MARCH, 1874. Missionary Work in General.

I CANNOT give you any counsel as to your settlement until I know something of its circumstances. I am hoping soon to know. May God grant you wisdom in all your plans! Although we are so much crippled at home, I find that there is great strength to our Society in your two foreign embassies. God will not suffer us to want because of any effort that we may make for the heathen. Your letter about Egypt does indeed make one long for the time when Egypt shall be third with Israel and with Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the land, and we must look for the land of Sinim at last to yield her children to God. There seem to be fresh disturbances in China which one hopes will prepare the way. Meanwhile we have charge of India. Oh, how one begins to realize very slowly the small extent of the conquest of the world which has yet been effected for Christ! Is it not that we have striven to conquer for Him, instead of letting Him go forth conquering and to conquer, while we humbly come after His victorious steps? Yes. Always remember that He must win the victories. We have to watch and pray and toil and talk, but all is empty words unless He smite the nations with the rod of His mouth, speaking through us by the power of the Holy Ghost.

GOOD FRIDAY. Redemption--European Work--Collect for Good Friday,

MAY the power of our Lord's redemption be very abundantly manifest in your mission. In the midst of the heathen the act of redemption seems to come more prominently before the soul. In a Christian community, however much people may be living below their Christian calling, the various gifts of sanctifying grace often put the work of redemption practically aside. It is acknowledged as a dogmatic truth--at least it is well if it is so acknowledged--but it seems to be a natural thing to be among the baptized, and Satan's natural hold of us is thus ignored. But it is a glorious thing to turn any from darkness to light, from the power of Satan to God, and I hope our Society will be blest of God for the accomplishment of this.

One man cannot do everything. Take care that the European work is well subordinated to work for the heathen. Our collect to-day for "Turks" had a meaning which far surpassed any former Good Friday. We felt we were praying not for abstract Turks but for a people within reach.

APRIL 9. Regeneration.

THANKS for the Mirror. It is interesting to see that notice of our Society written from a heathen point of view. I should be glad to have any Brahmo publications. . . . What one needs to bring home to their minds, I think, is the necessity of regeneration. I should think their Brahman training would in a great degree fit them to receive this truth. This world into which we are born is a world of death. We must die to it in order to live. But then we need to be born into a higher life before we die, lest we perish in death. This, therefore, is the record "that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life." This world bears upon its surface the evidence of being a world of condemnation from which we need to be delivered. Modern Christianity has so miserably lost sight of this standpoint of Christian teaching as given us so plainly by S. John. The idea of legal satisfaction has taken the place of regeneration, first in the moral theology of the Western Church, and then in the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith. The idea of mortal sins being committed by the unbaptized is fatal to the acknowledgement that they are altogether dead in sins. So, throughout, sin is considered as an impediment to enduring God's judgement, rather than as a forfeiture of the divinely-communicated life. There can be no salvation out of Christ, not because God would punish the heathen, but because the state of punishment in which they are remains upon them, and can only be taken away by their being taken into Christ. "When Christ, Who is our life, shall appear, then shall" we "also appear with Him in glory." Modern Christianity says that the wicked will die. S. John says that all who do not come to Christ are dead. The transmission of our nature in a dead and guilty state from generation to generation is, I should think, an idea that the Brahman mind would receive. The individual being thus involved in the collective substance of the race is akin to their own teaching; and so the substance of Christ being the regenerating principle to the new race of the baptized, and consequently our eternal life and salvation being not a matter of simple individual reward but of grace--reward to Christ the head, derived from Him to His members. Hence the necessity, with a view to salvation, of accepting the Catholic Faith with a view to incorporation into Christ, and thus, after this, but not before, a judgement according to works, by which the saved people shall be tested whether they be worthy of eternal life or no, as is set forth in the much calumniated and much misunderstood Athanasian Creed. I was surprised to read in Trench's Lectures on Plutarch how he had caught the idea of the seminal principle of humanity containing in its transmission a quality of merit or demerit. A Hindu ought to find this much easier of acceptance than a Greek. The attention to the more or less of actual sins in Western casuistry seems to me to have put almost out of sight the doctrine of original sin as a practical consideration. It remained as a doctrine, but being disregarded as a practical reality it generated a sense of injustice, as if its penalty were only akin to the penalty of actual sins, and so there followed European unbelief. Meditate frequently on S. John iii and on his first Epistle. They contain the true principles of conversion.

S. PHILIP AND S. JAMES. Poverty.

YOUR Holy Week must have been a strange one. It was the furnishing and preparing of the upper room. I hope the Master will indeed come to the house, not merely for a transitory feast, but for a permanent habitation. I am sure you will not be extravagant. Of course you must have certain appliances in that climate for health's sake. It would be false economy to squander strength or life, but I would try to keep the house as much to native simplicity as is compatible with such requirements; and keep the chapel also seemly for worship, and clean, but within the limits of religious poverty.

Much love to all the community, for those whom I know not by face I seem to know with an intense sympathy as the firstfruits of India to welcome us in the love of Jesus.

FRIDAY AFTER ASCENSION DAY. Sickness--English Work--Spiritual Life--Special Providences--The Kingdom of Christ.

I DO not feel any doubt that your sickness is a token of God's love sanctifying and accepting your work by teaching you your weakness. Hindrances of this kind are great tokens that God has some special work to be done, but He wants to bring us to more prayer, deeper humility, patience more perfect. He often calls us to wait, just because He wants to discipline our own souls for the attainment of greater gifts which He has in store. We must recognize His hand in all these matters with thankfulness, knowing that He loveth us. I suppose your health decides the question of the chaplaincy. It will be a long time before you are strong enough. I must say I have a strong feeling against the mere English work. It will be a great detriment to the heathen mission. I incline to keeping pretty nearly for them alone. Otherwise you will get involved in English distractions. . . . But the great matter is to get the match well alight before you try to kindle the fire, and so the spiritual life of the house is the primary necessity. At this time we must specially entreat our ascended Lord to make manifest within us all--England, India, America, Germany, Italy, France, Russia, Turkey, all our colonies--the power of the Holy Ghost, quickening us for that work for the accomplishment of which He sent that Blessed Spirit down at the first. As we have received the Spirit, "let us also walk in the Spirit," and then we need fear no dangers from without, nor doubt of any work that may be before us. Whenever any matters make us feel apprehensive as to the future they should stir up our faith to act in the fullness of the Holy Spirit within. I hope our house at Patna will be greatly blessed in the manifestation of this Holy Spirit. ... I look upon the doctor's presence with us as a special provision of God's love for this emergency. We must gain a great habit of faith by taking notice of all the tokens of God's watchful care. We must remember He does not say, These signs shall follow them that have Me with them, but those who not only have Me, but believe that they have Me. [The house was actually at Bankipur, near Patna. Bishop Milman of Calcutta placed Father O'Neill there in a house once occupied by the S.P.G. Mission.] How little do we really lay hold upon the inner life which Christ's presence in the fullness of His Holy Spirit would perfect within us. He does not come to us with the gift of the divine life merely in order to keep us going in the way of the world, but in order to manifest in us that divine power which by His Ascension He has assumed. May He grant us to realize that the Church collectively and our bodies individually are indeed a temple, having a Shechinah which does not merely fill the house wherein it is, but quickens the house so that each stone is a living stone, living with the very life of the undivided God.

Events round about us look critical at home. I cannot help a conviction that something serious will happen soon. "When these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads." l We may shrink from great catastrophes in the world, but when they happen we shall only learn to appreciate the more fully what it is to have received a kingdom which cannot be shaken. It seems as if our forefathers had held to the fact of baptismal regeneration, and the later movement had dwelt upon the fact of the real presence; and it seems as if it were for this age to rejoice in the power of the inner life of the Saviour wherein we are new-born, without which the external fact of Christ's presence in the Holy Eucharist and the dogmatic truth of our regeneration would be valueless. There is somewhat akin to this in the transition of the Apostles [from companionship] with the risen Saviour to the living union with Him which His Ascension effected. He is not ascended from us but in us, lifting up His head to breathe, as it were, the pure air of the height of the mountain of God, while His blood circulates in us His members here below. Surely it is expedient for us that He is gone up on high. If He were to come down our life would stagnate.

MAY 22. Reading of Holy Scripture.

I AM very glad that you have adopted the practice of an hour's daily reading of Holy Scripture all together. It is most desirable. May God, indeed, bring His word home with power to all of your hearts as you carry on the study! . . . If we want strength for any work of God, we do well to seek it in Holy Scripture. Those minds have been the greatest which have been most filled with it. The misery of our day is that we have so many books that we have scarcely any time for reading the one which is all-important. The writings of men belong to one nation or another, but the word of God speaks to the mind of all nations, the universal human mind formed after the image of God. If we would speak home to the mind of the heathen, savage or refined, we may be sure that the divine word will come home to them with a power far beyond any utterances of uninspired origin. The universal power of the Holy Scripture is indeed one great testimony to its divine origin.

JUNE 9. Wakeful nights.
[A portion of this letter was printed in the first series of Father Benson's Letters, published in 1916, It is reprinted here with its context.]

AS for the mode of spending wakeful nights, it is difficult to advise. Sometimes the bodily state is so restless during a wakeful night that it is impossible to give the mind to continued devotion. Sometimes a little quiet reading may be the best means of tranquillizing oneself for sleep. Of course you ought generally on such occasions to try to get to sleep. It would not do to turn these times of nervousness into vigils for spiritual purposes. The frame wants sleep all the more because it rejects it. You should do that which you find most helpful in disposing you to sleep. Sometimes a little quiet bodily exercise, a gentle turn in the compound, or a bath, may be useful. If you find you are able to give the time to any religious exercises without increasing nervous excitement, then you may take such opportunities as great occasions of thankfulness. I remember my mother during a long illness found the study of the Italian poets physically very helpful. There was just enough difficulty about reading a language with which she was not very familiar to give her the occupation which her mind wanted, and so much of the difficulty was merely mechanical. Anything more immediately touching the affections would have been too much for her to bear at that time. If you are able to turn such waking times to account, whether for linguistic or spiritual purposes, well and good. The simple reading of Holy Scripture, not for study, but as having a sacramental power to soothe the soul, may bring much comfort, and it tends imperceptibly to form the thinking habits according to the mind of God, so that it is very profitable. It is often disappointing to find when one is wakeful how utterly incapable one is of going through any religious exercises. The same nervousness which destroys the power of sleep destroys very often the power of tranquil thought and simple loving devotion. It seems to be such loss of time, void of profit both for this world and the next. But it is not so really. We must give up ourselves to the will of God, and the acceptance of His will is the true way of sanctification. We learn our nothingness by such helplessness, and that is the greatest lesson we can learn.

JUNE 18.

I ENCLOSE you a letter from Nassau. Matters in that diocese seem to be coming to a crisis--and so, in fact, it is everywhere. It makes one think of S. Peter's warning about the ark wherein few were saved. How many boats, great and small, will be swamped! How few will be saved! What an exemplification of detachment Noah's Ark is, floating on the wide waste, and living with an unassailable life in the Son of God! May God grant us to realize the same detachment in our vocation.

JULY 9. Bodily Suffering--S. John's Gospel, chapter vi--Prayer--Patience.

I SAW your sister to-day. Her suffering is very great and increasing. Yet surely we can see that a blessing from God is coming to her along with it. God uses bodily suffering as a great means of sanctification. I feel more and more that the Western doctrine of the soul's purgatory is an impossibility; but the suffering of the flesh, whether in this world or in the Day of Judgement, seems to be such a necessity. It fills one with much peace to think of the soul being absent from the body, and present with the Lord, unclothed of its own sinful nature and living in the body of Christ whose member it is, that "building of God . . . not made with hands, eternal in the heavens," in which the soul has eternal life. People do so little realize the truth of our substantial union with Christ. The heaven of the four living creatures, with each individual soul as an eye in their wings, would be no heaven to most people. They want to walk about, and talk, and think, and be in heaven just what they were on earth. There is so little idea in modern Christendom of the individual soul being lost, as it were, in the communion of saints.

