calls an "interna bonitas;" there is what Bengel calls an "adamantina cohærentia," which he says, speaking of this very passage, compensate for the scarcity of MSS." But our enlightened Revisers contend that the passage is a gloss of St. Augustine's, which has slipped from the margin into the text, when nobody was looking. How, then, did Tertullian and St. Cyprian quote the words a century before? How is it that the Santa Croce "Speculum," which Cardinal Wiseman thought to be St. Augustine's own, gives the words three separate times as the words of Scripture? It is beyond dispute that the Old Latin Version, made in the first half of the second century, and revised by St. Jerome in the fourth, contained the words. Still, they persist, the Peshito Syriac omits them. So does it omit four entire Epistles, to say nothing of the Apocalyse. Yet St. Ephrem, who certainly knew what was in the Syriac Bible, quotes, or rather alludes to the words. But they say the Fathers did not make much use of the words against the Arians. There is many another handy verse, the genuineness of which no one doubts, though the Fathers never cited it. The Fathers were not always quoting Scripture with chapter and verse, like modern Bible-readers and tract-distributors. But here is a fact, worth more in point of evidence than a cart-load of quotations. In the year 483, at the height of the great Vandal persecutions, four hundred African bishops in synod assembled drew up a Confession of the Catholic Faith containing the disputed text. This Confession they presented to the Arian Hunneric, King of the Vandals. Many of them sealed their testimony in their blood. About fourteen hundred years later some two dozen Anglican prelates, aided by Methodist preachers, Baptist teachers, and one Unitarian, assembled in synod at Westminster to revise the New Testament, and without a semblance of persecution they yielded up to modern unbelief a verse which Catholic bishops held to the death against Arianism. These men are worse than the ancient Vandals, who only killed the bishops, but did not mutilate the text of Sacred Scripture. In this Socinian age the world could better spare a whole bench of Anglican bishops than one single verse of Holy Writ which bears witness to Christ's Divinity and the mystery of the Blessed Trinity. Well might Strauss ask the question in one of our English periodicals, "Are we Christians?" Well may M. Renan cross the water to lecture England on the origin of Christianity.

But these modern excisers have committed a blunder as well as a crime. They stealthily cut out the verse, but they have joined the pieces so clumsily that any one can detect the fraud. As the passage now stands in their version is without sense, though they foist in the word " agree to smooth over the

difficulty. "The witness of God" in the following verse is meaningless without the Heavenly witnesses. Their new-made Greek text will make schoolboys wonder how the first Greek scholars of the day could have so forgotten their syntax as to try and make a masculine participle agree with three neuter nouns. The Article too, as Bishop Middleton foretold, will reproach them with a half measure, for they should either have kept both verses in or cut both out. Yet strange to say these Revisers have no shame, no remorse for what they have done. One of them likens what they have done to getting rid of a perjured witness! Another talks calmly of the Revisers being in Paradise, and this after they have dared to take away from the words of him who prophesied that God would take away such men's part from the tree of life and out of the Holy City.

Cardinal Franzelin concludes his masterly defence of the Three Heavenly Witnesses with a remark as true as it is sad. Protestants, he says, have given up the verse because they have first given up the doctrine it supports. St. Jerome says that after a certain council which left the word Homousion out of its Creed, the world awoke and shuddered to find itself Arian. On the 17th of May the English-speaking world awoke to find that its Revised Bible had banished the Heavenly Witnesses and put the devil in the Lord's Prayer. Protests loud and deep went forth against the insertion, against the omission none. It is well, then, that the Heavenly Witnesses should depart whence their testimony is no longer received. The Jews have a legend that shortly before the destruction of their Temple, the Shechinah departed from the Holy of Holies, and the Sacred Voices were heard saying, "Let us go hence." So perhaps it is to be with the English Bible, the Temple of Protestantism. The going forth of the Heavenly Witnesses is the sign of the beginning of the end. Lord Panmure's prediction may yet prove true-the New Version will be the death-knell of Protestantism. But one thing is certain, that, as in the centuries before the birth of Protestantism, so after it is dead and gone the Catholic Church will continue to read in her Bible and profess in her Creed that "there are Three who give testimony in Heaven and these Three are One."

We have spoken of the admissions, the peculiarities, and the omissions of the newly Revised Version. It only remains to express our deep anxiety as to its effect upon the religious mind of England and Scotland. It cannot but give a severe shock to those who have been brought up in the strictest sect of Protestantism. Their fundamental doctrine of verbal inspiration is undermined. The land of John Knox will mourn its dying Calvinism. The prophets of Bible religion will find no sure word from the Lord in the new Gospel. But assuredly the Broad Church

will widen their tents yet more, and rejoice in the liberty wherewith Textual Criticism has made them free. Already one of their great oracles, himself a Reviser, has declared that Inspiration "is not in a part but in the whole, not in a particular passage but in the general tendency and drift of the complete words." And he teaches a new way to convert the working-classes from their unbelief. "The real way," he says, "to reclaim them is for the Church frankly to admit that the documents on which they base their claims to attention are not to be accepted in blind obedience, but are to be tested and sifted and tried by all the methods that patience and learning can bring to bear." Then Heaven help the poor working man if his sole hope of salvation lies in the new Gospel of Textual Criticism! But what will those think who, outside the Catholic Church, still retain the old Catholic ideas about Church and Scripture? How bitter to them must be the sight of their Anglican Bishops sitting with Methodists, Baptists, and Unitarians to improve the English Bible according to modern ideas of Progressive Biblical Criticism! Who gave these men authority over the written Word of God? It was not Parliament, or Privy Council, but the Church of England acting through Convocation. To whom do they look for the necessary sanction and approval of their work, but to public opinion? One thing at least is certain, the Catholic Church will gain by the New Revision, both directly and indirectly. Directly, because old errors are removed from the translation; indirectly, because the "Bible-only" principle is proved to be false. It is now at length too evident that Scripture is powerless without the Church as the witness to its inspiration, the safeguard of its integrity, and the exponent of its meaning. And it will now be clear to all men which is the true Church, the real Mother to whom the Bible of right belongs. Nor will it need Solomon's wisdom to see that the so-called Church which heartlessly gives up the helpless child to be cut in pieces by textual critics cannot be the true Mother.

