mission which may proudly inscribe upon its banners Primus in Indis, and whose praise is in all the churches? The cordial and generous recognition by Mr. Noel of the labours of all bodies of Christians in the missionary field affords a striking contrast to this petty exclusiveness.

CAFFRES AND CAFFRE MISSIONS is a volume of great interest and value. Mr. Calderwood, the writer, was for many years an agent of the London Missionary Society, but, at the request of Sir Peregrine Maitland, he consented to become Commissioner for the Gaikas. Though no longer a paid agent of the Society, he speaks of himself as preaching whenever opportunity offers, and as using his influence as a government officer for the extension of the Gospel. The narrative throws much light upon the condition of the Caffre races, and gives many incidents illustrative of their character. We are not competent to estimate the accuracy of his statements as to the true causes of the Caffre wars. But from his position, long experience, and abundant means of information, we are disposed to attach great importance to them. His remarks on the Cape as a field for emigration are in perfect accordance with the strong recommendations which have lately appeared, from several quarters, in our columns. We rise from the perusal of this very instructive and pleasing volume with a far higher estimate of the prospects of the Cape colony, and the capabilities of the native races within its limits, than we had before.

CREOLES AND COOLIES-the last volume named in our list-is less distinctively missionary in its character than the others. It contains some most amusing and some most painful descriptions of the white, coloured, and black Creoles of the Mauritius. Of the lighter and more amusing class the following may be taken as a specimen

"Music is an accomplishment cultivated among all ranks, and while the coloured women have naturally fine voices they are too apt to mistake strength for skill, shouting for harmony. Every house in Port Louis, however poor, seems to possess a piano. It appears to be a mark of respectability, like Thurtell's gig. It may be an old, rickety, tumble-down thing, with half its chords in a state of collapse, and rheumatism in every joint. It may be less harmonious than an Indian tomtom or a Chinese gong. It may have seen service for succeeding generations, and Virginia may have discoursed on it in the days of La Bourdonnais. White ants may have hollowed out tunnels in its inward recesses and left it scrcely a leg to stand upon. No matter. So long as it can stand or totter on its legs, it is still a piano and a pledge of respectability. It forms part of the dowry of Ambrosine, who bequeathed it to

Artemise or Angeline, her first-born, who treasures it as a mark of past and present respectability. Good society must draw the line somewhere, and in Mauritius it does not extend its circle beyond the piano. The noise that is made by these tinkling old impostures, especially in the evening when that noise is accompanied with the howling of all the dogs in the neighbourhood, whose nervous system it seems to affect unpleasantly, might form an appropriate concert at a witches' sabbath. It is related of Theodore Hook, of witty, but somewhat disreputable, memory, whose 'disease of the chest' was caught in the Mauritius, that, excited one night to frenzy by the howling of a dog, the tinkling of a piano, and the voice of a dusky siren in a neighbouring compound, he rushed into the house, and declared that he would eat up the dog, piano, and all, if they did not stop that dreadful noise."

The book abounds with light, pleasant sketches of this kind. We have seldom seen the Negro character hit off with more exact truthfulness. If that character developes itself in such amusing and ludicrous forms in colonies where our graver English temperament is predominant amongst the whites, we may conjecture what it would be in Mauritius, which has been and still is French in language and habits. The native drollery of the Negro has been stimulated by the mercurial character of the white population, and still further encouraged by the great prosperity of the island, in which everybody seems well-to-do. The result, as we may readily believe, is matter for inextinguishable laughter. An African of pur sang, earning a dollar a day with rations, and adopting French manners, must be a most entertaining specimen of the genus Homo. The writer says of them :

