It was certainly by no means incomprehensible to me, that our friend should have taken it so ill, when his own brother became a Christian. On that point I have always had, I own, very much the feeling of the Roumanians, whose dislike to any change of religion is so thorough and intense, that they use the same expression--“s a’ turcit,”--_i.e._, “he has become a Turk, a Mahomedan,” indiscriminately to denote any change of faith, whether on the part of one becoming a Christian or a Mussulman. Quite different in this from their Russian brethren of the Orthodox Church, the Roumanians view with absolute disfavour the action of those who join their communion. To them such an act is always simply apostasy, and their language possesses no other term by which to designate it. In this, as I was saying, I am much in sympathy with them. Is it not an admission of weakness, to say the least, deliberately to abandon the Faith of our Fathers and enter another fold? Since all Churches are in a sense human institutions, what advantage have we in leaving the one in which we were born and brought up, only to find that of our choice equally fallible and imperfect! Should we not content ourselves with doing our very best, in all honesty and sincerity of purpose, within the community in which our lot is cast, striving to raise its aims and purify its ordinances, rather than impatiently to fling aside fetters that have perhaps become irksome, only by so doing to burden ourselves with other and perchance heavier chains, and from which we must no longer seek to free ourselves, seeing that they are of our own choosing? Is then the outward form under which we worship God, of so much importance after all? Some form undoubtedly there must be, as long as human beings meet together for prayer and praise, feeling themselves thereby more fitly disposed for their orisons and thanksgiving; but let us not forget that the essence of all service consists in its being performed “in spirit and in truth!” The rest matters little.