sense of Divine grace, have endured for long years such trials and sufferings without token of success, yet uncomplaining and even happy. Such facts are undoubted evidences of a power flowing from Christianity such as nothing else can inspire.

And not only was Moffat a great worker, a 'captain of industry,' a Christian preacher and teacher he was also a great scholar. His literary productions alone would have been sufficient to form the life-work of an ordinary man. When he was urged by physicians to go to the coast or to England for the sake of health, he simply sought strength in change of air and scene in a new quarter, where, uninterrupted by ordinary calls, he could be alone to master a new dialect and thus perfect his rendering. He translated the whole Bible, and many other religious works, into the Sechwana tongue. He wrote a grammar, and composed admirable school and reading-books.

No evidence (writes Seiler) can be produced that the whole of the Scriptures was by any one person rendered into Saxon. Even Wickcliffe had the help of many persons; much more Coverdale. Bede was translating the Gospel of John at the time of his decease. But Robert Moffat, who began with the Gospel of Luke, lived to translate the whole Bible into the barbarous dialect of South Africa, and lived to see it circulating among the natives, who both speak, and in many instances, through his own school instruction, can read it.

Compared with the task of any other translator, it may be said that Moffat's work was like that of a man who not only had to build a house, but had first, with his own hands, to fashion each of the several tools needed in the process.

Moffat's greatness and foresight were also seen in his determination from the first to have nothing to do with politics, or to become in any form an agent for Government. This decision was due more to his grand simplicity and single-mindedness than to any process of reflection, or of weighing the merits of various means of securing influence with the natives. This has often proved a sad temptation and stumbling-block to missionaries. Readers of Faust' will remember that the jewels sent to Marguerite were real jewels, but they came from the wrong side of the firmament, and sorrow for her was bound up in her acceptance of them. So it has been almost invariably with political business in the hands of missionaries. Moffat felt that his proper work was missionary work, and that to complicate it with any other form of activity, however influential and honourable in a worldly point of view, must sooner or later introduce sources of weakness. When at the

very outset, a mere youth, he declined to be Resident in Namaqualand and to go free or not at all, he could not have had before him the warning furnished by the fate of Mr. Anderson and his mission among the Griquas, which Mr. John S. Moffat has so effectively told in these pages, but we believe his final decision would have been the same. Mr. Anderson had spent years of incredible hardship in endeavouring to get Bushmen and wanderers of other tribes to settle in orderly communities, and was finally blessed with a measure of success in the forming of one settlement. He saw it grow and increase. It became a centre of attraction, a rallying point, as Mr. John Moffat says, for members of broken tribes of many races. But, unfortunately, Mr. Anderson had made himself the medium of correspondence between his people and the Government, and had become their political adviser as well as their religious guide. When, therefore, the Government took the strange step of ordering Mr. Anderson to send twenty recruits to the Cape regiment, the people lost all confidence in him, as they regarded him as a secret emissary in the interests of the Government.

So utterly did their trust in him fail that in a few years he saw it his duty to give up his charge of the mission of which he was to a large extent the founder, and to retire to another station in the Colony. Nor were the effects less disastrous to the people themselves. They began to break up; one party, headed by the most influential chief, removed to another part of the country; a second, though acknowledged as chief, withdrew to a distance of about fifty miles: and Griqua Town was left with a population reduced in numbers, and practically without a head.

When, at this juncture, Moffat was requested by Mr. Campbell to assist Mr. Helm in re-organizing the mission, he must have reflected on the wisdom of his own refusal, and had his principles on these points reinforced.

One of the great attractions of this biography is, that it faithfully presents Mrs. Moffat alongside her husband-a heroine in every sense of the word. There was no work in which she did not share-no enterprise or adventure however perilous in which she did not take her part. For years she made it her work to accompany him in the waggon, when he meant to be absent for more than a couple of days, for the double purpose of ensuring that he should have ordinary comforts (which in bachelorhood in Namaqualand he had been apt to overlook), and that she should learn what she could of everything. Moffat had laid it down as the result of his three-year-long single-life experience that, A missionary without a wife in South Africa was like a boat with only one

oar. A good missionary's wife can be as useful as her husband in the Lord's vineyard.' She over and over again undertook journeys to the Cape without Moffat (whom she would not permit, for her sake, to leave his work for a moment), and with faithful Bechwanas and Hottentots only for attendants, who never failed her. She combined missionary help with attention to family matters, and conveyed back printing materials or other goods, which were needed and waited for. Once, when she was ordered to the coast for her health, she persisted in going alone. Unfortunately this time they found the Orange River in flood, and could not get across. For a whole month in ill-health she had to wait on the bank in the hot weather. But she never got disconsolate or even depressed, and her power of taking the best and most hopeful view of things amounted almost to an art. This is how she tells of her sufferings:

I was in company with Mr. Hume, who rendered me every possible assistance, but my health being in such a delicate state, I could not but suffer much from the extreme heat and exposed situation, and was severely tried. Frequently were we tantalized with the prospect of being able to ride through to-morrow,' but as sure as to-morrow came the river rose again, till all hope was gone, and we came at last to the conclusion to cross on a raft. . . . There were eighteen waggons altogether, and with hard labour we got everything over that dreadful river in less than three days without a single accident. How much have we to be thankful for and it was gratifying to find that, for all I had endured, I was no worse, but rather better. Perhaps being obliged to take it easily was in my favour.

