amongst the heathen! I landed in Greenland thirty-seven years ago, and gladly would I stay another thirty-seven years to share the mercy and grace now enjoyed among us."

for human habitation. Yet here dwelt a man
and wife and several children, and a little
sickly orphan adopted into the family.
These were people who came regularly to
chapel, the children to the school.
went," writes one of the English visitors,

"We

A striking feature of these Arctic missions has been the preservation of the lives and health of the missionaries engaged in them." into the school at New Herrnhut and Frederic Boenisch was called home in the twenty-ninth year of his ministry on these inclement shores. Matthew Stach was spared till 1771, by which time he had planted a third station, called Lichtenan. John Soerensen returned to Germany in his eightieth year, after forty-nine years spent in Greenland. Later we find the venerable John Beck celebrating at Lichtenfels with humble thankfulness the jubilee of his labours there. And now for a moment we will turn to a sketch of the Greenland mission stations as they appeared to some English travellers who, in 1864, were moved by Christian love to visit their brethren in these far-off regions.

Landing at New Herrnhut on June 1st, they found the whole land still in wintry garb. "The wooden church church and missionary dwellings stand in the midst of the winter houses of the Esquimaux, round heaps of earth, from some of which rises a long stove-pipe." Around the mission buildings is a large garden where turnips, cabbages, lettuces were just appearing above the ground. They found the Moravian Brethren simple, loving, holy, devoted men, with whom, by means of an interpreter who had accompanied them from England for this purpose, they held delightful spiritual intercourse. At every station they found native helpers able not only to teach the children, but to minister to the congregation. Excellent addresses given by these to the Esquimaux were conveyed to the Englishmen through their own interpreter, a German, to whom first it was translated from Greenlandic by one of the mission band; in which rather complicated way the Englishmen's friendly greetings and Christian exhortations were passed on to the natives, who everywhere received them with affectionate gratitude, and everywhere welcomed them with their sweet hymn-singing accompanied by trombones. They describe the chapelkeeper's hut, the entrance to which was by a tunnel four feet high, and along which the Englishmen with their two interpreters contrived to crawl by dint of taking off coats and hats, and going on hands and knees. The windows were of oiled paper, and the place little fitted, to European eyes or noses,

found about twenty children there, from four to sixteen years old. They read fluently their impossible looking compound words, such as: 'Kasuerfigssakangitdliunarnarysok.' Fancy a row of the poorest-looking children, with bright happy faces and sharp black eyes, reading a page or more of such words as these, almost without mistake, repeating together the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments, and singing hymns very beautifully; and you may have some idea of the toils and successes of the worthy people who count it their privilege to spend their lives among the Greenlanders."

In every station visited by these travellers they found numerous and devout congregations; indeed, there are few Greenlanders now throughout the land who have not been brought more or less under Christian influence. Most interesting were the gatherings of the strangers with Esquimaux communicants around the table of the Lord. At Lichtenan one hundred and seventy partook together of the holy ordinance.

A touching scene never to be forgotten was the funeral of a Greenlander, a highly esteemed brother-helper. The body, wrapped in sealskins, was brought on a bier to the courtyard in front of the mission-house. The Herrnhut congregation assembled in the chapel. A hymn was very sweetly sung, a short address-simple, suitable, pathetic-given by Brother Herbrich. Then the company went forth into a beautiful summer evening, the blue bay with its floating ice before them, the rocky hills around. Another hymn was sung, and then the funeral procession, six Greenlanders bearing the bier, wound up a hillside to the burying-ground, and laid the body of their departed brother in a mosslined tomb of stones; another hymn, a few passages from the Moravians' beautiful Litany, and the simple service was over. Here, in the Herrnhut burying-ground, were the graves of Frederic Boenisch, F. Ballenhorst, and other Moravian missionaries, marked by tombstones such as are used in Europe, and standing in the midst of the nameless resting-places of the native dead.

Our thoughts go back to the old Moravian burying-ground of the Hutberg, where, one hundred and fifty years before, the humble

carpenter and his friend, labouring among the graves, had first felt themselves constrained to carry to Greenlanders lying in the shadow of death the tidings of Jesus and the Resurrection; and our thoughts go forward to the day when these men, so steadfast, immovable, abounding in the work of

the Lord, shall rise to the life immortal with many a Greenlander, who, since the days of Matthew Stach and Frederic Boenisch, have fallen asleep in Jesus, and shall know even better than they knew when they lay down to rest within those rocky graves, that their labour has not been in vain in the Lord.

A PLAIN MAN'S PHILOSOPHY.

GLOOMY world," says neighbour Black, | "Ay, so it is," says neighbour White,

AGLOOMY

"Where clouds of dreary dun,

In masses rolled, the sky enfold,
And blot the noonday sun!"
Ay, so it is," says neighbour White,
"But haply you and I

Might shed a ray to cheer the way——

Come, neighbour, let us try."

"A vale of tears," says neighbour Black,
"A vale of weary breath,
Of soul-wrung sighs and hopeless eyes,
From birth to early death!"

"But haply you and I,

Just there and here, might dry a tear-
Come, neighbour, let us try."

"A wilderness," says neighbour Black,
A desert waste and wide,

Where rank weeds choke, and ravens croak,
And noisome reptiles hide!"

"Ay, so it is," says neighbour White,

"But haply you and I

Might clear the ground our homes around-
Come, neighbour, let us try."