I was amused to-day at receiving your letter about the Commentary. I have just done one twenty-first part of the task which you assign me. I have just sent a MS. to the press on chapter vi. It is, as you say, strange how all commentators miss the drift of so many passages. It seems to me that chap, vi is our Lord's claim to be the prophet like unto Moses, "This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him Whom God hath sent." Our Lord claimed to feed them with Himself in a way which should far exceed the feeding of the Israelites by Moses: thus He accepted the challenge of the Jews that He ought to act in a way no less wonderful for sustaining His people on their pilgrimage than Moses did for them of old. . . .

Of course the real work of converting India is to be done only by patient prayer. If you were to find ever so many converted during your lifetime, we ought rather to regard this as the result of the prayers and perseverance of unobtrusive self-sacrificing men who have gone before us. The real result of your life in India will, in like manner, be reaped by those who come after you. If you live a life of prayer, God will draw to you such as shall be saved. Do not be discouraged because it is a slow work. Immediate success is, in comparison with toilsome barrenness, like mustard and cress in comparison with the growth of an acorn.

JULY 23. Locality of the Mission--Poverty--Brahmoism--Mr. Bowen--Jesuit Missions--Patience--Modesty.

I AM sorry in one sense for your having to move, but I am not sorry at your getting away from those premises. [The premises once occupied by the S.P.G. at Bankipur, which had been assigned to Father O'Neill by Bishop Milman, and were of considerable extent, had been bought by the Indian Government for a medical school.] I would much sooner settle in some smaller way. I think, however kind it was of the bishop to put us there, that large premises are a serious hindrance to poverty. It is not like the Bombay settlement of which we are only the nucleus. But I would much rather our mission should do its work--principally witness, prayer, preparation--with as little of external surroundings as possible. If I were in your place, I think I should pack up most of the things you took out, and leave them in a box. One could not refuse many presents, but I felt them to be in many ways grievous "impedimenta" to missionary life. In settling anywhere I would keep clear of the English as much as possible. I know the bishop's anxiety to get chaplains for English work, but that is not our purpose, and it must damage real mission work. I would much sooner settle in Bundelkand, or among the hill tribes, than in an English town; but I should think some large town where the English are few or scarcely any would be the best. I do not see how one is to carry out a life of poverty in an English chaplain's position. One must be out of sight. I always feel a grieving here for the old days when I was in the village at Cowley in a comparatively poor cottage. One did feel such a love for those Germans from the Nagpur mission whom I happened to see at the S.P.G., which I think I mentioned to you.

Do not be deluded by the Brahmos. [i.e. the Brahmo Samaj, a theistic society opposed to polytheism, mythology, and idolatry, founded at Calcutta in 1828 by Ram Mohan Ray.] I do not think they are worth spending any great effort upon. I should only use them as a reflecting medium, that what is done to them may react on others. I have much more hope of a thoroughgoing Brahman. I am very glad you have written a letter in the Mirror. From time to time, not too often, and very carefully written, a letter there may be useful, more to others than to themselves. Their mysticism is all rubbish. Mysticism and pride are like the smoke of the pit, not the incense of the altar. They are much more likely to succumb to unintentional than to aggressive work. They want an "inspiration" in the missionaries. It is pretty much like the Jews complaining of Jesus Christ. In fact on their part it is the same. We must expect them to be in India what the Gnostics were to the early Church. Their words often true enough, but their hearts utterly earthly, and their attempts at a "high" life the worst form of denying the supernatural. It is important to watch them and to know as much about them as one can, but to live just quietly and unobtrusively before God and leave them in His hands. They will, if they are in earnest, recognize the power of a missionary life. One of the worst features in them is that they should not have eyes to see how much divine life there has been in the mission work, in spite of all its shortcomings.

Oddly enough I have just had Mr. Bowen's meditations lent me, at the very time when Father Page's letter arrived saying he had had an interview. I think to live away from Europeans, as he did, is the real thing to do, only it will be easier to do this in a city where there are few English. I should think the mission stations of the Jesuits--you say they are generally single-handed with a catechist--would give you an idea of what is practical for us. Only be sure and have what food is necessary for health. ... I do not know when I shall have another priest whom I can send to you. Probably not for some time.

It is easier in some respects to settle down into the life of a mission station without others than with them. We must be content with what God gives us, whether in the way of fellow labourers or of results. I think that is so delightful which one reads of Mr. Bowen, that, though he has baptized but few persons himself in those twenty-six years, yet he has never felt any disappointment. That is the true spirit of a missionary, to rejoice in God and leave one's work in God's hands. Work carried on in that spirit is sure to have its results. The great lives of the world are just those which seemed to leave no result behind, because no man knew of them. Nothing seemed to come of what they did, for what they did was given to God. After the first gathering in of those Jews who were beforehand prepared for Christ, how scanty and how full of sorrow are the conversions as narrated in the Acts! The great thing for us is to tarry the Lord's leisure, and we shall be able sooner than we think to say, "This is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes."'

Do not let yourself get involved in too much work in different places. I hear from Madras that the bishop makes some difficulty as to our working or holding a retreat there. Be careful not to overstep such prejudices. We have plenty of work in the other two dioceses. In going about to hold retreats there is also the danger of us, who are young and new to the work, seeming to be setting right those who are older and more experienced. Therefore be very careful not to do anything of the kind without the full and hearty invitation of all who have to do with it. Some, I know, would welcome us, e.g. in Madras, but if there is any feeling on the part of senior men or the bishop we ought to hold back, for after all we are not there for the purpose of that work, but for the natives. It is a glorious armour, the armour of the religious life, but we must gird it on with much self-distrust in our new sphere of action.

JULY 31. Certainty of Success.

YOU must not think you can do nothing against the idolatry that is round about. Oh, no! The Church of God roots itself slowly and silently, but the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations, and the breath which exhales from a missionary's cell is a power greater than that of the most eloquent of philosophers or the most powerful of statesmen. You must live through the period of burial before you can begin to see results, but your labour shall not be in vain in the Lord, and idolatry is to disappear before it as surely as the walls of Jericho before the marching and hymns of the Israelites. We are not to expect to see the stones move until the seventh day. So must our faith and love and perseverance be tested. So shall you surely gain the victory.

AUGUST 12. The Infancy of a Mission--Times of Silent Waiting.

I HOPE that you will take care to nurse the mission house through its "infancy." Do not mind a mission house having infancy. Infancy is a very sacred thing. Silence is specially dear to God. Of course, wherever you are you cannot expect to be doing anything so as to see results for many years to come. It is just the trial of your patience which will be the great means of your sanctification, and so, being sanctified, you will be able to praise God for the answers to your prayers which you will see in years to come from the other side of the grave. Only do not be too venturesome. You cannot do English work in an Indian climate. Your life for some time to come must be a quiet witness before man, and a constant prayer to God. S. Francis Xavier felt himself very tongue-tied. God can use our silence as much as our words. But then, we must commend our silence to Him to turn it to account. It is in this patient waiting that the self-sacrifice of a missionary's life really consists. People do not commonly think of it. In fact no one can realize it until going out there. . . .

I am sorry that you have not gone to the hills. I sent out the money because I thought you might possibly be going off on a journey which might be an expensive one. . . . Plainly, what you have to do just now is to rest. . . . Give yourself up to a life of prayer to God. Think of the future of the mission, and "for their sakes" sanctify yourself, that those who come after you may be "sanctified through the truth." I know well what the apostolic weariness of such a waiting time is. I have had some waiting in my day. "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength." May He grant you a renewal of strength, and after patience has had her perfect work send us some fellow workers suitable to join you. Plainly it would not be right for you to be doing much preaching even if you were in a more English city. Think of S. Paul's years of imprisonment at Caesarea. So India of the future shall find itself advantaged by your necessary silence. Accept God's will, and God will open the way for you in due time. The work will go on all the faster by and by, if now you are continuing instant in prayer. Think of the loneliness of the patriarchs--Abraham, Jacob, Joseph. It is not for nothing.

AUGUST 20. Benefit of a "Retired Locality.

AS for the influence of our work, we must look for that to grow up by God's providence, if He gives us bodily health and grace to persevere, not by being in any prominent or central position, but by the effect of devoted life. I quite know how great an effort this is. I should not have thought of imposing the hardness and isolation of a missionary life upon you, if you had not offered for it so many years back. It must be a great strain, such as in this country we cannot realize. But God, Who has given you the desire and the readiness to offer, will give you strength to perform. I do not doubt that. But I do think we should lose the supernatural strength of the hidden life in patient witness among the heathen, if our station was exposed to the fussiness and outward prominence of life in Calcutta. I do not believe we should do any mission work there, or have more than a transitory effect. A retired work, and a life of devotion and prayer very little heard of by others, is what will surely tell the most in the end, not only upon the neighbourhood, but upon others at a distance. God will manifest His power in bringing to light, for the increase of His glory, whatever has been done in simple reliance upon Himself. Quite true, you cannot expect to make any number of converts worth mention for many years, but it is not those who have made the most converts whose lives have really been the most influential in extending the kingdom of Christ. The law of Christ and of God in nature and in grace is "one soweth, and another reapeth." There must be weary seasons of seemingly resultless prayer and toil before there can be a harvest such as God would give.

AUGUST 27. The Struggle of Missionary Life--Slowness and Difficulties of Missionary Work

ONE does feel ashamed of oneself to be writing, from all the comforts of home, words of encouragement to you in the struggles of your distant campaign. Yet do not think that because I have not experienced I do not estimate the difficulties of your position. I quite feel that very likely I may have been kept at home because God saw that, whatever might be the impulses of my heart, I should not have been able to bear the hardships of a real missionary life. These hardships, I know, are not those which the world counts. Not poverty, nor climate, nor sickness, nor outward difficulty, but loneliness in spiritual struggle. The silent watching through hours which seem wasted for a victory which seems hopeless, the oft-weary prayers for the heathen around while the heart feels the terribleness of inward struggles, greater than ever known before, which seem to make the conflict impossible. Yes, the missionary has to bear the struggles of the hermit saints and the warrior all in one--the hermit struggling with Satan and the warrior in the worst of all conflicts in the trenches. Do not think I should ever grudge of my best for the work, but "I have no man." Well, our Lord Jesus will be the Man to stand by you as He did by S. Paul, as He did by the palsied man, both to help and to heal. Others can take part with us in the outward struggle. Jesus takes part with us in both struggles. Jonathan had his armour-bearer. We in our loneliness have Jesus for our armour-bearer. We could not bear the armour of the heavenly warfare ourselves. If He bears it for us, and gives us arrow after arrow to shoot, not one will fly in vain.

I can quite imagine how difficulties open out before you. It must be so as we strive to climb the heights of heroic sanctity. But remember that thus it is that we must lay the foundations of a future mission work. We cannot begin and cultivate the soil all at once. There must be felling of the old timber, and many roots left to die and rot upon the ground before they can be removed. I hope before many years are out I shall have some men to send and enter upon the fruits of your pioneering. Remember that you are yourself to be in some sort the root of a future Christianity. You have not got so much to plant as to grow. Whoever comes out after you will not so much take up your work as be grafted into your life. I am not disappointed at the sickness and desertion which have marked the Indian work. I believe they are tokens that God is pruning you thoroughly that you may grow and bring forth fruit abundantly. . .

