But an object of much greater interest than our farming is the care of our ransomed children, and we have been fortunate in beginning our Mission with them. They are very promising, are most docile to all our desires, and have no serious faults. One danger is their running away, as happened in the case of a man and boy without any reason whatever.

But trouble came upon the little colony thus cheerfully toiling in the wilderness. In the month of December, 1879, their house was totally destroyed by a hurricane, and when they were about rebuilding it, the Sultan forbade the work and desired them to leave the country. Père Deniaud, who was then at Ujiji, applied to Muini Heri, the effective ruler of the whole district, and he sent his nephew, Bana-Mkombé, with the Superior, as an envoy to the Sultan. The latter, when asked the motive of his change of conduct, explained that he had been told by the Wajiji that the white men were sorcerers in possession of fatal poisons, and that they would drain off the lake through the Lukuga, by throwing medicines on the water, but that he had desired them to be expelled without the smallest injury to their persons or property.

Bana-Mkombé had no difficulty in refuting these reports, which doubtless arose from the sudden flushing of the Lukuga channel in the manner above described, coincidently with the arrival of the Fathers. They were finally re-established on a more permanent footing, to the great joy of the natives, who considered them thenceforward as their friends, and executed a splendid war-dance in their honour.

Père Deniaud had on his way opened negotiations for the establishment of a second missionary station in the province of Massanzé, farther south, and promised the Sultan of that country to send him white men without delay.

But for these new operations reinforcements for the little missionary staff were required, and a second caravan was already on its way to join them, having started from Algiers in June, 1879. It was accompanied by six ex-Zouaves as lay-auxiliaries, according to the suggestion made by one of the first missionaries. Of the total of eighteen of which this fresh expedition consisted, only ten survived to reach their fellow-workmen at the Great Lakes, eight having died on the road-one, a lay-brother, mortally wounded in a combat with the Ruga-Rugas.

A third caravan, numbering fifteen missionaries, started last November to follow in their footsteps, and on the 8th of March, 1881, were establishing themselves at Mdaburu, about half-way from Lake Tanganyika to the sea. The Society of Algerian Missionaries has, in a word, in two years and a half, sent fortythree missionaries into Equatorial Africa, a number representing heroic efforts on the part of the little fraternity, but lamentably

insufficient in comparison with the vast field to be reaped. The districts of Lake Tanganyika, and the Victoria Nyanza have already been created Pro-Vicariates Apostolic, and it is designed to establish two new missionary centres, one in the territory of the Muata Yanvo, accessible from Ujiji, and another on the Northern Upper Congo, to be reached from the West Coast.

The reader who has followed the details of such a series of journeyings as we have essayed to describe, will scarcely require to be told of the immense cost involved in them, and will receive without surprise Mgr. Lavigerie's statistics on the subject. Every missionary established in the centre of Africa represents, he tells us, an outlay of thirty thousand francs, and within the last three years, on the mere foundation and creation of these missions, a sum of eight hundred thousand francs has been expended. The Protestant Missions are, indeed, still more costly, as they dispose of five millions sterling a year, and their liberal outlay at all stages of the journey was found by the Algerian Fathers to have largely increased the cost of travelling by the same road. Fortunately, the charity of Christendom is never exhausted in such a cause, but all its efforts are required to carry out so gigantic an enterprise.

It would seem that Mgr. Lavigerie's efforts for the evangelization of Africa were inspired equally by zeal for the spread of Gospel truth, and by horror at the cruelties of the slave-trade, some of the victims of which were occasionally met with in Algiers, and against whose iniquities he makes eloquent protest. He dwells at length on the revolting miseries inflicted on the slave caravans, and goes on to say :

Amongst the young negroes torn by our efforts from these infernal tortures, there are some who for long periods afterwards awake every night uttering the most horrible cries. They see again in hideous nightmares the atrocious scenes they have gone through.

Four hundred thousand negroes are annually the victims of this scourge, and it is sometimes said that if the traveller following in its habitual track were to lose all other reckoning, he would find sufficient guide-posts to mark the path in the shape of the human bones blanching in decay.

The loyal exertions of Seyd Barghash have almost annihilated the export slave-trade from the East Coast, but for its continuance in the interior let the two following pictures from Mr. Thomson's pages speak :

Half-way up the ascent a sad spectable met our eyes—a chained gang of women and children. They were descending the rocks with the utmost difficulty, and picking their steps with great care, as, from the manner in which they were chained together, the fall of

one meant, not only the fall of many others, but probably actual strangulation or dislocation of the neck. The women, though thus chained with iron by the neck, were many of them carrying their children on their backs, besides heavy loads on their heads. Their faces and general appearance told of starvation and utmost hardship, and their naked bodies spoke with ghastly eloquence of the fleshcutting-lash. Their dull despairing gaze expressed the loss of all hope of either life or liberty, and they looked like a band marching to the grave. Even the sight of an Englishman raised no hope in them; for unfortunately the white man has more the character of a ghoul than of a liberator of slaves in the far interior.

Saddest sight of all was that of a string of little children, torn from their home and playmates, wearily following the gang with bleeding, blistered feet, reduced to perfect skeletons by starvation, looking up with a piteous eye, as if they beseeched us to kill them. It was out of my power to attempt releasing them. The most I could do was to stop them, and give the little things the supply of beans and ground-nuts I usually carried in my pocket.

