a firman from the Sultan, granting freedom to the Protestants of Hâsbeiya. Some amelioration in their lot was the happy result, but only to a certain degree; for the artful Mathodios managed, during five weary years, to bribe the Pasha of Damascus to assail them with all kinds of secret social persecutions.” While this is the state of the Greek Church, and these the difficulties which all the labours of a purer faith must encounter among our so-called Christian brethren in the East, Lieutenant Van de Velde does not share in the popular idea of the greater liberality of the dominant religion. “Mahommedans,” he says, “have been hitherto, by the very laws of the Koran, inaccessible to the gospel. The Sultan is the faithful assertor of these laws, and punishes with decapitation every Mussulman who abandons the doctrines of the Prophet. It is not three years since a respectable young man was beheaded in the streets of Constantinople for having abjured Islamism. Think, then, what is implied in a Mahommedan’s even giving an attentive ear to the gospel.” If this statement is correct, as we presume it to be, it throws rather a singular romance of disinterestedness upon the present services of the most prominent nations in Christendom to this empire of heathenesse. Notwithstanding the discouragements, almost amounting to impossibilities, which beset him on every hand, M. Van de Velde’s friend and travelling companion, Dr Kalley, does not fail, with unceasing devotion, to proclaim to the thronging hosts of invalids who surround the Hakim at every resting-place, the unchanged faith which, eighteen hundred years ago, proceeded from this very soil. The scene is thoroughly Oriental, and strangely reminds us of many a sacred scene. Crowds of the sick and helpless throng to the door where the wandering physician sits with his medicine-chest. A high compliment to the beneficent science of healing is in the eagerness of these mendicant patients. They believe in a man who goes from village to village for no other purpose than to alleviate their pains and heal their distresses, but they find it extremely hard to believe in one who comes with no medicine-chest, but only with outlandish instruments of science, and have no faith in topography. It may be that the popular imagination has a far-off traditionary remembrance of that sublime Traveller, under whose touch and at whose voice the very dead arose; but it is certain, that while they do not understand travelling for pleasure, nor travelling for discovery, nor any other kind of expeditionary enterprise, the wandering hakim has but to disclose his errand to secure their perfect faith and most respectful welcome. Poor children of Ishmael, materialism is too strong for spirituality with them. They may gape at the antiquary with the scorn of ignorance, but the physician, to those who have so much need of him, is half divine.