It seems to me that that Sunday reunion of young men from the college may be full of results. Do not expect a convert at once. Some of the fruits of my ministry to which I look back with the most gratitude took nearly a twelve-month of family prayer and exposition before they were brought out of dissent. You must not let the remembrance of exciting mission work at home make you discontented at the apparent resultlessness of work abroad. In fact pastoral work at home must be very much of the same character. People take years and years to Christianize, and then it is only one fruit here and there which ripens for heaven. If we could only see what one ripe fruit is, we should be satisfied even with one.

SEPTEMBER 4. Addresses to Indians.

YOUR last letter was a very encouraging one with the account of your first Sunday evening with the students. I felt sure that God would open to you some door of usefulness. Nothing would seem to be better. Of course they will need to be tested if they do show any readiness to accept truth. Their perseverance is not equal physically to the vividness of their impressions, so that I expect that Europeans often set them down as hypocritical because of seeming untruthfulness, whereas it is rather a physical constitution which causes the readiness to accept, and the incapacity to retain. You will therefore require great caution; and do not be discouraged by seeming failures. How many failures our Blessed Lord had to bear with in Judea amongst the chosen people! How the Apostles found their converts running off! "Ye did run well; who hath bewitched you?" We must not expect that perseverance belongs to the nineteenth century, either in England or in India, more than it did to Jews and Galatians in the first.

OCTOBER 16. Future of the Society--Guidance of Providence.

WRITING to our Indian dependencies is always a great joy. More than a joy: it is a strength, for I cannot but feel that your mission work is a great source of grace to us at home. May there ever be such a fruitful interchange of prayer and effort that our Society may span the world in the indissoluble glory of the Holy Ghost! There certainly does seem to be a time of special manifestation at hand, and as God has planted our little Society in so many points of special influence, He must be intending us to have some great work in moulding the future. We must be ourselves preparing for it in a spirit of simple devotion and entire detachment. I am so glad you are able to write as you do about leaving the future in God's hands. I am sure it is best to be entirely guided by the indications of His providence. We can form no idea for ourselves. We must be ready for anything and preparing for anything. I wish I had some one that I could send to you as a coadjutor. I hope before long I may be able to do so.

NOVEMBER 19. Oneness of the Society.

YOUR letter is a very strengthening one to us at home. I quite feel that you, who are gone as pioneers of missions, go forth in order that the Society may become sanctified in your persons in various spots, with a view to future conversions. We cannot expect to see much fruit, but be assured the branch that is purged will bring forth its fruit in due season. I am sure that our whole Society drinks in, by God's mercy, a blessed draught of sanctifying grace by the patience and endurance of our distant missionaries. You must try and feel in return that, however much separated by space from the Mother House, you and it are thoroughly one in that which binds us much closer than daily intercourse can bind. Oh blessed love of Jesus, wherein we are also to love one another! No member of the Society can ever be alone. In all loneliness you must try and realize how thoroughly we are indissolubly one.

DECEMBER 10. The Companionship of Jesus--Benefits of Solitude--Accumulated strength of the Body of Christ--Hindrances.

YOU will have found this in one sense a very lonely Christmas. May you experience the joy of the holy fellowship of all the company of heaven keeping festival with you! The throng of men is very apt to hinder our seeing that which is so near us. The lonely soul has many joys of divine revelation, and can exult as none other can in the vision of the glory of Jesus. He ever delights to show Himself to us. He ever delights to abide with us. He is with us who remain at home and with you who are gone. . . . You must not think that your time is wasted because you may seem to have but few inquirers. Your life is a life of witness to His truth, even to those who do not hear the sound of your voice. We shall pray that God may give you grace to bear this life of lonely witness worthily. His eye is ever resting upon you, and His hand sustaining you. In loneliness with God we attain to experience the powers of God. In our more active work amongst men we are very apt to lose sight of God's power in the very results which it effects. Loneliness brings the soul to a real habit of worship, so that we find God as being, in Himself, our sufficiency, our reward, our refuge, and our strength. When He strengthens us to live, in humble devotion before Himself, He is doing much more for us than by any strength whereby we may be enabled merely to speak with men. The strength which we receive in such seasons of privacy is an accumulating strength which makes itself felt as the emergency arises. God does not give us His strength for nought. Strength, as it is treasured up in any one of the members of Christ, makes itself felt throughout the body of Christ. I was thinking the other day how we, in these last days of the Church, must be stronger than any that were before us. As the number of God's elect becomes complete, and all the redeemed are gathered into paradise, each having some special gift that God has given him as the manifestation of the Pentecostal Spirit, so there must be a pressure of the energies of the body of Christ against the world. The energies in which all have served God upon the earth do not die with their bodies, but live in the body of Jesus, where their blessed spirits abide; and so the body of Christ shines out ever more and more with growing perfection, and we upon the earth are like the front waves of a mighty flood, which, dashing on against some barrier, breaks down the dam by the force of the collected waters. The waters break through where there is some weak point in the dam, and all the supernatural energies of the body of Christ will break forth wherever the world has least hold over us to keep us back. Any gifts which we may have of the world only serve to make the darn strong, and hinder the divine manifestation. We must live as the heirs of all the ages of Pentecostal life, and Christ will make His power to be known in us even more than it was ever known in earlier days. The accumulated grace of Christ must first break down the barrier of our earthly hearts, and then it will break through and overflow the evil of the world. We must see that we are each one of us treasuring up this power, whether we witness its bursting forth or no. What we see in the way of success matters little, but the whole body of Christ partakes of the consequences of what we are. I do really believe that our Society is gaining great strength by means of the grace which God is giving to you through the trials of the past year and the novitiate of our Indian mission. We must pass through the novitiate, and it may be a long one, before we can go forth in the fullness of strength. God is calling you to the special work of sanctification: "For their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth." l Your solitude and suffering and prayer shall not be lost. India and England too shall reap the benefit, and God shall be glorified in our Society, according to the promises of His unfailing love.

When I think of you being in India, I can praise God for not letting me go there sixteen years ago. [If Father Benson had gone to India at that time, as he had intended, probably the Society of S. John the Evangelist would never have come into being, nor Father O'Neill have gone to India as a Religious.] How little one can tell what is likely to come of our hindrances. We must give them up into God's keeping, and He will always make them result in good far beyond the immediate loss.

DECEMBER 31. Union of the Society--First Epistle of S. John--Waiting--Sensible Devotion.

I HAD quite intended sending you a Christmas Day letter, but I had not written it beforehand; and when I came down from the midnight Celebration I was really unable to do as I had intended. First it was impossible for me to get anything written before two o'clock, as I had been almost all the time in church. However, if we are living in the power of the incarnate Word, we need not the mere utterance of human expression to make us feel the bond of divine love. The same Word speaks in both our hearts. He knits the community in one, however much we may be separated. Our true life, our oneness, is in Him. May His blessing be with you, speaking through all your acts with His divine power, the voice at which devils tremble, by which men are blessed, and in which the Father rejoiceth. May you learn the power of His word, with more and more of experience, through all the years that He may call you yet to serve Him.

We are now keeping our annual retreat from Sunday to Sunday. ... I am taking the Epistle of S. John as the basis of our retreat--The Manifestation of the Eternal Love (chap, i): Transfiguring Love: Penitential Love (chap. ii). Justifying Love: Renewing Love: Restraining Love: Illuminating Love (chap. iii). Filiating Love: Purifying Love: Obedient Love: Fraternal Love: Self-sacrificing Love (chap. iv). Mediatorial Love: Experimental Love: Corresponding Love: Triumphant Love: Impetrative Love: The Eternal Welcome of Love (chap. v).

What a sight the Mela must have been. [A great religious assembly of Hindus.] I do not know, but I should fancy that mission preaching was likely to be more effective quietly, in the ordinary village life, than in the excitement of such a concourse. Yet if, after several years, one listener is brought to the faith that makes the annual visit well worth while. I could not help thinking of the man at the pool of Bethesda, not eighteen, but thirty-eight years. The waiting times of Holy Scripture are stupendous if one thinks of living through them. It is so difficult for us not to fancy that men of faith must have seen the end. But no, they died in faith--Abraham, Moses, David, Hosea, Jeremiah, Daniel. The missionary ought to find great encouragement in these and the other teachings of Holy Scripture, by which we learn with patience to wait for the fulfilment of the divine promises, a fulfilment which shall be so far beyond what we ever expected. We must live and mark out the land we would evangelize with the Cross of many a weary year of resultlessness, and yet feel assured that our labour is not in vain in the Lord. God treasures up every cry of the lonely heart. It is more powerful in the end than the most eloquent preaching amidst man's applause.

I do not think that I ever replied to what you said about a convert's faith. I think I can quite understand the consciousness of the present faith being less intense than the earlier false one. I think it is so always. Religions exert the most hold and power over our nature when they are most akin to it. Things supernatural do not affect the sense so much as things debased. Even in Christianity it is those forms which alloy the truth which get the most hold of the nature. They who are "of the truth" must live with less sensible emotion. The loving trust in God has not that strong sense of union which union has when it is sought for some inferior end. The bitterness of party spirit is apt to be more intense than the energy of true love. The doctrine of assurance, or a devotion to some miraculous image of the Virgin, stir their respective followers much more than the pure love of Christ. The work of the Spirit of God is so tranquil, so unobtrusive, that its power is not felt or known. It remains for martyrdom to show the strength of the Spirit of God, or, at least, confessorship. The Spirit of God shows its hold upon the soul by what it causes us to do. We often seem to ourselves to be acting without faith, because we are really acting in it; and faith is opposed to sensible emotions. On the contrary, if Satan holds possession of the soul he makes his presence felt as a master. There is all the difference as between continuous flashes of lightning and the pure calm daylight. The more diabolical the doctrine the more intense and violent is the conviction likely to be, which Satan will inject into the hearts of those over whom he tyrannizes.

JANUARY 7, 1875. The Prayer of the Missionary--The Epiphany of Christ.

I OUGHT to have dated January 8th, for it is already past midnight; but unless I write tonight I shall not get my letter off by to-morrow's post. I cannot send you a long letter, but I do not like to miss a post, even though I have nothing to say which may be worth the shilling, yet I cannot bear the thought of some little missive not coming. He Who led the wise men by a star can lead the people of India to His truth. No other power can. Ours must be lives of prayer to develop the power from Him. He gives us waiting times that they may be prayer times, and so Abraham's long years of waiting were for the building of altars to God. He had to symbolize herein the one purpose of his life, which was to be the father of the great Victim. We have not to build altars but to minister at that which is already built in the heavenly temple, fulfilling the virtues of our high calling in bringing forth into manifestation the glory of the one Victim Who is found clothed with the seed of Abraham. It would be a terrible thing to be a missionary sent to preach Christ unless indeed we were slaves of Christ, separated unto the gospel of Christ, dedicated first to prayer and to the ministry of the word, as the outcome of our communion with God. And so we need not look upon the darkened earth with despair. We may "wish for the day," and look up, for the day shall dawn. It comes from above, not from below. Man may be dark, but the light of grace shall equally shine on all. "No man can come to Me, except the Father which hath sent Me draw him." But God, if He sends us, means to confirm our word with signs from heaven, after He has tried the perseverance of our faith. "For the love that I bear unto them they take My contrary part; but I am prayer in the midst of them." So must we be the representatives of the great Mediator, bringing down the fullness of the divine light upon them that are in darkness. "Abraham rejoiced to see My day." We must rejoice to see, not our day, but His day; not the results of our work immediate upon our toil and suffering, but the sure results of His grace, ordered in all things and sure, sure to be whenever the time shall come. It seems to us, perhaps, to be useless to fill the water-pots with water, but when the hour is come we shall find that our waiting time of discouragement and want and prayer and faith and obedience and love has brought forth its full results. Nothing that we have asked in the Name of Christ can be held back from us. Be sure you will have a glorious Epiphany in India, and however far off it may be, you will be able, by God's grace, to claim it as the result of your solitude and prayer. Those hidden prayers, to which God calls you, are the buried title-deeds of the prophetic estate which you will be able to claim in the new kingdom of the restoration.

