ed on the naked beach, with the cold blasts of a Chinese winter aggravating his pains, he contended alone with the agonies of the fever which wasted his vital power. It was a solitude and an agony for which the happiest of the sons of men might well have exchanged the dearest society and the purest of the joys of life. It was an agony in which his still uplifted crucifix reminded him of a far more awful woe endured for his deliverance; and a solitude thronged by blessed ministers of peace and consolation, visible in all their bright and lovely aspects to the now unclouded eye of faith; and audible to the dying martyr through the yielding bars of his mortal prison-house, in strains of exulting joy till then unheard and unimagined. Tears burst from his fading eyes, tears of an emotion too big for utterance. In the cold collapse of death his features were for a few brief moments irradiated as with the first beams of approaching glory. He raised himself on his crucifix, and exclaiming, In te Domine, speravi-non confundar in æternum! he bowed his head and died.

14*

SIR JAMES STEPHEN,

Essays on Ecclesiastical Biography.

MISSIONARY CONTRAST.

THIS great success of the Catholics in these islands, reminds us of the more glorious results attendant on the mission of the priests than on that of the Puritans in North America. While the former, through the benign influence of genuine religion, and a reasonable conformance to the outward life, simple habits, and natural instincts of the Indian, possessed themselves of the door of human nature, the heart, and by kindness, sympathy, persuasion, and rational appeal, passed through it to the inner seat of his convictions; the cold, unbending, unpitying, and uncompromising disciple of Puritanism, sought to attain the same end by dictatorial harangues on election, justification, and sanctification, unintelligible to themselves and incomprehensible to their hearers; and by harsh decrees, fierce denunciations, and finally by the practical enforcement of death and damnation. The result of these two systems of proselytism are matters of record. The former, introduced by the French Franciscans, on the rocky shores of Maine, was subsequently borne thence (322)

along the great valley of the St. Lawrence and the lakes, even to that of the Father of Waters, by the Jesuits; winning the confidence and love of the untamed savage, guiding him to the peaceful contemplation of truth, and along the path that leads to eternal life. While the latter wrote in blood the record of aboriginal repugnance, and of their own persecutions, oppression, and final extermination of a race whom they professed to seek with the Gospel of Peace, but in fact destroyed with the weapons of war; and when at a later day they seized the happier fields of Catholic missions along the St. Lawrence and the lakes, there too they blasted the fair face of a benignant Christianity, by the terrors of uncompromising heartlessness, intolerance, cruelty, and selfishness. As a New England historian has asked in regard to the contrasted spirit of the missions of that day, equally applicable to the missions of which we have been speaking in the Hawaiian Islands-"Can we wonder that Rome succeeded and that Geneva failed? Is it strange that the tawny pagan fled from the icy embrace of Puritanism, and took refuge in the arms of the priest and Jesuit?"

H. WILLIS BAXLEY, West Coast of South and North America, and the Hawaiian Islands.

HOSPITALS AND SISTERHOODS.

It would take far too much time were I to go over the history of the early ages of Christendom, and show you that women, associated under the ruling civil and ecclesiastical powers, were then officially, but voluntarily, employed in works of social good. That these women should have been early associated with the Church, and held their duties by ecclesiastical appointment, was natural and necessary, because all moral sway, and all moral influence, and all education, and every peaceful and elevating pursuit, belonged for many centuries to the ecclesiastical order only. The singular and beneficent power exercised by the religious and charitable women in those times is remarked by all writers. The whole of the early history of Christianity is full of examples. I will give you one which, on looking over these authorities, struck me vividly.

Paula, a noble Roman lady, a lineal descendant of the Scipios and the Gracchi, is mentioned among the first Christian women remarkable for their

active benevolence. In the year 385 she quitted Rome, then a Pagan city; with the remains of a large fortune, which had been expended in aiding and instructing a wretched and demoralized people, and accompanied by her daughter, she sailed for Palestine, and took up her residence in Bethlehem of Judea. There, as the story relates, she assembled around her a community of women. In the old English translation of her life there is a picture of this charitable lady which I can not refrain from quoting: "She was marvellous debonair, and piteous to them that were sick, and comforted them, and served them right humbly; and gave them largely to eat such as they asked; but to herself she was hard in her sickness and scarce, for she refused to eat flesh how well she gave it to others, and also to drink wine. She was oft by them that were sick, and she laid the pillows aright and in point; and she rubbed their feet, and boiled water to wash them; and it seemed to her that the less she did to the sick in service, so much the less service did she to God, and deserved the less mercy; therefore she was to them piteous and nothing to herself.”

This picture, drawn fifteen hundred years ago, so quaintly graphic, and yet so touching in its simplicity, will, perhaps, bring before the mind's