FREDERICK LANGBRIDGE.

I

AM going to tell you the story of Stephen, | a fortress. But the hill on which the city the first Christian martyr. I have no- stood was nearly cut in two by a valley that ticed that people do not very often talk to ran right into its heart, and divided it into the young about Stephen; perhaps because two summits, a lower and a higher. The there are some things in his story that grown- lower summit was Mount Zion, on which the up persons, even though very wise and Temple stood, and behind the Temple, the learned, do not understand. But Stephen Roman castle of Antonia, where the governor was so very noble and bright and brave that and his soldiers lived. The higher summit I like very much to talk about him. And I was Mount Moriah, on which stood the am quite sure that if you could only feel a greater part of the town, with its houses, very little of what he felt, if you could under- streets, markets, and its many synagogues. stand a little of what he wanted to do, and see how gloriously he fell in trying to do it, you would be nearer to the spirit of Stephen's master, Christ; and that is the great thing for us all.

Think that you see before you the city of Jerusalem. You can easily do so, because you have seen many pictures of it, and I dare say models of it as well. "Jerusalem was a city set on a hill," as the Psalmist says; and all but one side, the north, was surrounded by deep valleys like the ditch of

First, however, you must think of the Temple. You can have no idea how proud the Jews were of this. They were more than proud of it. They almost worshipped it instead of God. Some children who live in a cathedral town know what a deal is thought of the grand old church; but after all there are many cathedrals in the country, and there is a good deal of dispute as to which is the finest. Now the Jews had only one Temple. And it was not only the dwellers in Jerusalem who thought much of it; but every

ɔne in Palestine was expected to come up once a year to worship there. And those who lived far off across the sea used to send rich presents to it. The tribute paid for the support of the Temple was enormously large. | The priests, therefore, were very rich. And you know there is always a danger that men should think more of what makes them rich, than of what makes them good. Now, the Temple could not make these priests good. Only the God that they professed to worship. in it could make them good. But the Temple could make them rich; and so they thought more of the Temple than they did of God.

were who made money by the Temple. Certainly, we must remember that in the days of the Old Testament the Temple had been a great blessing to the Jews. It had kept before them the need of sacrifice for sin, and by bringing the people together it had maintained the unity of their faith. But those days were gone by; a better day had come; and the Jews did not understand it, because they worshipped the Temple instead of God.

We were speaking of the synagogues just now. The word means, as I suppose you know, places of meeting, because the people gathered together in them for praise and I was speaking just now of cathedral towns. prayer. How many of these synagogues In most of such towns, if you take a view of there were in Jerusalem I scarcely like to them from a neighbouring hill, it looks as if say, because it seems almost beyond belief. the town was built for the cathedral, rather It is said that there were four hundred and than the cathedral for the town. The towers sixty. Whether that is true or not I really of the great church are so high, its roofs so cannot tell, though I think it very likely. vast, and its walls so massive, that there | You see it was not like the case of our seems little space in the town for anything country, where not more than one person in else; and the houses appear to be crowded ten goes regularly to church. But amongst and squeezed together to make room for it. the Jews all the men and boys over twelve So, when travellers approached Jerusalem, years went to their synagogue as regularly as the Temple must have looked like a magni- they went to their work. For various reasons ficent palace, and the rest of the town like the women and girls did not go always. But the huts in which the servants of the palace there would probably be enough people to were huddled together. No doubt there fill the synagogues very fairly, especially as were a few other handsome buildings in these were not very large buildings. In Jerusalem, but they were all nothing to the every main street of Jerusalem, then, there Temple. The body of the Temple itself, must have been, at least, two or three synaindeed, where were the "Holy Place" and gogues, and in some of them a good many "the Holy of Holies," was only small. But more. then it was surrounded by broad, handsome courts, going up like steps, each one higher than the other, and at the top of all, the Temple shrine glittered white and golden in the sun, like the summit of a broad pyramid. As to the other buildings of any note, a very great number of them were synagogues. These, as you know, were more like modern churches. They were not for the offering of sacrifice, like the Temple, but for praise, and prayer, and preaching. They were not thought nearly so sacred as the Temple. It seems strange to us now that people should have thought so much more of sacrificing bulls and goats, than they did of praise and prayer, or even of judgment, mercy, and truth. Their own prophets, hundreds of years before, had told them that this was very wrong. But there were two reasons why they did not attend to the prophets. First, it is always much easier to do outward acts, like offering a bull or a goat, than it is to make our inward feelings right; and, next, there were not nearly so many people who made money by the synagogues as there

There is one other thing about these synagogues that we should understand before we go any further. Before the time of which we are speaking a great many Jews had left their own country and had settled in foreign lands, where most of them were very successful in business. There were large numbers of them in Alexandria, the great seaport of Egypt. There were many in Cyrene, a Greek colony in North Africa. There were thousands in Rome; and, indeed, there was hardly any part of the Roman Empire without them. All these foreign Jews were called by their own countrymen Grecians, or Hellenists, because they generally spoke in Greek, and used the Greek translation of the Old Testament called the Septuagint. But they never forgot the Holy Land, from which their fathers had gone forth; and all who could afford visited Jerusalem when they could, and, if possible, spent their last days there. These Grecians naturally liked to have their own synagogues in the sacred city, where

* Compare the Turkish use of the word "Frank," or French, to describe all the people of Western Europe.