not care for the lower-at least nothing to speak of?" The poor man was in a state of dreadful perplexity, and felt well-nigh distracted. At last a light broke in on him. He remembered that as one of his most revered masters, Professor Tyndall, had admitted, a great part of Humanity would always need a religion, and that Virginia now had none. He at once rushed back to her. "Ah!" he exclaimed, "all is explained now. You cannot be in love with me, for that would be unlawful passion. Unlawful passion is unreasonable, and unreasonable passion would quite upset a system of pure reason, which is what exact thought shows us is soon going to govern the world. No! the emotions that you fancy are directed to me are in reality cosmic emotion-in other words are the reasonable religion of the future. I must now initiate you in its solemn and unspeakably significant worship." Religion!" exclaimed Virginia, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. "It is not kind of you to be making fun of me. There is no God, no soul, and no supernatural order, and above all there is no hell. How then can you talk to me about religion?"

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You," replied Paul, "are associating religion with theology, as indeed the world hitherto always has done. But those two things, as Professor Huxley well observes, have absolutely nothing to do with each other. It may be,' says that great teacher, that the object of a man's religion is an ideal of sensual enjoyment, or

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6

"Ah!" cried Virginia, "that is my religion, Paul.”

"Nonsense!" replied Paul; "that cannot be the religion of half Humanity, else high, holy, solemn, awful morality would never be able to stand on its own basis. See, the night has fallen, the glorious moon has arisen, the stupendous stars are sparkling in the firmament. Come down with me to the sea-shore, where we may be face to face with nature, and I will show you then what true religion-what true worship is."

The two went out together. They stood on the smooth sands, which glittered white and silvery in the dazzling moonlight. All was hushed. The gentle murmur of the trees, and the soft splash of the sea, seemed only to make the silence audible. The Professor paused close beside Virginia, and took her hand. Virginia liked that, and thought that religion without theology was not perhaps so bad after all. Meanwhile Paul had fixed his eyes on the moon. Then in a voice almost broken with emotion, he whispered, "The prayer of the man of science, it has been said, must be for the most part of the silent sort. He who said that was wrong. It need not be silent; it need only be inarticulate. I have discovered an audible and a reasonable liturgy which will give utterance to the full to the religion of exact thought. Let us both join our voices, and let us croon at the moon."

The Professor at once began a long, low howling. Virginia joined him, until she was out of breath.

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Oh, Paul," she said at last, "is this more rational than the Lord's Prayer?"

"Yes," said the Professor, "for we can analyze and comprehend that; but true religious feeling, as Professor Tyndall tells us, we can neither analyze nor comprehend. See how big nature is, and how little-ah, how little!-we know about it. Is it not solemn, and sublime, and awful? Come, let us howl again."

At

The Professor's devotional fervour grew every moment. last he put his hand to his mouth, and began hooting like an owl, till it seemed that all the island echoed to him. The louder Paul hooted and howled, the more near did he draw to Virginia.

"Ah," he said, as he put his arm about her waist, "it is in solemn moments like this that the solidarity of mankind becomes most apparent."

Virginia, during the last few moments, had stuck her fingers in her ears. She now took them out, and, throwing her arms round Paul's neck, tried, with her cheek on his shoulder, to make another little hoot; but the sound her lips formed was much more like a kiss. The power of religion was at last too much for Paul.

"For the sake of cosmic emotion," he exclaimed, "O other half of Humanity, and for the sake of rational religion, I will kiss you."

The Professor was bending down his face over her, when, as if by magic, he started, stopped, and remained as one petrified. Amidst the sharp silence, there rang a human shout from the rocks.

"Oh!" shrieked Virginia, falling on her knees, "it is a miracle! it is a miracle! God is angry with us for pretending that we do not believe on him."

The Professor was as white as a sheet; but he struggled with his perturbation manfully.

"It is not a miracle," he cried, "but an hallucination. It is an axiom with exact thinkers that all proofs of the miraculous are hallucinations."

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See," shrieked Virginia again, "they are coming, they are coming. Do not you see them?"

Paul looked, and there, sure enough, were two figures, a male and a female, advancing slowly towards them, across the moonlit sand.

"It is nothing," cried Paul; "it cannot possibly be anything. I protest, in the name of science, that it is an optical delusion."

Suddenly the female figure exclaimed, "Thank God, it is he!" In another moment the male figure exclaimed, "Thank God, it is she!"

"My husband!" gasped Virginia.

“My wife!” replied the bishop (for it was none other than he). "Welcome to Chasuble Island. By the blessing of God it is on your own home you have been wrecked, and you have been living in the very house that I had intended to prepare for you. Providentially, too, Professor Darnley's wife has called here, in her search for her husband, who has overstayed his time. See, my love, my dove, my

beauty, here is the monkey I promised you as a pet, which broke loose a few days ago, and which I was in the act of looking for when your joint cries attracted us, and we found you."