ART. VI.-CATHOLIC MISSIONS IN EQUATORIAL

AFRICA.

1. To the Central African Lakes and Back.

THOMSON, F.R.G.S. London. 1881.

2. Les Missions Catholiques. Lyon.

By JOSEPH

T is now nearly twenty years since a European traveller crossing a series of swelling heights, all tufted with sheeny plumes of plantain and banaua, saw before him a great unknown freshwater sea which no white man had ever looked upon before.

It proved to be the mighty reservoir which feeds with the gathered rainfall of a vast tropical region the mysterious current of the White Nile, at a distance of three thousand miles from the point where it discharges the volume of its waters into the Mediterranean. This equatorial sea washes the shores of a strange but powerful kingdom, Uganda, or the Land of Drums, which, thus isolated in the remote heart of Africa, possesses nevertheless a certain amount of relative civilization. Rejoicing in the exuberant bounty of tropical Nature, it is rich in fat herds and luscious fruits, and supports a numerous and thriving population in perennial and never-failing plenty. Self-sufficing and selfsubsisting, as it has nothing to desire, it has also nothing to fear from the world without, and is sufficiently organized to resist internal disorder or external attack under a form of government bearing a shadowy resemblance to the feudal despotisms of mediæval Europe. Its ruler, the Kabaka, or Emperor, Mtesa, holds barbarous State in his palisaded capital, attended by files of guards, by obsequious courtiers, by pages swift as winged Mercuries to convey his orders, and by the terrible "Lords of the Cord," or State executioners, ready on the merest movement of his eyelids to draw sword on the designated victim and send his severed head rolling to the tyrant's feet. This redoubtable potentate, who at the time when the first English traveller, Captain Speke, visited his Court, was scarcely more than a boy in years, combines all the furious passions of the African race with a high degree of nervous excitability. The result is an electric temperament, in which outbursts of sunny geniality are liable to be interrupted, like those of the tropical sky, by sinister caprices equally swift and sudden. On an excursion to an island in the lake on which the above-mentioned explorez accompanied him, one of the women of his train offered the youthful despot a tempting fruit she had plucked in the woods. Instead of accepting it, he turned on her in a paroxysm of bestial rage and ordered her for immediate execution, nor did the terrible incident appear to mar for a moment his enjoyment of the day's pleasure.

When Mtesa declares war against an enemy, 150,000 warriors in their savage bravery of paint and feathers muster under their respective chiefs, and defile past the royal standard in the panther-like trot which is their marching style; while a canoe fleet 230 strong, manned by from 16,000 to 20,000 rowers and spearmen, appears to join the naval rendezvous upon the lake. Tributary monarchs do homage to the powerful sovereign of Uganda as their liege lord; neighbouring states send embassies to invoke his alliance; and his great vassals, each in his own province ruling with delegated authority equal to his own, VOL. VI. NO. I. [Third Series.]

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cower and tremble in his presence like the most abject of slaves.

Seated in his chair of State, his feet resting on a leopard skin, and clad in no unkingly fashion in a gold embroidered coat over an ample snowy robe, a Zanzibar sword by his side, a tarbouche or crimson fez upon his closely shaven head, his aspect is not without a certain impressiveness conferred by the sense of conscious power. His mobile bronze features have something of the terrible fascination with which the association of slumbering ferocity invests the repose of a wild beast, and few even of white men conscious of all the prestige of civilization to sustain them, have met without a feeling of involuntary awe the glance of the large vivid eyes, in whose glooming shadows lurk such suggestions of latent fury. The whole scene of his Court, with the discordant clangour of wild music, the braying of ivory horns, roll of drums, and shrill dissonance of fifes, the prostrate forms within, the acclaiming thousands outside, the guards motionless as monumental bronzes, presents a combination of outlandish strangeness bewildering to the European visitor; while the picturesque costumes, white mantles of silky-haired goatskin, clay-coloured robes of bark-cloth draping dark athletic forms for all are decently clad, and the law prescribes a minimum of covering without which the poorest may not stir abroad*-furnish elements of pictorial effect not often found in African life. A rude but powerful society is here made manifest, and something like the raw material of civilization may be found in this land of primitive plenty and comfort beneath the equator.

Nor is the king a mere untutored savage; his demeanour is not wanting in dignity, and both he and his principal courtiers have acquired a foreign language, in addition to their native tongue, both speaking and writing the Kiswaheli,† or Arab dialect of the Eastern coast. Mtesa has even some claim to rank among royal authors, for he has certain tablets, made of thin slabs of cottonwood, which he calls his "books of wisdom," on which he has noted down the results of his conversations with the European travellers who have visited his Court. A strange volume would these reminiscences of the African monarch prove, should they, in these days of universal publication, find their way to the printing press!

The ruler of Uganda has always shown a marked preference

* Even Captain Grant's knickerbockers were not considered sufficiently decorous for an appearance at Court in Uganda.

The African languages are largely inflected by the use of prefixes altering the sense of the words, thus:-U means country, as U-Rundi; M, a single native, as M-Rundi; Wa, people; Ki, language, as WaGanda, Ki-Ganda, the people and language of Uganda.