"They have adopted all the exaggerated forms of politeness practised by the white Creoles, and really the principle of imitation is so admirably developed in the Negro, that they go through all the different modes of salutation with a stately gravity which leaves little to desire. It is amusing to see two ex-slaves who are friends meet in the street. The soldier's battered shako (the favourite head-dress), worn as Paddy wore his coat, is gracefully raised from the head, and, after mutual salaams and shakings of hands, affectionate inquiries are made about Madame and the other members of their respective families. Sometimes, from no apparent cause, except an exuberance of animal spirits or appreciation of their own highly polished manners, they burst forth into fits of inextinguishable laughter. Their laughter is irresistible. It is like the uncorking of a champagne bottle, or the gushing forth of waters from a fountain. It rises from the depths of the African's interior, expands his chest, swells his throat, lights up his eye, opens his mouth, shows his teeth, and then often convulsive throes come bubbling forth like sparkling wine from a narrow-necked bottle. It is not like ordinary cacchination, the affair of a moment, performed without cessation from the work in hand. His laughter is, so to speak, a serious affair, which unfits him for every kind of serious labour, and absorbs all his faculties. He looks as if some chemical process was going on within him, resulting in the production of laughing-gas and causing involuntary explosions. His whole body shakes under the influence of the laughing demon that has seized him; and it is sometimes a quarter of an hour before the fit is over. You may see no cause for laughter. You may have addressed him in the gravest manner, without thinking of laughing yourself, or of being the cause of laughing in others. And yet some invisible agency has affected his risible faculties, and off he goes hick! hick! till sometimes he rolls upon the ground in an agony of convulsive enjoyment."

But the picture has many darker shades. Mr. Beaton, quoting the language of the Roman Catholic Bishop, that "he could not name more than two coloured men in the island who could be believed on oath," intimates a doubt where the two are to be found. The most wanton desecration of the Sabbath seems to be all but universal. Concubinage, with all its attendant evils, is frightfully common. And although great crimes are rarely committed by the black and coloured population, pilfering and petty thefts are so frequent as to be the rule rather than the exception. We are glad to observe the high and satisfactory testimony borne to the beneficial results of emancipation in this island. Mr. Beaton seems only to speak the sentiments of the whole population when he ascribes its present high state of prosperity to the influence of this measure. His emphatic statement is, "The productive power of Mauritius was not known till after the abolition of slavery."

The missionary portion of the volume is mainly devoted to the labours of the writer and others among the Coolies and Hindoo immigrants. These he estimates at not fewer than 130,000, who are brought into the island, and apprenticed for a term of three years, from all parts of India. He conceives that they afford a peculiarly inviting sphere for missionary labour. Caste is broken down by the sea voyage. Their slavery to idolatry and superstition is diminished by

distance from home. New scenes expand the mind and encourage an adventurous and inquiring spirit. The mythology of the Shasters, connected as it is with cosmical fictions, is found to be false by the resistless testimony of fact. A field of labour is thus prepared upon which the missionary may enter with far greater hope of success than if he met the same individuals in their native villages. Mr. Beaton thinks that the results of the yet infant missions among the various races of Mauritian Coolies are such as to confirm these views. We cannot be insensible to the fact that the return of these men to their homes at the expiration of their apprenticeship forms a very important feature in the case, and strongly commends this missionary enterprise to the sympathy of Christians. Most of them return to their native villages enriched by the wages they have earned. Those who go back converted by the grace of God will do so as unpaid missionaries, carrying with them the seeds of truth, the word of eternal life.

In reviewing these narratives of missionary labour one cannot but be struck by the power of the gospel to subvert and triumph over every form of idolatry and superstition. The Budhist, the Mohammedan, the Hindoo, the Fetish worshipper, are each and all seen to have yielded to "the truth as it is in Jesus." The apathy of the Chinese, the stolid ignorance of the Zulu or Caffre, the perverse subtlety of the Brahmin, the resolute opposition of the Malagasy, have each given way to the same influence. The Gospel of Christ has gained victories over them all. It thus proves its fitness for universal extension. It is for all times and all nations. It is the gift of the Universal Father to the whole family of man. All other systems have been local and temporary in their range. This is for humanity in its whole extent. "The field is the WORLD." "There is neither Greek nor Jew, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free, but Christ is all and in all." The old truth, that "God hath made of one blood all nations of men," finds its best exemplification in the records of apostolic and modern missionary labours.