A yell of delight here broke from the Professor. The eyes of the three others were turned on him, and he was seen embracing wildly a monkey which the bishop led by a chain. "The missing link!" he exclaimed, "the missing link!"

"Nonsense!" cried the sharp tones of a lady with a green gown and grey cork-screw curls. "It is nothing but a monkey that the good bishop has been trying to tame for his wife. Don't you see her name engraved on the collar?"

He sprang away

The shrill accents acted like a charm upon Paul. from the creature that he had been just caressing. He gazed for a moment on Virginia's lovely form, her exquisite toilette, and her melting eyes. Then he turned wildly to the green gown and the grey cork-screw curls. Sorrow and superstition he felt were again invading Humanity. "Alas!" he exclaimed at last, "I do now indeed believe in hell."

"And I,” cried Virginia, with much greater tact, and rushing into the arms of her bishop, once more believe in heaven."

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W. H. MALLOCK.

FACTS OF INDIAN PROGRESS.

THE

HE main object of my recent researches in India, has been to inquire into the principal modern forms of Indian religious life and practice. Such investigations as I have hitherto made have convinced me that we are as yet very imperfectly acquainted with the later development and present drift of the religious creeds of India, their various sectarian differences, and their effect on the character and conduct of those who profess them. Nor have we sufficient data to enable us to form a correct estimate of the modifications in Indian religious thought effected by contact with Christianity, by the spread of education, and by the diffusion of European scientific knowledge. The whole subject is involved in much obscurity. We rulers of India see it through a glass darkly; or, at any rate, see it reflected very dimly in the mirror of our superficial intercourse with the Indian world. Close and confidential intimacy with all classes of the natives is necessary to its adequate elucidation. Nor can the investigation be prosecuted satisfactorily without collateral inquiries into the present physical and social condition of the people. For this reason I propose to preface an account of some of the more remarkable phases of Indian religious life by a cursory review of the material and moral progress of our Indian Empire.

Macaulay, in his essay on Lord Clive, asserts that every English schoolboy "knows who imprisoned Montezuma, and who strangled Atahualpa," but doubts "whether one in ten, even among English gentlemen of highly cultivated minds, can tell who won the battle of Buxar, who perpetrated the massacre of Patna, whether Sujah Dowlah ruled in Oude or in Travancore, or whether Holkar was a Hindū or a Musalman." Macaulay's review was written exactly thirty-seven years

ago.

Whether the Tom Browns and Julian Homes of the present day are equally well" posted up " in Mexican history, and whether, when turned out into the world as educated men, they are equally ignorant of Indian history, admits of question. Probably the main facts of the material development of British India are better known than they were when Macaulay wrote his essays in the Edinburgh. Yet at a time when great statesmen speak of our Eastern Empire as "founded on criminal ambition," and when other politicians accuse Russia of a desire to extend her territorial possessions in a manner equally unscrupulous, it may not be unprofitable to recall attention to the irresistible current of circumstances which has landed us in our present position in India, and made British Indian interests and British Indian duties important elements of the momentous problem now pressing for solution in every court of Europe.

The history of European enterprise in the East begins with the maritime supremacy of the Portuguese. The journeys of the Venetian traveller, Marco Polo, in Central and Eastern Asia, between 1291 and the close of the thirteenth century, and the narrative of his visit to the coast of India, excited much interest in Europe, and stimulated travellers and navigators to feel their way eastward.

Our fellow-countryman, Sir John Mandeville, left England in 1327, and, after wandering for thirty-three years through Europe and Asia, returned home and wrote his well-known narrative. The marvels he described probably contributed to stimulate the prosecution of maritime discovery. The Portuguese navigator, Bartholomew Diaz, succeeded in rounding the southern promontory of Africa, called by him the Cape of Storms, and was the first real pioneer of the ocean route to India, about the year 1487. Ten years later his countryman, Vasco da Gama-whose tomb or cenotaph I saw the other day in a large Protestant church at Cochin-sailed round the Cape and reached Calicut on the 11th May, 1498. The Portuguese found India torn asunder by internal dissensions, and were the first to take advantage of its condition of chronic disunion and so gain a footing on the western coast. But the Portuguese were not mere traders as we originally were-mere commercial speculators who went to India to make money, and to return home with it when made. They aimed from the first at settling in the country, at establishing themselves there as a conquering nation, and achieving political dominion.

Their first Indian viceroy was Almeyda. The second, Albuquerque, landed in 1508, took Goa from the kingdom of Bijapur, and made it the capital of the Portuguese possessions. The Portuguese, however, never possessed any considerable territory in India beyond the limits of their factories. Their progress was too rapid and their career too adventuresome to be lasting. In less than a century their power began to decline, and by 1640 nearly all their ports and forts were wrested from them. Bassein was taken from them by the Marathas