but it still is true that Christianity and Christian missions have struggled with it from the first, and that now, at length, it seems to be yielding, and there is good hope that it may ere long be utterly subdued. In every way Christianity has been the pioneer of civilization, and the giver of social comfort and peace. Very truly, many colonists from Christian lands have given to the colonies which they founded not comfort, nor peace, nor civilization; but it has been because they have left Christian lands and not carried their Christianity out along with them. Often, indeed, they have only laid waste heathen lands and oppressed heathen races; and Christianity following after them, has had to undo the evil, which apostate Christians had inflicted. Still we may challenge any one to show a single instance, in which civilization in modern times has spread to any place to which Christianity has not first found its way. We may challenge any one to deny, that, where Christianity has been forsaken or neglected, there have sprung up, instead of it, as in revolutionary France, cruelty, licentiousness, and social degradation. Christianity, once more, has been favourable at least to the development of mind, the cultivation of letters, the advancement of science. It is easy, of course, to say that there have often been efforts among Christians to check the progress of science, still more frequently panic terrors as to its unexpected discoveries. It is easy to point to Galileo, easy to speak of the fate of geology in the earlier days of the present century, of the reception of Mr. Darwin's theory now. As to Galileo, we may at once disown the Inquisition as representing the Christian faith. But it is unnecessary to deny that an appearance of antagonism between faith and science, or faith and literary criticism, will alarm timid believers, and so may lead to temporary misunderstandings between Christians and men of science or of literature. Yet look at past history and say, first, whether science and philosophy and literature did not for centuries find their only shelter in the Church, even under the deepest shadows of its cathedrals and monasteries. When all the world besides was unlettered and ignorant, learning flourished among the schoolmen, philosophy and even physical science were pursued, as far as they then could be pursued, by ecclesiastics and divines. The name of Roger Bacon stands out conspicuously as one who, in the cell of a convent and under the garb of a friar, carried inquiries into physical truth to a height which, considering his date and his difficulties, may compare even with the great and rapid discoveries of the present day. In short, it may be said truly and fearlessly, that whilst the only other religious systems in the world, which deserve consideration, Mohammedanism, Brahminism, and Buddhism, have either stifled, or at the best stunted science and made stagnant civilization; Christianity has fostered learning of all