REMARKS ON A NEW VIEW OF INFANT BAPTISM. Ir is a trite observation in relation to the baptismal controversy, that, while the view taken of the ordinance by Baptists is characterised by simplicity and uniformity, those taken by Pædobaptists are both various and wavering. Every now and then some one attempts to lay a new ground for it, or to form a new theory of its use, as if there were in the body a feeling of restlessness and dissatisfaction pining for relief. An instance of this has lately come to us across the Atlantic, in a discourse with the following title: Growth, not Conquest, the true Method of Christian Progress. By Horace Bushnell, D.D., Philadelphia." Dr. Bushnell stands high in the United States, and the discourse now in question is on the whole an able and an admirable production; but, in the course of it, he touches on the subject of baptism, with, we think, the usual infelicity of Pædobaptist writers. Although the passage is somewhat long, we shall transfer the whole of it to our pages, being not at all unwilling to afford to our readers the fullest opportunity of benefiting by it; and then we shall append a few remarks. Our quotation is made from the October number of the "Monthly Christian Spectator" (in which the discourse appears to be given entire), because we have not seen it elsewhere.

"We reject the doctrine of baptismal regeneration as held by Episcopalians; first, because it makes nothing of faith in the parents, thrusting them away by the interposition of sponsors, and assuming that the priest may take any child and translate him at once into the kingdom of heaven by his own act; secondly, because there is no evidence

REMARKS ON A NEW VIEW OF INFANT BAPTISM.

that any child is, or can be, spiritually regenerated in the moment of baptism, and by virtue of that ordinance. In place of a doctrine so false and pernicious, we hold that children are, in a sense, included in the faith of their parents, partakers with them in their covenant, and brought into a peculiar relation to God in virtue of it. On this ground they receive a common seal of faith with them in their baptism; and God, on his part, contemplates in the rite the fact that they are to grow up as Christians, or spiritually-renewed persons. As to the precise time or manner in which they are to receive the germ of holy principle, nothing is affirmed. Only it is understood that God includes their infant age in the womb of parental culture, and pledges himself to them and their parents in such a way as to offer the presumption that they may grow up in love with all goodness, and remember no definite time when they became subjects of Christian principle. Christian education is, then, to conform to this view, and nothing is to be called Christian education which does not. As Baxter, who was long perplexed with suspicions that his piety was only bis education, because he could remember no time when he began to be exercised with right feeling, removed his difficulty by the happy discovery, that education is an ordinary way for the conveyance of God's grace, and ought no more to be set in opposition to the Spirit than the preaching of the word.'

"We think it is no objection to this view, that the children of Christian families so often grown up in sin, and die in manifest impenitence. For it is nothing new that Christians fail of their duty, and cast away their privilege. At the same time we may safely enough indulge the suspicion, that a large share of those who seem to be renewed at a later period of life only experience a resuscitation of that holy principle which was planted in their childhood; for, if a child only receives the law of the house as good and right, it is difficult to conceive that it does not involve the germ of a right character. The Moravians, too, have very nearly realised our doctrine. As many as nine out of ten in that most interesting church, we are assured, have no conception of a time when they entered on a Christian life. Besides, the practical disbelief of our doctrine is itself a good and sufficient reason why our Christian families do not realise its results. It vitiates the whole spirit and aim of their education. It leads them even to discourage every ingenuous effort of holy virtue in childhood. They take their own children to be aliens, even under the covenant-train them up to be aliens, and even tell them that they can do nothing right or acceptable to God till after their hearts are changed; or, what is the same, till after they have come to some advanced age. They are thus discouraged, and even taught to grow up in sin, which, if they fail to do, it is because a bad education is not able to accomplish its legitimate results.

"Nor is our view any infringement upon the doctrince of depravity, in whatsoever manner it may be held. It only declares that depravity is best rectified when it is weakest, and before it is stiffened into habit.

"Neither does it infringe at all upon the doctrine, that spiritual agency is the operative cause of Christian piety. Whatsoever the parent does for his child is to have its effect by a divine influence. And it is the pledge of this which lies at the basis of the household covenant, and constitutes its power.

"As little does it falsify the oft-repeated text, which declares that all are not Israel who are of Israel. This declares a fact, and the fact is, alas! too true; or, if it be supposed to speak of an electing purpose of God, God has no such purpose irrespective of means and conditions, and the question is still open, whether parental misbelief and a failure of duty are not the reasons why the offspring of Israel are aliens.