I suppose your plans are by this time more fixed. The intervention of Government: was quite unlocked for, and so one must accept it as a plain manifestation of the divine will. The star will shine out to guide you. Of course, I cannot offer any suggestion. The bishop's wishes seem to be the best criterion. Could you go within reach of Delhi so as to work somewhat along with Winter? I confess to having a personal predilection for Bundelkand. That seemed to be suggested to us at the first with various good reasons, but I am quite without bias. The sun shines over all the world in turn, and God's grace will shine in and from you wherever you are, for I am sure you will be looking to Him always. The dust of our feet is not forgotten. If we are true to Christ, the pathway of divine light is being made bright by every step of holy obedience, as it were with diamonds. Be sure the language to convert India is the language of heaven, that is, prayer. The tongues of men and of angels will avail nothing to spread the gospel of Christ, but the mediatorial life of divine charity, lifting up man before God with a crucified heart in the power of the Holy Ghost.

FEBRUARY 12. The Unseen Order of God--Delhi and Ephesus.

YOUR accounts of the various missionaries and their ways are very interesting. We must look for God to bring the new heavens and the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness, out of the chaos of the earthly Church, as the present earth came out of the chaos of former worlds. We know that the various manifestations of God's Holy Spirit in His Church are not to die away under the power of Satan. However much ill-regulated zeal there may be, yet as it comes from the Spirit of God it shall effect God's purpose in spite of all that Satan may do to mar its working. As we now see the power, we shall hereafter see the order and beauty of the work of God. When that day of the revelation of Christ comes, how shall we see our own highest ideas of order transcended by the result which God will then bring to light! He knows how to establish His own in their true places, while all around seems to be unsettlement and confusion. One is like a ball rolling without any certainty over the board until at last it drops into a hole, but He knows exactly what the destination is to which our rolling about is to bring us. One dare not wish to be at rest, for He knows where we are to settle, and in His wisdom we are each of us safe. So with our spiritual consummation, and so also with your temporal settlement at the present time. I do not fear but that good will come of your uprooting. Delhi seems to me a promising place, but I would not have you settle there nastily. I suppose too that Delhi is in some respects like Ephesus, and so there would seem to be a link between your life and the last years of S. John. If you do settle there, you will be in the midst of great architectural splendour of iniquity. May the Word of God make the fabric to collapse, and however humble the outward building of the truth may be, I hope the glory of the spiritual building will be a joy of eternity. I never noticed till the other day how S. Paul's commending of the elders to God and to the word of His grace ' leads on to promulgation in the midst of those very elders of the teaching of the incarnate Word by S. John.

MARCH 5. Solitude--Jonah--Heathen Faith and Prayer.

IN solitude God teaches us many things, and you must have altogether a good deal of real solitude although you have been a good deal along with others. In solitude we learn both our own littleness and the greatness of God's power to do with us whatsoever He wills. A little surrounding, even two or three, makes one forget the smallness of the individual in comparison with the vast world of work; but when one is alone in the mighty waters, like S. Paul a day and a night floating on the deep, one feels the mightiness of the power of God and His all-sufficiency. I have to preach this afternoon at All Saints' on Jonah. (My course there is on the "forty days" of Holy Scripture.) May that power which subdued Nineveh subdue India before you. I wonder what happened to the men who threw him overboard. Their deprecation would secure them from the charge of innocent blood.

Thanks for your letter. I did not imagine that a heathen could love his god. I do not think it possible. "Every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth" the true "God." There may be an intense passionate devotion which the devotee supposes to be love, but I should think it was a possession acting like an intoxication. Elijah when subdued before the still small voice was a much greater man than when he was calling down fire from heaven upon the altar at Carmel. Probably, however, there was much more consciousness of zeal on the latter occasion than on the former. With him it was the true God Who was the object of different affections in both cases, but the parallel would be in the change of the earthlier into the heavenlier affection. There would be a real knowledge of self in the latter case, which was wanting amidst the excitement of the previous occasion.

I suppose there will be a good deal of opportunity for the doctor to practise in your part of the city, and this will bring you into intercourse with many of the people. Do not, however, be disquieted if they are slow to move. Probably S. Paul's converts in many places were few. We may be sure that such as are ordained to eternal life will believe, if we are true to the divine ministry among them. The divine election connotes our industry as one of its conditions, but it should give us a blessed tranquillity in periods of long and unpromising expectation. We look for promises, not to the deceitful appearances of the world before us, whether they be good or bad, but to the unfailing truth of Him Who sends us. His work is being done in the world in a very marvellous way in spite of the powers of the world. Let us be constant in prayer to Him that He will send labourers to do the work.

MARCH 12. Easter Blessing--Need of Prayer.

I SUPPOSE this will arrive before Low Sunday. May all Easter blessings shine out upon you! In one sense solitude helps us to realize the great festival glories of the communion of saints. You have, at any rate, the two or three to whom our Lord's presence is so specially promised. May you all rise up to Him in the glory of holy contemplation. Surely it cannot be long ere Christ come again.

The slowness of mission work makes us realize how very little prayer is really being made by Christendom to God. If Christian people generally said "Thy kingdom come" as if they meant it, what consequences would there be! If we could see, we should find that God is giving far more in answer to prayer than we could have any right to expect.

MAUNDY THURSDAY. The Power of the Cross.

TO-NIGHT we seem to be watching on each side of Gethsemane; you from the East, and we from the West. May we so watch around the Cross that we may come to sit down with those who are partakers of His promise in His heavenly kingdom. ... I look forward to some postulants after Easter. We may be sure God will give us increase according to our real needs. Probably we need to be kept down for a while, in order that we may rely upon God. The victory is not to numbers; one Jonah converted Nineveh. The power of the Holy Spirit bowed down men's consciences before him. No man can come to us except it be given him of our Father. It is just in proportion as we are living in the fellowship of the Holy Ghost that we shall find the power of the Holy Ghost. We must be living true to the Crucified. We cannot overleap that step in evangelical life. It is not enough for us to point to Him; He must be manifest in us, still crucified in the world, though glorified in the world beyond. Such a number are carried away with the dream that, as Christ has died, we may live in this world in the results of His triumph. It is like claiming to take possession of an enemy's capital by lodging in a hovel on some battlefield of victory. This world can never be to us anything but a hovel and a battlefield. The country we claim is on the other side of the dark river. The less we have to make ourselves feel at home here the better. The most dangerous times are when all things are smooth.

APRIL 22. Modern Christianity a Mockery--Solitude.

YOU mention Ram Chandra and Tara Chand. [Afterwards a catechist at Panch Howd.] They are two men in whom I have for many years felt a great interest. I hope they are going on well, and realizing the supernatural life of Christianity. More and more I feel what a miserable mockery of Christianity Christendom is. The utter repudiation of the supernatural life as a real divine transformation of the soul is so sad. One hopes that believers gathered in from among the heathen will believe that they are drawn into the life of God. In Western Christendom the Holy Eucharist has so entirely overshadowed Holy Baptism, that the food of our life is made to be a gift greater than the life which it sustains. Without a full acknowledgement of the supernatural change wrought at our baptism, our spiritual life becomes a metaphor. . . .

I fear you must feel sometimes very solitary, but I hope the grace of the Society is a stay to you. We must all feel the distant houses of the Society to be a real strength to our own selves. Our life must deepen as our work widens. We must never lose that hold upon one another which sympathy, intercession, vocation, obedience, community involve. I quite think that, by God's mercy, we have been enabled to realize our unity in Christ in a remarkable degree. I want our central house to grow in strictness of observance. Then we shall be more of a support to the branches in various parts of the world. In all seasons of loneliness remember the Lord will stand by you and help you. You can scarcely feel more lonely at Delhi than I have often felt during the last twenty-five years at Cowley. Loneliness has its trials, but it has great blessings belonging to it. We need loneliness for the purpose of training. How God trained in loneliness the great men of old, down to him that is the greatest of all that have been born of women! How many Christian saints have been trained in intense loneliness, voluntary or involuntary, as the case might be! The Lord "took him aside from the multitude" to give him the natural gifts of hearing and speech; so He takes us apart if He wishes us to learn His will.

APRIL 30. Troubles.

YOU must not think one can ever be weary of hearing of troubles, for troubles are only the plural of life. Eternal life is the changeless act of divine bliss; may God bring us to it in the end! Life is action upon the earth also, but the acts of earth are manifold and each one full of toil. By them we are perfected for that act of eternity. The power of the eternal act shows itself, inspiring the many decaying acts of life and perfecting them for its own glory. So may God lead you onward by the discipline of present toil and manifold embarrassment to the joy of His kingdom. . . . I do not think it really matters much where you settle down; the eye of God will rest upon your labour of love if it is really done for His Name's sake, and it will not be in vain in the Lord. Years after years must go by, but the bread shall be found after many days, growing up in the harvest which has been watered with many prayers.

FEAST OF THE ASCENSION (MAY 6). Trouble belongs to Earth; Rest to Heaven--Solitude--Delhi--Guidance of God as to Locality.

IT is quite pleasant to think that you and Father Page and Father Rivington are keeping our festival all together at Bombay, and what a glorious festival it is. [S. John a. P. L., the Patronal Festival of the Society.] It is at once lost to sight and glorified by the feast of the Ascension which absorbs it. Even so, all true glory is in the loss of that which is of self, by absorption into that which is of God. May our Society find the glow of the Ascension resting upon us during the coming year. Outward difficulties must not drag us down, but rather force us to ascend. If they do so, how indeed shall we welcome them! They are indeed the loving discipline by which we are fitted to follow our dear Lord in the heavenly life. It requires much detachment to bear them joyfully, but these troubles do help to detach us, not in the way of making us discontented, for that is only a strong sense of attachment to earth after all, but in the sense of helping us to realize the power of spiritual joy to outshine all. We learn the calmness of the heavenly glory into which Jesus is ascended by the very interest of the earthly life from which He was delivered, and in which we awhile remain; but there remaineth a rest for us. This rest remains. It is not merely future. We are to experience it now. We must act in its strength, the peace of God which passeth all understanding. It is the possession of this sure abiding place which gives us stability amidst a changing world; and this home with Jesus is a place of repose for us, so that we can be detached from place and associations of every earthly home. Jesus, enthroned above the angels, carries us to rejoice with Himself in the presence of the heavenly citizens. Our home is in heaven, not merely by expectation, as the fathers of old sought a better country, but by grace; for we are made partakers of its joys by supernatural communication, and every rent of the earthly envelope of life only serves to disclose to us the glorious substance of the heavenly reality which shines out within. If a child is eager to see something which has been given it, how it tears off bit by bit the paper in which it is wrapped! and so should we rejoice to have heavenly life revealed to us by the perishing of all outer things. We must have our eyes open to see that which is within.

It is a great strength to the Society that you all are able to meet together from time to time. Even when you are separated, the consciousness of another branch of the Society being at work in India must be a stay. Perhaps the sense of loneliness which grows up even in spite of this, may help to make us realize more fully how intense must be the loneliness of the mere ordinary missionary who goes forth with no other ties than that of the common priesthood. This should make us both glorify God, Who enables them to bear up against such privations, and also it should make us careful to cherish the sympathy and sense of oneness which God in His mercy vouchsafes to us for our support. Indeed in England the sense of loneliness comes over one very often. Bodily presence is often not much more than a burden, when those who are present have so little consciousness of what one feels to be the only realities of life. Even in the midst of Church-people the minds of men are now so occupied with externals that one is nearly as much shut off from them on one side of controversy as on the other, if one really is clinging to the centre and not to the circumference. I do feel it a great strength to myself that you all in India are carrying on the work of Christ, bearing witness to His truth in the bond of our brotherhood life. Such a sense does not supersede, but develops, the work of the Holy Ghost, Who is at once the bond between us and Christ, and the bond between us all, in every form of relationship which the body of Christ permits within itself. Nothing in that body exists as a mere dead, superfluous, tolerated mechanism. In the glorified body of Christ all is life, and we are members one of another in Him; and as in the body of earth some parts are joined together in special links of interdependence and nervous sympathy, so in the body of Christ we have our special higher relationships in addition to those which are common to us along with all others, and it is the healthy working of these which must be our support and delight as we think of S.SJ.E. throughout the world.

