rection of Our Divine Redeemer, while explaining personal religion. Unfortunately, many of our own Church and Protestants who labour among Roman Catholics are often too eager to instruct, beginning with violent abuse of the Roman Church rather than educating their hearers by enlarging on the truths they have been taught and instilling the doctrines of the Gospel, leaving the truth to work, as Elisha did with Naaman. Therefore, such teachers are spoken against by the ecclesiastical authorities, and the people refuse to listen. I could not have distributed a single Gospel with advantage without feeling my way most carefully. One point is very praiseworthy in all the sermons I heard the priests never weary of dilating on the atonement of Our Divine Redeemer as the one ineffable sacrifice necessary for the satisfaction of divine justice and substitutionary for each individual soul, through which alone the sinner can find acceptance with God; though they do teach that the prayers of departed saintswho should be invoked, as well as those of one's relations and friends who are alive, are of use in obtaining blessings from God. The doctrine of the atonement is, however, one which is often lost sight of in our pulpits; men refuse to believe in the heinousness of sin, refuse to believe that the justice of a perfectly holy God requires full satisfaction for sin, and, by rationalistic arguments derived from degraded human reason, dwell only on the fatherhood and love of God to mankind. There are two rocks, Scylla and Charybdis, against either of which all Christian people may make shipwreck of their faith; they stand one at each end of the line of intellectual thought. The first is Formalism, the second Rationalism. The former is the outcome of a kind of parasitic religion, handing over the conscience to the direction of another, and considering that the individual has no right to think for himself and examine the doctrines whether they be of God, or else thinking that a feeble acquiescence in certain dogmas and the performance of certain forms and ceremonies is all that is necessary. The second phase is the result of revulsion of feeling from the other extreme, not only refusing to listen to the voice of the Church, the directions of the Bible, and the dictates of conscience, but setting up their personal puny and corrupt intellect as the supreme appeal-refusing to believe all that seems contrary to their individual ideas of justice or expediency. This latter is perhaps the more fearful error, as by it the finite utters the awful blasphemy of daring to dictate to the Infinite. It is a thought which should be much considered, that Our Lord's last prayer for unity is too often lost sight of. Unity in design, variety in carrying out that design, is the universal law in the natural world; would that it were more fully recognized in the Christian Church. There are hardly two leaves on any tree exactly similar; so there are few men of the same mind and temperament. All branches of the Church may be described as ranged in a circle, with Christ as their centre; the nearer they approach Him, the closer they are drawn to one another. Certain doctrines, of course, must be insisted on, such as the Trinity, the divinity of the Son of Man and His atonement, salvation in and through Him alone. We must likewise remember the inability of man to make himself acceptable to God, that prayer is the life of the soul, that the Christian life is a conflict, that we are alone able to fight by supernatural aid through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and that the sacraments are also divinely appointed means to that end. Surely, this is a basis on which all Christians should meet, and the details, though in themselves important, should hold a second place. One man may consider that a service bare of ritual, but from the heart, is more acceptable to God; another, that ornate ritual, with vestments and incense, is a closer resemblance to the unending worship in heaven, as revealed in the Apocalypse. "Who art thou that judgest another man's servant? To his own master he standeth or falleth." "Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind." If every one would exercise more of the divine gift of charity, and were more inclined to acknowledge and appre Is it not virtually to deny that charity is the greatest of the three theological virtues (1 Cor. xiii. 13), when a Church, e.g. the Roman Communion, excommunicates all other branches, calling them heretics, or when Protestants look upon the various Christian Churches as idolatrous and ripening up for fierce judgment, and therefore, while refusing to extend to them the right hand of fellowship, will even prefer anti-Christian religions or sects, such as the Jews or Unitarians? I refer only to the odium theologicum between Churches or sects per se, and not to individuals of any denomination. ciate the good in others, instead of dwelling on what each considers their faults or errors, one great step towards unity would be attained. The bigotry and lack of charity amongst Christians is the fact which affords—perhaps more than any other-the ground for the arguments of Atheism against the Church of our divine and blessed Redeemer. SLAVERY. It may be confidently asserted, owing to the very great movement which has been daily increasing in earnestness, and which engrosses the mind of every one throughout the length and breadth of the empire, that before long slavery will have ceased to exist in Brazil. The law of Rio Branco, or Lei do ventre livre, was passed September 28, 1871. It provides that the children of all slaves born after that date shall be free; and it also founded the Emancipation Fund. The Bill was brought in by the Visconde do Rio Branco, then President of the Council, and Director