At a later stage of his journey he came upon another of these miserable spectacles.

Camped at Mtowa, we found a huge caravan of ivory and slaves from Manyema, awaiting, like ourselves, means of transport across lake (Tanganyika). There were about 1,000 slaves, all in the most miserable condition, living on roots and grasses, or whatever refuse and "garbage" they could pick up. The sight of these poor creatures was of the most painful character. They were moving about like skeletons covered with parchment, through which every bone in the body might be traced. . . . . We learned that they had had a frightful march, during which two-thirds fell victims to famine, murder, and disease, so that out of about 3,000 slaves who started from Manyema only 1,000 reached Mtowa. The poor wretches were carrying ivory to Ujiji and Unyanyembé, to be there disposed of, along with themselves, for stores to be taken back to Nyangwé.

....

Yet the writer describes the Arabs conducting these caravans as kindly and humane men in all other relations of life-surely the strongest proof of the brutalizing effect of such traffic on all engaged in it.

One might have expected that the sight of such scenes would have predisposed the youthful traveller to take a favourable view of the conduct of men whose very presence is a protest against them. Yet Mr. Thomson speaks of the Catholic missionaries in a tone of censorious acrimony very different from that of most African explorers. On one occasion, in a village not far from Lake Tanganyika, he came on a party on their way to join the station in that district, and, making his way into their tent, unannounced and uninvited, while they were having such poor ·

repast as the circumstances admitted of, he took occasion to criticise all their arrangements, including their food. He speaks of them as "French peasants," severely condemning Père Deniaud for inducing them to leave their homes, apparently quite unaware of their character as missionaries. It is to be hoped Mr. Thomson may learn with more experience of life greater sympathy with the aims and motives of others, as it would be a pity if a spirit of intolerance and self-sufficiency were to mar the many fine qualities which enabled him to do his own work in Africa so creditably and well.

Ungenerous criticism of this kind is indeed in many quarters the only recognition bestowed on the Catholic missionary's labours in the cause of humanity, and the meed of human praise reaped by him is at best but small. The motives which sustain the ordinary traveller are in his case non-existent. His discoveries will evoke no applause from the learned, his adventures no sympathy from the multitude, his life's work will be obscure to the end, his name unknown, his death unchronicled. In the remote deserts where he has cast his lot scarce a word of appreciation from the world without ever reaches him to cheer the lonely hours when, amid the depressing influences of his surroundings, he seems to be labouring in vain; for European civilization, absorbed in the whirl of its own busy round, can spare no thought to those who by African lakes and streams are working at the noblest task possible to man here below-the moral regeneration of his fellow

man.

ART. VII.-A RECENT CONTRIBUTION TO ENGLISH

HISTORY.

The History of the Holy Eucharist in Great Britain. By T. E. BRIDGETT. Two vols. C. Kegan Paul & Co. 1881.

ISTORY is no longer the simple narrative of facts that it used

HIS

to be-ad narrandum non ad probandum; the exhibition of concurrent events just as they happened en masse, if we may so say; a panorama of the contemporaneous political and religious and social and domestic life of nations at a glance. The spirit of subdivision, characteristic of the times, has changed, completely changed, the old summary character of history. The keen analytical temper of the day has thrown men back on the past to scrutinize and mark off and draw out each constituent part, each separate feature of human society, in order to discover and to estimate at its true worth each

separate motive power in the development and growth of nations that has contributed to make them such as they are in the present. Buckle's "History of Civilization," Lecky's "History of European Morals," Freeman's "Historical Geography," each in its turn and measure is an example of this. Stubb's "Constitutional History of England" is a still better example. And the history that is before us, the "History of the Holy Eucharist in Great Britain" is the best example of all. It is the history of one single doctrine in its results on the individual life and the public character of the various races-Britons, Picts, Scot, Saxons, Anglo-Normans, English and Scotch-that during a period of more than a thousand years successively peopled this island and assisted the slow formation of the English nation.

I.

A more fitting title than the one adopted could not have been chosen for this work. And yet it is open to misconception. It is just possible that it will mislead people and give them an impression of something too doctrinal to be generally interesting, of something very abstract and learned and dogmatic, or controversial, or pious: more suitable for the study of theologians or the meditation of religious than for the general reading of ordinary laymen. This is just what it is not. It is learned, yes. There is something of dogma in it and something of controversy too. And moreover it is pious, since that may truly be called pious which, though marred by the record of much irreverence, is essentially a narrative of the piety of England in connection with the Blessed Sacrament, the Mysterium Fidei, the object of supreme adoration, during all the centuries that followed the adoption of Christianity by our forefathers down to the hour when the revolt of lust and greed and pride overthrew the altar of sacrifice and extinguished the lamp of the old Church throughout the length and breadth of the land. But so far from being a dry theological dissertation, a mere abstract, dogmatic, controversial treatment of the great central rite of the Catholic religion, it is, as we have already said, a history of the Holy Eucharist in its effects on the individual and public life of a nation; and it is so full of real personal interest, so full of varied biographical and historical incident; it sets forth in so fresh and striking a way the important civilizing, educating influence of the faith of the English people in the Eucharistic Presence, that it will enable many to see, who have never seen before, how singularly onesided and incomplete that estimate of our national growth and development must be that, heedless of the operation of this particular belief in early times, overlooks the fact that the Holy