I am sorry that you have any unsettlement at Delhi. In itself I do not see that it can at all matter "where your mission is. Obstacles in any place are just a token that the Holy Ghost does not suffer you now to preach the word in that district. So the loss of the buildings at Bankipur seemed to be a token of God's will that we should move on. It cannot really affect our own future. If S. Paul was not suffered to preach in Asia, it was because God had a call for him to Macedonia. God never hinders for the sake of hindering, but for the sake of bringing His people to some other point where the blessing is waiting for them. The great aim of our earthly discipline is to bring us thus to look for whatever blessings He has in store. Our life is through the valley of the shadow of death, but faith always seeks the bright hill-top, whose loveliness is waiting for us with a welcome, though we cannot discern its features. It is impossible to tell beforehand where God's work is most likely to find congenial soil, for it is supernatural, and none can accept it unless the Father Who sends us draw him, nor can we force it on any unless the Father sends us to him; so that the great satisfaction is just to feel oneself in the hands of God, whether in a country district or in a city. No human carelessness or degradation or anything else can really hinder the work of God's Spirit, if it be His will to work. There is no Nazareth too bad to receive the message of an angel, and germinate with the grace of Christ. Your time will not have been thrown away in getting experiences of different parts, for after all you could not under any circumstances have expected yet to have any converts growing up under instruction. You have been gaining knowledge of various classes of minds and of various ways of working, and probably this apprenticeship of migration will be the most serviceable wherever you may eventually be. My advice would be just simply to accept any post that the bishop suggests. As I said, I cannot think that there is any reason in the nature of things for such as we to choose one place rather than another. Only may God bless you everywhere.

MAY 13. Trust in God--Delay.

WE only want a place where we can kneel down and pray, and then the gospel message is sure to go forward. We may not see its progress, but it will work, as a voice on the mountain-top detaches the avalanches from summits and precipices beyond. It is a good thing for us not to have our own liking in the place of settlement. God puts us just where it is best for us to be by taking us out of our own will and judgement. It is for us to exult as we feel ourselves to be swimming in the wide ocean of His love. . . . Do not be anxious about time any more than about place. Mission work is like charging an electric machine. The rubbing all tells, though no result comes for some time. So there must be an outlay of faith and prayer, and all is accumulating towards the final result. God does not forget anything that is done for Him, but He does require us to trust His memory, His providence, and His love. These interruptions to which He has subjected you are not hindrances, though they seem to be so to us. They are all working out the great purpose which God has for you.

WHITSUNTIDE. Pentecostal Hopes--Death--Joy--"Brahma Asceticism.

THIS festival calls to mind the little cloud arising out of the western sea which the prophet's servant saw, and encourages us to anticipate the mighty shower of grace which shall yet be vouchsafed to India; or again, as the holy waters of Ezekiel's vision flowed eastward from the house of the Lord, at first only up to the ankles, but afterwards so deep that one must swim therein, and the waters of the sea were healed thereby and became full of fish; so may Pentecostal waters indeed bring forth abundantly round about you, that the net may be filled and we may come to dine with Jesus on the shore of the eternal joy.

I am writing this at All Saints' Home, and have just been interrupted to go and see an old patient, who has been nursed here for fourteen years, and a penitent, who is speechless, at S. Agnes' Home. They are both just near to die to-night. How death equalizes all things and makes us indifferent to accidents of earth! How utterly all the differentiating features of life pass out of sight, as souls are set free from this earthly prison house and enter into the glorious presence of Jesus! Do not the things of this world seem just like a counterpane thrown over one's bed? If one is to wake refreshed in the morning, one must sleep through the night without any thought of what its material may be. If one does think about it, whether its beauty or its ugliness, one cannot sleep, and then one cannot wake refreshed. There is indeed a difference. We may not be able to summon sleep for the body at command, but in the soul's sleep our will must go to sleep, as well as other features of earthly sensibility. O what a delightful thing to be like a child that a mother takes, perhaps, and lays down again, and if it wakes again it is only to have a mother's kiss and feel the sweetness of her loving care! So must it be with us and our heavenly Father. Amidst all the changes of life, we must just open our eyes to His loving providence, so full of grace and of the power of the Holy Ghost, and sleep the better, not disturbed but soothed by the sweet embrace of His love. You will find this, I am sure, both in your sickness and in your moves. God has been wonderfully good to us, and He is leading us in various ways more and more to trust simply in Him, just like a child who is awake enough, not to care, but to know in the fullness of love that it need not care. May God grant you indeed to have a right judgement in all things, and evermore to rejoice in His holy comfort. How that word "rejoice" anticipates the cry of the present day that religious truth is nothing else but religious joy, only converting the proposition, for religious joy is nothing but religious truth, and religious truth always is joy although it is not always manifest as joy. You will, I am sure, learn by God's gracious discipline to rejoice in infirmities. They are the foundation of apostolic life, and joy is the life of that life; for joy is in the Beatific Vision, and that we have if we are working for God in constant mindfulness of His presence. How interesting the notices of the Brahmos in the Mirror have been lately, speaking out so strongly of the need of the ascetic life. Gnosticism always tended in that direction. But it is a great element of truth for them to possess. We must not therefore attribute much importance to the fact of their having this idea, but we must rejoice that they have what, unhappily, their Christian cousins in the present day are wanting.

JUNE 4. Conversion of India--Virtues necessary for the Work--Psalm cxxxiii--God -proves us by delays.

IT is quite true that India seems to be getting ready for some great work of conversion which God may do through some man whom He will raise up for the purpose. Most probably the fire will be kindled by the breath of His Holy Spirit moving simultaneously on many. God delights to act rather through several than through any one. So it was at Pentecost. There were twelve. So now, probably, in India we may look for a missionary idea to seize upon many in various parts at once. We must pray that it may be so, and every one who does thus pray will surely be called to take part. We cannot be in any place so remote as to be out of God's sight. Keep Him before your eyes in constant prayer and you will be ever within His remembrance. But this requires apostolic charity, and therefore we cannot look to have any share in the work if we are in any way pushing where others do not want us; and apostolic obedience, to go just wherever we may be sent by constituted authority; and apostolic detachment, so as to be really at heart quite indifferent to place; and apostolic patience, so as to be ready to wait as many years as God may will before we see any result or tokens of His being with us. Without all this we cannot really do any abiding mission work either at home or abroad. We have suffered sadly from the want of these principles in the Church movement at home for the last twenty years. If the Church is to rise up to her glory, cither within the limits of ancient Christendom or among the heathen, it must be on the principles of Psalm cxxxiii--charity, the many abiding in one; obedience, receiving the unction from Christ the Head through the episcopate as Aaron's beard; detachment from place, Hermon and Zion participating in one refreshment of a holy dew; patience, in full expectation of the blessing of life for evermore. We may be sure God will do this work in His time, if we wait for it patiently. But He must prove us by waiting and many upsets before He can use us with confidence. He must have confidence in us as well as we have faith in Him, and that confidence He has by proving us, as if He were incapable of knowing us otherwise. He knows all His creatures through and through by divine knowledge, yet deals with us as it were upon a human level, "Now I know." Therefore, "Blessed is the man that endureth temptation." God leads us out at last into a wealthy place. You need have no fear of the future if you trust yourself to Him.

FEAST OF S. BARNABAS. Desertions--Results.

IN fact it is very useful for us that some do drop away. It just tests who have a vocation to any particular work. The defalcations in India are not so sad as those were which we ourselves experienced in the first days of our Brotherhood at home, when those whom we expected to join us fell away. God has greatly prospered us beyond our deserts, and He will carry us onward according to His good purpose. Trust yourself entirely to Him. He will provide you with fellow workers, and He will appoint your habitation. He has chosen you that you may bring forth fruit, and that your fruit may remain. The fruit of our labours which we see in this world is very perishing and very deceitful. The true fruit is that which we shall not see until the day when Christ Himself shall come to acknowledge His work in us. The less we think about success and disappointment meanwhile the better. Our true life and its true fruit are hid with Him in God, and the knowledge of this should set us free from all care and make us rest in the fullness of His peace.

JULY 22. Divine Assistance.

YOU speak of prudence as involving the calculation of divine assistance. It does not seem that we can calculate on supernatural assistance in any plan that we devise. It is not promised to us. We may rely upon it in the fulfilment of any plain duty. But if we thought any plan of our own sufficiently important to warrant our looking for supernatural assistance, it would be like throwing ourselves down from the temple and trusting to the promise of angels. We must not take divine promises as going beyond the conditions which God assigned. If we do not calculate upon God's help to supply our defects, we may always calculate upon it to multiply our results. But, to take a common case, I cannot think it justifiable to run into debt in church building and say we are building upon faith, when after all we are only building upon credit. We have no right to look to God to make up the deficit. It is not faith but dishonesty. When anything comes to us in the way of obedience, then indeed it were imprudent to refuse to obey God because we did not see how He could help us.

AUGUST 25. Detachment--Prayer--Spiritual Power--Mortification--Our nothingness.

GOD does in His great goodness lead us to see more and more of our own sin. There is a great danger in having any one object of religious work before us in such a way as to draw us from the simple desire of doing God's will. It does not matter what we do, or where. Nothing avails without detachment, and with detachment anything is good, for there can be no true detachment without love. To convert India is a great work, but to give my heart to God is a greater. Buddha did the first, and failed of the second, for he knew not God. To give our heart to God implies the knowledge of God, Who created the heart for Himself that He might both possess it and fill it. To give the heart to God is to have the heart filled with God, for He cannot appropriate to Himself the heart in any other way than by filling it. But then it must be wholly emptied of all other things ere He can occupy it. He carries us through various modes of discipline that He may thus empty the heart for Himself. We often begin by desiring to do great things for God, but there is one only end, and it is the desire to be nothing. The more truly we are given to God, the more possible it is for us to be His instruments in bringing others to Him. We cannot bring any to Him, but His peace shining through us can draw others to Himself, if there is nothing in ourselves to hinder it. One must learn one's own nothingness in a heathen city, as the first power through which that city is to be converted. We must lie hid for a long time resultless, if our work is to grow in the end. It is the long-sustained prayer, the ceaseless communion with God, which must make itself felt in due time. If you have any others at any place along with you, you must try and organize the house for constant intercession as much as circumstances will allow. If our house is a house of prayer, living in the power of God, the heathen will come round it as moths round a light, and then will die a most blessed death unto the world as the fire of God touches them. It is impossible to convince them by arguments. We may silence them. But we want to have them so convinced that they may not be silenced, but rather that they may learn to speak with the word of God. It is only the word of God coming to their heart which can make them thus show forth His praise. We have not to win them to Christianity as to a set of opinions, but to breathe upon them Christian life as a power, "that ye ... may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ." I So shall our gospel be not in word only, but in power. We cannot give forth life save by dying. Many a mortification of the outer nature is needed, not mere austerity, for that does not always mortify, but a real dying to ourselves. "I die daily" is the law of apostolic life. You will find your past experiences in Bengal a great strength to you if they have been a real mortification, so that you can now enter upon any fresh work with less reliance upon self, less thought of self, less expectation, more simply ready to do God's will without either shrinking or forcing. Any disappointments we have had are often much more resultful in blessings for the future than success would have been.