This so entirely expresses the character of the woman as she appears to us throughout these pages-patient, courageous, equal to any emergency, gifted with power of command such as few men have, and yet tender and true to every claim of womanhood—that we can only praise her sufficiently by saying that she rose to the same heights of unconscious heroism as her husband. To read of her must prove an inspiration in many a home.

In a certain sense it may be said that the fame of Livingstone has eclipsed that of Moffat. But Livingstone would have been the first to say that his way was prepared for him, that he never could have done the work he did but for Moffat's previous journeyings and many labours and trials. To the furthest corner of Africa the name of Moffat had been borne, with report of the great deeds done by him on behalf of the dusky tribes in Bechwanaland and around it, with the Sechwana Bible for his silent pioneer; and it is only bare justice that, in estimating the work of Livingstone, his great fore

runner's share in it should be borne in mind, if discretion of a certain kind should warn us, at the same time, not to magnify it.

In the presence of such a career as this it has been well said 'sectarianism is dumb.' Dr. Norman Macleod was wont to urge, with his happy naïveté, in which fun and earnest were so nicely blended, that ministers, like wines, were mellowed by a voyage round the Cape. He meant that, when they had seen a little of heathenism and its degrading horrors, and had struggled with them, the distinctions among Christians that loom so large at home grew dim, if they did not altogether die out. His sentiments were those of Lord Macaulay, who, when he returned to England from India, declared that he had been so long in a country where the people worshipped cows that he could not attach any importance to the minor questions which separate Christians. Moffat's labours in this respect, too, bore their full fruit. Though firm on essentials, he was quick to welcome what was good in all sects and churches, and obeyed the apostolic injunction-ready to communicate.' Mr. Collum, the Vicar of Leigh, in whose parish Dr. Moffat spent his last years, has happily written some reminiscences in which these sentences occur:

As a large-minded and large-hearted man, who had seen much of the world, who had been brought face to face with the degradations of heathenism, and of bastard forms of Christianity, he had no sympathy with what was narrow, bitter, or sectarian, whether it were found within the Church or in systems outside her pale. If I mistake not, Nonconformity, no less than ecclesiasticism, had its own peculiar puzzles for him. He never attempted to justify or to palliate those too numerous and grievous divisions which marred the symmetry, broke the unity, and weakened the influence for good of the Church of Christ in the increasingly hard struggles with the powers of darkness;' and in his generous heart he longed for the reunion, in the one true faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, of a divided and distracted Christendom, thus realizing the devout aspiration of the Founder of our faith, that they all may be one.' He was always most ready to take part in any village gatherings-turning out of his home on dark and cold winter evenings. He attended many of our schoolroom lectures, and was ever willing, when requested, to say 'a word in season.' He highly approved of our Penny Readings, and thoroughly appreciated the musical selections, readings, and recitations.

A power in South Africa, he was thus also an example at home-a bond of brotherhood and unity to the various denominations who could rally round him and forget their differences in the delights of great work done among the heathen.

We are not sure that Mr. John S. Moffat has not lost something of unity and of interest in his endeavours to keep from

repeating what Moffat had himself told at length in his various volumes. This particularly applies to the earlier periods. For some things we are referred to Moffat's Labours and Scenes in South Africa.' But nothing can be more interesting than to see a great man in the making; and, though to the host of readers five-and-twenty or thirty years ago these things were all familiar, a new generation has since then sprung up who are, we fear, less well-informed on many points. And such a tale, at all events, can lose nothing by being twice-told, more especially when the later teller is one who knows the subject so well, can sympathize so fully with difficulties and dangers, and has, moreover, in so large a measure the gift of a quiet and effective narrative style. But, on the other hand, conciseness in these days is too little studied in biography; and if Mr. John S. Moffat has shown a failing, certainly his failing leans to virtue's side. It is more difficult to compress than to expand, to admit without discrimination than to hold back wisely, especially where there are many documents, and where the author himself has shared in several of the enterprises described. We will say, then, that Mr. John Moffat has done his work with rare discrimination, good taste, and, what is more, with judicious self-effacement. He has thus contributed to missionary biography one of the most readable and reliable additions that has ever been made to it. He affects no eloquence and endeavours to let his revered parents tell their own story; and by this plain and simple method we feel that we have been let as far as it was possible into their friendship and confidence, and led to know them precisely as they were.

ALEX. H. JAPP.

ART. VIII.-The Ethics of Pain.

PAIN and pleasure have been twins in every moral system since the dawn of ethics, sometimes bracketed as both alike evil, like opposite extremes; sometimes contrasted as positive and negative, but always entering into the subject-matter of all conduct. Aristotle, while he investigates a definition of pleasure, omits giving any of pain, which in the tenth book of his Ethics he regards only so far as it illustrates pleasure. I shall follow his example, and suppose pain, with all its pathological extensions, such as wearying exhaustion, depression of spirits, agonizing anticipations, and the like, sufficiently familiar to need no definition. With a vast capacity for pain,