"On the other hand, it is the express direction of God, that children should be trained up in the way that they should go-not that they should be trained up in the wrong way, which, afterwards, they are to repent of and forsake. Bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, not in evil and graceless impenitence. Faith, too, is to be an heir-loom in the family, and descend upon the child; the faith that dwelt first in his grandmother Lois, and in his mother Eunice, is last of all to be in

him also.

"This view, too, is the only one that gives household baptism any meaning, or any real place in the Christian system. We admit in words, that baptism introduces the child to membership of some kind in the church; but we see no place for him there, any more than for a vegetable. We thus stand for a rite that is insignificant, or even absurd. Or, if we call it a dedication of the child, the child is only dedicated to our own unbelief, not to the grace of God; for we do not really suppose that the grace of God can have anything to do with it, till after it is of an age to dedicate itself. not more reasonable to receive the rite as a seal of faith, a token of spiritual renovation, Is it understanding that God has graciously included him in the covenant with us, given us the helm of his moral existence, authorised us to ask a rite for him before he is of an

age to ask it for himself, and empowered us, by virtue of his own co-operation, so to guide him, that when we give him over the helm, we shall give it to him as a Christian youth? This is Christian education-not the Baptist scheme of individualism-which conceives it to be absurd for the parent to work anything spiritual in his child's infancy, lest he should not believe for himself, which tells the Church that after she has given existence, and the egg of immortality is produced, her motherly duty is to copy the instinct of the Nubian ostrich, and leave it hidden in the sand!"- pp. 610-11.

reason.

As to the practical bearing of the passage before us, we do not suppose there is much, if any, difference between Dr. Bushnell and ourselves. We agree with him that the spiritual culture of the infant mind should commence at the earliest age at which it is possible, and we suppose he would agree with us in saying that this cannot be earlier than the first dawn of That the blessing of God might be expected upon such efforts, the question of baptism wholly apart, cannot be doubted, and we should be prepared thankfully to accept the most abundant fruits which, under his blessing, might be gathered from them. There is much truth and shrewdness in some of the remarks made by Dr. Bushnell on this subject, the remarks being taken cum grano salis—that is, with some allowance for a questionable theological notion which, perhaps, lurks beneath portions of his phraseology. There is no truth nor justice at all, however, in his preposterous denunciation of the "Baptist scheme of individualism," which, indeed, is couched in language expressing one of the most unscriptural views we ever met with in a professedly Christian writer. Does Dr. Bushnell himself believe-assuredly the Baptists do notthat the church gives existence to spiritual life, and produces "the egg of immortality"?

Our particular object, however, in noticing the passage we have quoted, is to subject to a brief examination its author's theory of baptism. Having expressly rejected "the doctrine of baptismal regeneration as held by Episcopalians," he gives his own view in the following short sentence:-"We hold that children are, in a sense, included in the faith of their parents, partakers with them in their covenant, and brought into a peculiar relation to God in virtue of it." Here is laid the basis of his whole scheme, and we shall endeavour to test it.

We begin by observing that some considerable difficulties lie on the face of it. A scheme of this sort, intended for such wide and important application, ought to be teres et rotundus, of some organic completeness and harmony of parts; qualities in which the scheme before us entirely fails. Let us test it by a few practical queries. "Children are, in a sense, included in the faith of their parents." Query 1. Which parent? The father? Or the mother? Or either? Or does it require both ?— Query 2. Which children? Some may have grown up, some may have died, and some may have lived and died in sin, before the parents believe. Does the parents' faith include these? Again, does the parents' faith include children already born, or only those to be born?-Query 3. In what sense? Not in the full sense of salvation by faith, as the doctor's language admits; and if there be any other sense in which faith may modify the condition of a human being, it surely requires to be defined and justified.-Query 4. What in the case of persons who may (in Dr. Bushnell's language) have grown up from their infancy "in love with all goodness," and so never have exercised faith at all; or, if in any sense they can be said to have exercised faith, can hardly be said to have included their children, contingent or impossible, in it? These practical questions, we think, deserve an answer. Without one, indeed, Dr. Bushnell's scheme is not capable of any general or safe application.