We must thus learn our nothingness before God. At the same time we must be careful to avoid self-disparagement before men. The less we speak of ourselves either for praise or blame the better, except, of course, to those to whom we look for spiritual counsel and correction. We should just come into any position, however great or however small, as naturally, as noiselessly, as the air. Our very unworthiness to do the work of God disappears in our nothingness.

SEPTEMBER 16. Settlement at Indore--Principles of Work--Answers to Prayer--Deadness to Self and to the World--How Souls are Won--Christ in us--God's care for us.

I HAVE your telegram. May God bless you in the work at Indore! It seems as if you had been hitherto following on and asking the question, "Master, where dwellest Thou?" For surely that is only another form of the question, Where wilt Thou have me to be? For wherever Thy faithful servant is, there art Thou, O Lord; even as he is wherever Thou art. And now you have the answer, "Come and see." It is difficult for us to realize Jesus dwelling where nothing else but heathenism is seen, and yet we cannot see where Jesus dwells unless we live in the future as a present already realized. We must come up to heaven and then we see that which shall be hereafter. Faith is "the substance of things hoped for." We can be content to forgo outward results, and all of present circumstances that can cheer the soul, if we have thus, by faith, a real hold upon the substance of the future; and Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and to-day and for ever, so that if we hold Him Who is the Head, we have indeed all the predestined future as our portion to be enjoyed even now. For all is nothing save in Him and with Him and through Him, and He is Himself all to us, our all-sufficing portion, containing all that our hearts can desire. Yes, we find the emptiness of earth a joy because it opens our hearts to possess Him.

So we must take possession of Holkar's dominions in the Name of the Lord, and they are ours. "The earth is the Lord's, and all that therein is." r "All things are yours," for "ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's." We must not merely hope for future possibilities, nor must we anxiously anticipate; we must accept the country as a gift from Him and in Him.

It is a joy to feel that the Society is breaking new ground, and not merely building on other men's foundations. This was the original idea of the Indian mission, that where He had not been spoken of men might hear; and God has been guiding us onward to this. You will be able to settle down there much better after the experiences of other works which you have seen and shared. We must combine the zeal of the Church Missionary Society with the regularity of the S.P.G. and the spiritual consciousness of sacramental life as belonging to the early days, alas! too much forgotten--easy to be wished for, but so hard to rise up to. It is, however, the Spirit of God which can lift us up with wings like a dove to abide in that Pentecostal power. I am afraid there is little more than a glamour of romance about Roman missions, or a fervour lacking substance in those of certain sectaries; but Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, and His power is ours upon one condition, that we will be content to live in His weakness. That is our difficulty. We measure power by results, not by promises. If S. Paul could have seen the Christendom which would emerge from his ministrations--well, perhaps it was as well that he did not. He probably never thought of "this way" becoming the way of the world as it did. So we cannot conceive of the Christianized India, which may come out of our missions, but indeed I hope it never will. Far better for us to think of the paradise that certainly "will come out of them. Other successes are more disappointments than failures themselves, but the great success of a paradise filled with true saints living in the light of God, and the wonder of being there where Jesus is--this must strengthen our hearts to every endurance, fill every success with hope of something better to come out of it, cheer every struggle with consciousness of certain victory, and make all times of expectation seem but as a moment in the brightness of the ultimate vision.

I think I am right in the idea that there is no existing mission of any kind at Indore. It will be a blessed thing to have two or three just settling down to pray, and waiting to see whom the Lord will bring round them. You must not expect great answers to your prayers at once. This answer itself has been a long time coming. . . . And then the true answer to prayer will be in yourself, to fit you for further answers. We must have been changed by our prayers according to the requirements of God, before we can receive external answers so as to be a blessing to us. A gift to us unchanged would be a curse. We must be learning to find our joy, our whole joy, in Jesus alone, before we can find any true joy for Jesus' sake in anything else that He may give. This is a life-long lesson. We are content to receive Jesus as an addition to ourselves. The great gift is when we lose ourselves, and have nothing but Him. Perhaps we cannot attain to this while we are in this world. S. Paul seems to have done so, yet perhaps not as an habitual state. He left himself behind when he was caught up to paradise. Oh, we must leave ourselves behind, hate our own lives; so shall we see our Master and dwell with Him and find His power within us. The more simply you are dead to the world, the more will you be able to bring the world to the life of Christ. We cannot reproduce the glory of heaven on this side of the grave. We can live in heaven while our senses look upon the world around us, as dying eyes upon a battlefield look on dead forms of comrades round about. You will need constantly to have at heart that text, "No man can come to Me, except the Father which hath sent Me draw him." l It is not men drawn by eloquence, or learning, or music, or ritual, or influence, who make solid Christians--" Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts" 2--it is souls really won out of the grasp of Satan by prayer. These must be our crown of rejoicing. All else are only flowers that fade. May you have grace to lift Christ up, not only by word in preaching, nor under veils in Sacraments, but in the manifest power of the life of God, living with Christ, and showing forth Christ manifestly living in you. As living in Christ we can take part in the intercession of Christ, as the head and the heart, while we are the earthly mouthpieces speaking with all the power of His life.

The entrance of the Society upon this new sphere of work is indeed a crisis in our history. I suppose it was on Holy Cross Day you sent your letter; I got it on the fifteenth. Our patron stood beside the Cross, and lived upon it. May we indeed live upon it, while we lift it up before the heathen. How good God has been to us in making the difficulties all work round and change into triumphs, both in Bombay and now in your work. And your Bombay life, learning Marathi, will have been the very thing you wanted. So little do we know what we are preparing for. In all these ways we learn to be resting child-like upon God: "Shew Thou me the way that I should walk in, for I lift up my soul unto Thee."

SEPTEMBER 22. Indore--Prayer that Jesus may be glorified--Asceticism.

I WROTE to you last week to congratulate you on the conquest of Indore. O yes, if we go forth in the Name of the Lord God, we go with conquest certain. We know not the vicissitudes of the campaign, but we know the end of it. "This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith." "Only be strong and of a good courage." Joshua must have been disheartened at the sluggishness of Israel. So will all be who have to lead the people of God. Still the word remains, "Only be strong." . . . You must look for prayer to make the walls of Jericho fall before you. It may be a long time before the answer comes, but it will come if you and yours persevere in prayer. "Ask of Me and I will give thee" Indore "for thine inheritance." We must ask as God's gift not to us, but to His Son. We must cherish an intense longing to have Jesus glorified in that country. If we take an interest in its people, how much more does He? We must recognize our interest in them as being a mere faint reflexion of His, and pray, not because we are working there, but because He died for them. He gives us the opportunity of praying, in order that, through us, He may speak for them to the Father.

While keeping up the devotional tone of the community, you must be careful not to err on the side of asceticism. You must keep them all properly fed, so as to do their work, and arrange fast days when you can have them without exhaustion.

OCTOBER 14. Settlement in one place--Poverty--Sequence of Dogmatic Teaching--Preaching and Prayer--Fasting.

MY own idea would be to settle down some place and remain there, not move about, unless it were for a few months in the winter. If one is known as a devotee at a particular place, the news would be carried far and wide, and people would come round one as the people of Judea round John the Baptist. If one moves about, one is no one. It is important to remember that one preaches far beyond the limits either of seeing or hearing. People know that a prophet is among them.

Then I should very much deprecate the idea of building or even renting "a good house." The poorer one's place of lodgement, the better. The less one is like an ordinary English gentleman, the better. Where one has to work among the miserable proletarian population of civilized Christendom, one must, of course, have institutions and buildings; but my own idea in going to break fresh ground would be to begin upon a thorough law of religious poverty. I should not have more things with me than I could pack up in two hours, a chamber where one could sleep either in it or on the roof, and a portable altar in the corner. I think the great trouble at Bankipur arose from our having got involved in the S.P.G. premises. Of course, if we take up one of their missions, we must take their "plant"; but I am sure that "nowhere to lay one's head" is a better tradition.

One has to do the Baptist's work, calling people to a sense of sin. One has to get them to realize the spirituality, personality, and holiness of God. Of the last, I suppose, the Hindu has no notion; but though he has it not as a Hindu he has it as a man, in spite of Hinduism. It can therefore be awakened. The holiness of God must be apprehended before a sense of sin can be awakened. Then the personality of God, not merely as a colossal man, or a composite monster, but the living personality which philosophically involves the doctrine of the Trinity, for a living, loving God cannot be other than triune. But I suppose it must be a work of time to get a Hindu really to know the personal God as a Being existing altogether distinct from creation, time, and space. People must come to know this before they can intelligently accept a Saviour. So God trained the Israelites for two thousand years in the truth before Christ came. Then would follow the doctrine of the Incarnation, contrasting so intensely with the incarnations of Hinduism. And here it would be very important to show that it was wrought by the simple power of the Holy Ghost (I fear that the article "conceived by the Holy Ghost" is very much slurred over as compared with the words that follow), and not by any personal fitness or natural power of the earthly parent, that so the incarnate Son of God might be seen in that detachment of being which the gospel represents, the eternal Son taking the manhood into God. Then our sanctification in Christ by sacramental incorporation into Him. But I should keep the Sacraments as mysteries to be as little as possible disclosed to mere inquirers. They should be taught that there are means for them to be truly incorporated into Christ, that this does away with all caste notions, that they must become new creatures in Him.

I suppose you will generally do more good by talking with individuals than by speaking to crowds, and by talking with those who come to you rather than with those whom you seek out. One must remember "No man can come to Me, except the Father which hath sent Me draw him" Therefore a constant cry of prayer ought to be the strength of the mission, frequently carried on without ceasing day and night. I should have much more faith in calling the people round me by prayer than in carrying the gospel into the market-place. A mission of this kind would have very little laborious exercise, and therefore there would be the less drain upon the natural constitution. The chief work of life would be prayer, and conversations with the few inquirers would amount to little more than recreation. This would make fasting the easier.

It is important to choose a site that is as healthy as possible, and to arrange diet as may be most helpful. I quite agree that the men should not be required to observe the fast days as they would do in England. I should think, however, that if people are not stirring about very much, fast days would be rather a gain in India. This must be a matter of experience. But fasting is a great element of power.

I did not mean to write at such length. I do not know whether my hints will be of any help to you. You must, of course, take such a line in starting as you feel you can work best. But I certainly would incline to the "poverty" rather than to the "good house" line of mission.

FEAST OF S. SIMON AND S. JUDE. Training by Sickness--The Apostolic Spirit--Unobtrusiveness and sympathy in Mission Work.

GOD is no doubt fitting you by the discipline of sickness for your work. Man trains man by developing the powers of man's nature. God trains man by making us learn the nothingness of all that is in man, that we may live in the power of the divine nature. So He trained Jonah for the conversion of Nineveh by his burial in the sea and in the whale's belly. Sickness and difficulties are necessary to effect the same purpose for us. The degree of result will be proportionate to the degree of discipline. We are not to think that we can, as it were, profit by other people's experience so as not to need this personal discipline. However much we know the power of God intellectually, we need to learn it experimentally by having the outer self utterly humbled, prostrated, crushed. Sickness and difficulty do this work for us. They make a real break between us and the world, such as no effort of our own can do. After his years of madness Nebuchadnezzar praised the God of heaven. You should accept all dislocation, weakness, etc., just as the means by which God would bring you to some greater work that He means to effect. All work that is done in any human strength perishes. Therefore we see of necessity how the great bulk of work undertaken in the Christian Church must collapse. We must learn the secret of our own nothingness if we would gain the fullness of apostolic power.