of the Polytechnic School at Rio de Janeiro. He is a staunch Conservative. The Bill passed through the two Chambers during one of the visits of the Emperor to Europe, when the Princess Isabel was Regent. She is the wife of Count Louis Philippe Gaston d'Orleans and Conde d'Eu. Since that date the abolition of slavery has been steadily progressing, through the Emancipation Fund, and by private acts of freeing slaves during their life, or after the death of the owners, as I shall describe in due course. Slaves can still be bought, but there is a tax of a conto of reis on importing them from other provinces. The cost of slaves from fifteen to twenty-five years of age is from four hundred or five hundred milreis to one or two contos. Since 1831 no slaves can be brought into the country; but this law has been evaded, as many have been imported from Africa from time to time. In Gardner's Travels,† he mentions that in 1841 he saw, near Petropolis, twenty young negro boys recently imported, of from ten to fifteen years of age, none of whom could yet speak Portuguese. * A conto is a million reis = roughly £80 to £100. + Gardner's "Travels in the Interior of Brazil," p. 536. on emancipation, He says But there is also Dr. Pedro Ferreira Vianna, in an article advises the employment of prudence and law. "Slavery is an institution of our civil law. in our civil code the law of November 7, 1831, which says, Article I, 'All slaves which shall enter the territory or ports of Brazil, coming from abroad are free;' and in Article 2, 'Persons who knowingly buy as slaves those who are declared free in Article 1, are included under the term importers; these importers, however, are only compromised subsidiarily to the expenses of re-exportation, subject withal to the other penalties.' One of these penalties is that of Article 179 of the criminal code, for those who reduce free persons to slavery. . . . The nation is therefore compelled to indemnify for those slaves who are liberated if they came before that law, and to restore liberty to those who came after it. The judges cannot, without injustice, fail to indemnify the masters. Abraham Lincoln and the Americans had no such law as that of 1831, and thus spoke in the name of God and of humanity. . . . Fiat justicia pereat nec pereat mundus. I trust that in loyalty none will say the law has fallen into disuse. . . . The law being known, nothing is easier than to put it into execution. The Imperial Government cannot and should not liberate by the Fund of Emancipation the slaves who are free in virtue of the law of 1831. They know by the books, the invoices of sales, the baptismal registers of the descendants of these Africans, and by other documents, who are those comprised under this head. . . . The civil law states that there are hundreds of thousands of free men reduced to slavery (about one-half of the population). . . . For these men no indemnification can be allowed. The voice of the civil law will not be smothered, because it will be heard in the recesses of every conscience.. In my words there is not only charity, but the desire that you should reconcile yourselves with God, with humanity, with natural instinct, with civil law, with the slave; and this reconciliation means liberty." He then says that everywhere there should be organizations to prevent freed slaves being continually threatened, prisons being invaded and captured slaves assassinated, and finally to guarantee justice. He concludes by extending the hand of friendship to all emancipators, and offers Gazeta da Tarde, June 30, 1884. . "a prayer that the dead may not forget us in their prayers for these unhappy ones." The Rio News,* commenting on this letter, says, "The Brazilian slave-owner never obeyed the law of 1831, because it was antagonistic to what he considered his own private interest— an uninterrupted supply of cheap slave-labour. . . . For some twenty-five years he brought in over half a million of Africans after 1831, and it was only after further legislation and the forcible intervention of foreign powers that he finally gave up the traffic. Since the passage of the law of 1871 he has pursued a similar policy with relation to the avoidance of its requirements. There has never been an honest registration of slaves, nor a strict observance of the provision guaranteeing liberty to the children of slave mothers. . . . No man can justly claim the protection of laws which he habitually and openly violates. If a law is worth enforcing, it is worth obeying." The "Funda de Emancipaçao," or Emancipation Fund, is divided at certain intervals by the Government of each province between the different municipalities. Every day one reads in the papers of some slaves liberated by this fund. The administrators select their candidates carefully. For instance, they prefer to free a slave whose husband or wife is already free. Again, the fazendeiros (landed gentry) give some of their slaves land, and allow them. Sundays and saints' days to cultivate it; or if the slaves are hired out, their wages on those days belong to them. Slaves can thus earn money to assist in buying their freedom; and such are also preferred as recipients from the Emancipation Fund. When the time for liberation arrives, the master and slaves appear before the municipal judge, and their value is handed over to the owner. I may quote, among many instances that I heard of, a gentleman at Pitanguy, who possesses a slave who is a "pedreiro" (stonemason). Out of every $2 500 reis that he receives as wages, the master takes S1 300 reis, and gives the slave S1 200 reis. Another man has a black cook who lived five years in Rio, being three years in a French house; he obtained his freedom in 1870. He speaks a little French, and, though he cannot read, he knows July 5, 1884. * |