We need not say much about our nothingness. Rather we must look away from ourselves--look to God, be absorbed in the thought of God, so as not to think or speak of ourselves, live in God and for God. I have just been giving the lay-brothers an instruction upon the apostolic spirit of Religious. The Apostles were not different from other men by their zeal, their boldness, their learning, their capacity, but because they were ever living in God from Whom they came. They were not separated from God by being sent from Him. The Son is begotten of the Father, but ever remains in the very substance and glory of the Father. So the Apostle goes forth from God, having mission, but abides in God, having life. And so the Lord works with him, confirming the word with signs following.

I should think it was important to be very unobtrusive in taking up one's abode there. I should watch opportunities and get invitations to speak to some few of the Indians. Probably more would be done with individuals than by public preaching. I do not see that there is any need to do anything overt which would arouse opposition. Opposition will come when there is success and the heathen begin to feel the mission's power, but I should think it was needless to approach them in any way that would give offence. The Athenians mocked at S. Paul's speech, but they were not made angry by it. We should try and build up the Christian faith upon any foundations of natural religion which may be lingering in their religious system, or, if not in their system, in their hearts. They must get to feel the need of what Christianity offers before it is any use offering it to them. If you settle down in a thoroughly humble, unpretending way, such as befits religious poverty, I do not think there would be much opposition. Satan has not yet learned to believe in the power of poverty. I should get over the difficulty of settling by not settling. One cannot expect to plant Christianity, like a laurel-bush, just where one chooses. As God moves us about, we know He means to bring us into connexion with special souls. Through them you might, I should think, get invited to address congregations more or less numerous, generally less; but let them get interested and inquiring, and above all take care not to upbraid them. May God direct you!

NOVEMBER 10. The English Government and Missions--Openings for the Gospel--'Differentiating Features of Christianity.

IT is very sad how the English Government has discouraged mission work, but it has been so all over India. Perhaps it may work for good in the end. If it retards conversions, it also checks the spurious ones. It is good for us to feel that we have God alone working with us. His work is sure to tell in the end. If Israel will not be gathered, the Gentiles shall come in at the call of Christ, and though a missionary may preach for years in an Indian city without making a convert, yet not one of those years shall be lost. The word of God shall go forth in all its power. You will find the notices of S. Paul's residence in heathen cities especially interesting now that you are getting beyond English and Christian surroundings. We must always remember that he almost always had the way opened for him by Jewish settlers. The great thing will be to try and find those, if any, who are hungering after righteousness, who feel that their souls have a craving which Hinduism does not satisfy; just as S. Paul took advantage of the confession involved in having an altar to the "Unknown God." The chief difficulty, I imagine, in India is the moral sense being wanting. No theology can avail unless there be a moral sense to welcome the revelation of God. They that are of the truth will hear the voice.

On Sunday evening I gave an address to an undergraduate missionary association in Corpus. [Corpus Christi College, Oxford.] My subject was Christianity in face of the other religions of the world, chiefly with reference to Max Muller's Science of (Comparative Theology. The points which I dwelt upon as differentiating the Church of Christ from all other religions were: Firstly, its historical and prophetical character, developing itself by progressive stages of authenticated history up to the completion of its original prophetic announcement, so that it came to the full in the full light of modern history; whereas other religions merely existed without any announcement of their own destiny, and by the very fact of their greater antiquity they spring out of darkness and legend. Secondly, its Pentecostal or dynamical character. No other religion claims to regenerate or lift man up to God. None escape from the charge brought against Judaism that it was weak through the flesh. Christianity may or may not be true in her claim, but the claim to regenerate, deify, is her fundamental principle. This claim needs the prophetic antecedents as its warrant, and a noonday birth as its security. Had this claim come out of darkness and legend, it would have been too great to be trustworthy. But our fault has been treating Christianity as a phase of thought respecting God, instead of treating it as a divine life. It must be set aside as a sheer imposture, or acknowledged to be without a rival. The mere comparison of details of doctrine and morals is only like comparing the skeleton of a man and of a brute, without taking notice of the existence of reason as a differentiating principle.

NOVEMBER 18. Providential effects of Climate and of Weakness.

I TRUST that both your novitiate of sickness and your future life of prayer will go up before God, and bring many from heathenism to the obedience of faith. Be careful not to waste your energies. Think what long intervals of repose and prayer marked off and supernaturalized the active periods of S. Paul's life. We cannot crowd into our life more than God put into his. The law of temperature will effect for you very much what imprisonments and manual labour did for him. God arranges this so as to effect manifold purposes. As He has ordained the law of man's labour, which originated in man's curse, to be his blessing, so that the necessities of hunger force fallen man into energies which otherwise would stagnate; so He makes periods of inactivity necessary in order to ensure what otherwise our zeal might overlook--the tranquil and refreshing work of communion with Himself. May He of His goodness make Himself very manifest to you in your sickness, and, as you find the weakness of the outer man increasing, strengthen you so much the more continually in the inner man, for the accomplishment of His will. The weaker we are the more we can do for God. Our strength rather unfits than fits us to be God's instruments. The Old Testament had its Samson, for bodily strength typified spiritual, but we cannot exercise real spiritual strength until we have learnt the nothingness of all that is outward. Every faculty by which we touch upon the outer world, and its strength and praise and glory, is sure to fall a victim to some Delilah bondage, and enslave us to a Philistine usurpation. We need, all of us, to be blinded and mocked, to feel our own weakness and to have it felt by others. Then God can make us pull down the world. So it was with S. Paul, and so it is in quasi-Christian England and in heathen India.

NOVEMBER 25. Father Greatheed---True and Fake Brightness--Slow Growth.

TO-MORROW will be our parting Celebration for Father Greatheed. He is to sail from Liverpool Saturday night at 10 o'clock, in the Timor. May God indeed bless his voyage and his residence along with you, that your lives may go up in the power of prayer which the Holy Ghost teacheth, and the merits of the life of Christ, to be the torch-flame kindling a mighty conflagration of divine love. I cannot help feeling that many lives are like fireflies in the dark valleys of history--bright with their own brightness, but giving no light to others. We must, on the contrary, really burn with a devotion which consumes self and communicates itself from and through us to others, because it is Christ living in us. The utmost zeal and activity in mission work does not turn the firefly into a spark, and we need to be sparks. . . .

It is scarcely probable that you will live thirty-six years to do Indian work; but if you live half that time I do not doubt your seeing good results of your labours, if only you are content to labour and wait, striving earnestly in prayer, not seeking for yourself, but welcoming those whom God draws near to you. Remember I am not at all anxious to hear of conversions, nor do I expect the first converts to be reliable. When the religious mind is so lost to the sense of sin, as in Hinduism, the daylight will rise upon the soul with the gradualness of a northern twilight, not with the sudden burst of the tropics. It is weary waiting and wishing for the dawn while the vessel aground seems liable to sink, but the trial of patience worketh experience of God's will. When we speak, whether to one Nicodemus or to many in a congregation, we must speak in the brightness, having just come from worshipping with Jesus as the Head. We do not need to speak much for Jesus. If we are living the life of Jesus, Jesus will speak from Himself on our behalf. The natural heart can resist the most convincing arguments, but not the consuming fire of the divine life whereby we ought to be sanctified.

DECEMBER 2. Effect of Christianity upon Nations--Rejection of Christianity by Europe--Blessing of Weakness.

IF you spend Christmas at Indore, how it will bring home to you the wondrous power of the Incarnation! As now the whole population around you are living in utter ignorance of the Son of God, so was all the world; but the truth has made its power to be known in city after city, and country after country. It has brought joy and honour to those who have received it, and those who have rejected it have sunk in darkness and misery. The Church's condition upon the earth has ever been that of a pilgrim, seeking here no abiding city. Asia and Africa have witnessed vast tracts covered with multitudes of episcopal thrones which have been swept away. The culture which Christianity developed forsook these peoples as they fell away from the faith. Europe has received the heritage of the incarnate God, but with no more pledge of stability than the nations before it. If Europe does reject the faith, yet she cannot drive this mighty presence of truth from the world. She must fall into degradation as her punishment, but some other nation shall rise to glory by welcoming the Stranger whom she repudiates. If we do ever feel inclined to take a desponding view of the Christianity of Europe, we ought to find in it an encouragement to do the work of missions, since God has certainly provided some nation to receive that which Europe scorns. History tells us of this ever-conquering power of the mysterious Traveller. In this fact we see the great evidence of the truth of the religion of Christ. Had her home been a more settled one, we might have imagined that there was some sort of national idiosyncrasy which gave to the Church of Christ a local welcome; but she has ever won her way, not from centres of power, but by her own inherent vitality, when the actual centres whence she emanated had become unworthy of her continuance by their weakness and decay. What a glorious nation, or confederacy of nations, shall India be if she does accept the faith of Christ. Oh, yes; surely He is the Son of God Whose grace unfailing raises up race after race to honour, such as nothing but the life of God can give. It is strange that a man of intelligence and noble heart can live in a heathen country and fail to recognize the divinity of the life of Christendom by the mere power of contrast.

I think your tour with Padre N. must have been very interesting. [Nehemiah Goreh.] I suppose you will now have got back home again, if indeed your present house be a "home." Perhaps you are rejoicing to keep Christmas with the consciousness of not having a home. To have no certain dwelling-place has ever been the object of my ambition, and I suppose I needed to be turned out of the dwelling-place of my ambition, for I seem to be put very immovably in this place, and the very work which might have called me away pins me down the more tightly to a locality. One must rejoice to know that one's home is fixed in the predestination of God, and the growth of any institution of His Church is as definitely foreknown to Him as the original place that was marked by prophecy for the birth of our Head.

If we had more numbers and more health and more capacity every way, perhaps we should perish in our pride. It is well for us to feel the tug of the world with its many wants, that we may feel our own littleness and rejoice in the strength of the Child Who needs not our strength to protect Him, but protects us with His own. "My soul doth magnify the Lord."

DECEMBER 9. Ventures of Faith--God's Guidance--Suez Canal--Decay of Turkey.

GOD will surely bless us if we make ventures for Him trusting in His word. Did Pere Balmand tell you anything about his style of living? One would like to know exactly what various people have striven to do, where they have failed, and how they have succeeded. I should think the Holkar is not likely to interfere if he understands that you merely come to preach the gospel to his people, so that they may know what it is and accept it if they like.

However, one knows that if they persecute in one city we are to go to another, and so we shall come at those who have been really called by God. We cannot tell by the map where to find them, but God, by His providence, will bring us into contact with them, leading us about by various things--oppositions, necessities, persecutions. What we have to do is just to be guided by Him, and if we recognize His providence in external events we shall be sure to accomplish His will.

All England is full of the Suez Canal just now. It has been a wonderful stroke both of fortune and of genius for Disraeli. No Prime Minister ever did a thing which was so popular on all sides. It looks very much as if Turkey were dying. One wonders what will be the effect of her fall upon Christendom throughout the world. Mohammedanism in India must feel it. And then the shock to Mohammedanism must be felt by the other religions. Besides which, one feels that the fall of the false prophet must coincide with other special arrangements of divine providence. How strange it would be for English clergy and old Catholics to join with the Patriarch of Constantinople at the reopening of S. Sophia! May God grant both a reopening and a reunion!

CHRISTMAS EVE. Parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard--Missionary Bishops for India--Hired Houses.

I SEEM to hear Lauds going on at Indore and Bombay: "To-morrow shall the wickedness of the earth be done away." [Opening versicle of Lauds, Christmas Eve.] It is a joyous versicle anywhere. O how full of joy it must be to you! "Tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people." In drawing up some meditations it has occurred to me that the call of the labourers before sunrise means the Jews. At the third hour the others called are the Gentiles at Pentecost. At the sixth and ninth hours, two seasons of great religious awakening and ingathering, possibly the conversion of the barbarians and the Reformation period. The eleventh hour, just before the close of the world's day, the missionary movement which shall be just before Christ's second advent. How that parable identifies missions with a special going forth of Christ Himself! The steward pays, i.e. administers the grace of sacraments, the daily pay. It is the Householder in person who calls. May He indeed go out into the market-place of India along with you, and call many in. They "preached everywhere, the Lord working with them."

The question of missionary bishops for India is assuming a new form, and we seem likely to have something done. I hope they will not have curate bishops. It would be better to let the whole machinery die out and to start afresh than to make such a mistake as that. However, no doubt God will order all for good, if we are faithful. It seems to me that you are quite right to live, like S. Paul, in a hired house--also like the Society at Cowley for two years--rather than build anything great or small. Of course, with my imperfect conception of what is possible at Indore, I can only advise upon certain grounds of abstract principle, and all I say must be reduced by the greatest common measure of facts and sense of mind and body. "To-morrow shall the wickedness of the earth be done away." O that wondrous to-morrow will soon be here! God grant us to meet in its joy!

DECEMBER 30. Many hear gladly--Few believe--Unlawful Occupations--Unknown Martyrs--Low standard of Christendom--Value of Martyrs.

IT is wonderful to hear that the people come so full of eagerness to hear. You must not expect many to continue on. But how this eagerness testifies to the power of the Good Shepherd's voice! His message finds its way to the simple heart, even though that heart be degraded and the lips that utter the message be the stammering lips of a foreigner. One God, one human race, however broken up into many languages, one universal need, one all-sufficient Saviour. We must remember how the people thronged about our Blessed Lord, and yet how far their hearts were from Him. Nevertheless, how full and perfect was His love for them! So must we accept people to the fullest love in His Name, whether in England or in India, without considering whether it will be reciprocated. No, "love is of God, and every one that loveth is born of God." J We must be content with idle curiosity in the many, thankful if among those many there be some who will receive Christ. When there is so little truth to be found in Christendom, we cannot expect much in heathendom. No, it is but few that are chosen. The levity of which you complain is, I suppose, very much what S. Paul had to meet at Athens. When he seemed to be a setter forth of strange gods, we must not wonder that the people make strange mistakes as to us. However, the work of God goes on. "The Lord knoweth them that are His." All that the Father hath given to us shall come unto us, and we must take care to lead them steadily on to Him.

You ask about the poor Bajanewalas. [A low class of Hindus whose occupation is to provide music and singing for weddings, etc.] Their case is a very difficult one. What they are to do one cannot say. One can only say the Lord will provide. I think there can be no doubt that they must at any cost give up their calling if it involves them, as I suppose it must, in seeming to join in Hindu idolatry. Some few Bajanewala martyrs may be the seed of the Church at Indore. It is just as acceptable to God to starve because we will not sing, as it was to be thrown to wild beasts because men of that day would not offer incense. If some will accept the faith and die for it, it will develop the power of grace. O how easy to talk of this! Well, if it were easy to do it there would be no blessing on the doing. Surely it is unknown martyrs who keep God's Church alive upon earth. Christendom would soon collapse if there were not some blessed sufferers, in whom the triumph of God's grace is being made continually manifest before angels and devils, though not before man. What a different martyrology would be written by the angels from any which we find in our books! "Right dear in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints," I but it is hidden from human knowledge. Miraculous deaths are better than miraculous lives. An ignorant Bajanewala full of love may be of much greater use than some learned theologian full of light rather than love. Of one thing we may be sure, God overrules individual and collective operations of grace. He will not allow the individual to suffer by reason of surrounding difficulty. It matters not whether we live or die. We are born to die, and we are converted to die well, and if we cannot die well we certainly should not live well. God will give grace to die, if there is need to die. I fear that God does not generally call us to die because He knows we cannot use the grace to die. But then what is the use of living all square with the world? I often feel about young men in draper's shops and elsewhere, what would be the effect if they were to make a thorough stand for truth? But the miserable conventionalities of Christendom seem to make one speechless. It is hard to call some few to act upon a different standard from the rest of Christians. One feels that true Christianity would be altogether a new religion to Europe, and yet one cannot look for spring blossoms upon stems that know no brightness except the red leaves of autumn. In a heathen country, on the contrary, one must look for a real upgrowth of true Christian life. Those who have grace to come to Christ shall come to Him truly, and find His power as they do His work. As many as receive Him, to them gives He power to become the sons of God, and to act as the supernatural life requires. We may trust, therefore, that in special difficulties God has some whom He has called to true conversion, and He will cause some external deliverance to appear if it be necessary and good. The land may be sanctified either by their death or by their life, as He sees good. The life of the Church on earth glows with the life of Paradise. Martyrs are not of value because they die under circumstances of great human prominence, as human witnesses to their own strong convictions, but because in the energy of death the grace of Christ is developed in His body the Church, and the Church on earth grows with the vigour of those who have passed on into Paradise. We are all one body in Christ. It is not so much the intercession of the saints as their actual existence which is of value to us. Every one who has been faithful unto death becomes an organic channel of life from Christ, in Whom he lives, to the body of Christ remaining upon the earth. I think modern hagiology has tended sadly to obscure this truth. People look upon saints in heaven as separate individuals like Homeric gods, whereas really their life is in us, for it is Christ's life in both. We grow out of the body which is in Paradise. So the firstfruits of a country are really the germ of the future Church of that country; not merely the first drops of a shower, but the bud that has to be developed. One must, therefore, look for it to be developed in the fullness of its supernatural energy, and look for those energies to last on in the sacramental life of a future generation. It would seem to be almost a natural necessity that the first Christians of any nations should have to endure very supernaturally in order to develop the spiritual life of the people in ages to come.

FEAST OF THE EPIPHANY, 1876. Civilization--Truth and Falsehood--"Dogmatic and Spiritual Truth--Transforming Power of 'Truth--Episcopal Jurisdiction in India.

day of the feast is actually over, but I cannot resist the pleasure of dating my letter in its brightness. O yes! its brightness is as the brightness of many days. It sums up in one day all the brightness of all the days of earth, and it is a day which stretches on to shine throughout the days of eternity. Specially is it a bright day for writing to the Indian mission. The star was seen by the Wise Men in the East, and now we must be the star of India. We know not who there are ready to welcome its brightness. The germs of capacity latent within the human heart need the ray of holy light to fall upon them ere they can show themselves. One does wonder at the scanty love of truth, the miserable levity of people born and bred within the Christian Church; but how can a people such as those of India be expected to have any regard for, or conception of, truth. No doubt it was once a lingering token of the life of paradise, and the less civilized people are the more it lingers among them; but a people of ancient civilization and intellectual culture and religious superstition, like the Hindus, cannot be expected to have a perception of truth remaining. The wild Indians of America offered to take a boy from us and give him such a training as would make him a useful man and speak the truth; whereas they did not care to give up a boy to be taught, after the European fashion, things quite useless and the practice of falsehood. If Christian civilization has made us such, what must Hindu civilization produce? We have at least the supposition of the truth. We worship the truth, even though in works we deny Him. What can we expect of a nation whose god is not only a false god, but a god practising deceit without there being any consciousness of the inconsistency! People may hold true doctrines and think themselves Catholics, Orthodox, Evangelicals, as the case may be; but their clear views do not make them saints, do not raise them much at any rate beyond what they might have been otherwise. On the other hand, the truth must make us free if the truth has us within its almighty grasp. If we are "holding the Head," I we shall find that the truth, the mind of Christ, is a living power that we may be true in love, speaking the truth from the heart; not from the surface of the natural heart, but from the depth of the supernaturally-communicated heart of Jesus. Out of this supernatural abundance of the heart the whole life must speak, and then the eye will see dogmatic truth, otherwise it can only see its caricature. How much of the repulsiveness of controversial truth and of men's antagonism to the faith arises from the grotesqueness of fragmentary statements which want the clothing, the atmosphere, the elasticity, the emotion of the divine life. We must get the Hindus to live in some consciousness of the mysterious controlling inspiration of Christian life. If they change doctrines for doctrines they have become perhaps worse than before. They must exchange death for life, weakness for power, darkness for light, as they turn from dead idols to serve the true and living God. To serve Him is to live with His life. Not, however, that I would disparage the Catechism, but I should not put it into any one's hands until they were really in training for Baptism. Statements are clear when the Holy Ghost has opened the eye to see their clearness; but the truth flows on from man to man, from heart to heart, and the Holy Spirit goes forth in our daily intercourse to spread mysterious fertility and fill hearts with grace. Do not be discouraged because they seem to learn so little. The want of memory bringing them again and again to you, as children say to a mother when they have heard a story, "Tell me that again," may itself be a divine appointment to make them receptive of living, life-giving truth spoken in love and received in curiosity, until the wonder of the hearer's mind changes into a glow of divine love quickening his heart. The Wise Men took a long journey, knowing almost nothing about Him to Whom they came. Probably they went home rather perplexed than instructed, but they had felt the power of God speaking to them from heaven, and this must be the deep principle of all true conversion, and it is a transforming principle. May God use you and those who are with you for the advancement of His glory by the transformation of many souls! . . .

We must deal very carefully so as to keep up a real high supernatural standard of religious aim in our Hindu novices. They must feel that the Society is true to God and to the life of Christ in all the power of the Holy Ghost; and although we minister in India, yet, after all, the aim of our life is to be ourselves converted to God, not merely to convert India to a traditional form of European belief about God. The less we think of converting, the more are men likely to be converted by us. Our one thought must be simply to live for God, and God will use us for His will.

As to the Bishop of Calcutta, I am going to surprise you by a statement that you are not under his jurisdiction at Indore at all, any more than under that of the Bishop of Bombay. You may be working for him there in deference to his wishes, but plainly he can have no more jurisdiction in Holkar's dominions than he has in China. It is a strange thing that this has not been seen hitherto. It is the solution of an immense difficulty. People have been living under a terrible thundercloud of letters patent. But how can the Queen issue letters patent over territories which do not belong to her? The Indian bishops have felt that India was parcelled out into those tremendous sees, but it never has been and could not be. Lord Salisbury seems to have been the first person to find out what one would have thought was self-evident. It is just one of those cases in which people have imagined a difficulty to exist until the shadow became a reality to their minds, and they got paralysed before it. Lord Salisbury yesterday was talking to Berdmore Compton [Vicar of All Saints', Margaret Street] and Mr. Pinhey, [Mr. Justice Pinhey of the High Court of Bombay] and they were deprecating the dreadful evil of having curate bishops, which ought certainly to be resisted at any price, when he threw this new light upon the whole question, and said that after all the letters patent were no hindrance to the increase of the episcopate, for they could only apply to that part of India which Was already under British Government at the time of the passing of the Act for making those three sees, and all the rest of India, whether governed by us or under native rule, is wholly free for the Church to map out and assign to bishops as she pleases. This seems to be a most joyous discovery, and entirely changes one's idea of how to increase the episcopate in India. Surely it is just another token of the advancing day, like the moment when one begins to see colour on the face of nature as the sun rises.

JANUARY 19. Christmas at Indore--Aid to Converts.

IT is a delightful thought to have celebrated the feast of the Nativity for the first time in that country. Many were in Bethlehem who wondered at the things told them by the shepherds. They were to go away; but, though they went away, multitudes were to flock to Bethlehem in devout gratitude. So, surely, your invitation, as you say Adeste Fideles will have its answer in due time. The seven days of Jericho have their fulfilment in long periods of Christian supplication. As the thing sought for is greater, so the patience must be greater with which it is sought, and the appointed time may be yet far off. But the result is as sure in the one case as in the other. Your labour shall not be in vain in the Lord. It is indeed a blessed thing to be living, as you are striving to do, the life of pilgrims