"suzerainty was not mentioned in the later Convention, the thing itself was amply emphasized in the article which prohibits the making of any foreign treaty by the Transvaal without British consent. We hope that a war will not be necessary to secure needed reforms. Although its result would ultimately be a British triumph, such a conflict would arouse well-nigh undying hate between the two races in South Africa. Pastoral Letters To the Reluctant Skeptic I want to believe, but I cannot. It seems as though my faculties for believing divine truths were atrophied. For years I have been fighting this unbelief. What shall I do? These sentences, selected from a single letter, may serve to interpret the spirit of many letters, and the perplexities of many souls who never tell their perplexity to others. It is to such reluctant skeptics that I address this response. There are two methods of reaching the truth-the theological and the vital, or the theoretical and the practical. The former method assumes that thought precedes action, the latter that action precedes thought; the former makes ethics the foundation of morality and theology the foundation of religion, the other makes morality the foundation of ethics and religion the foundation of theology. The postulates of the first method are, I must know God before I can pray to him, I must understand Christ before I can trust in him, I must accept the Bible as a trustworthy guide before I can follow its guidance. The postulates of the second method are, I must pray to God in order to know him, I must trust in Christ in order to understand him, I must follow the guidance of the Bible before I can know that it is a trustworthy guide. The one method assumes that the light is the life of men; the other says, with John, that the life is the light of men. Doubtless this antithesis is here put somewhat too sharply; doubtless these two processes the vital and the philosophical, the religious and the theological-in actual life go on together, and are really indistinguishable parts of healthful spiritual growth. But it is also certain that Christ laid his emphasis on the second method; that is, he put religion. before theology, morality before ethics, life before an understanding of life. If one takes up the four Gospels and reads in them, or reads either one of them through, for the purpose of ascertaining what was Christ's method, the theological or the vital, one will probably be surprised to find how little of direct instruction in theology Christ's instructions contain. He calls his disciples to follow him, and it is not until they have followed him for a year that he even asks them what they think of him. He speaks to them of God as a Father, but it is not in a definition of God; it is in counsel how to pray. He never argues the question of immortality, except to answer foolish objections brought against it by the Sadducees in a vain attempt to trip hin up; he simply talks to men as though they were immortal, and treats all the affairs of this life as though there were an eternal perspective behind them. He never once debates the question of the inspiration and authority of the Bible; he simply uses it to illustrate or to enforce his practical teachings concerning life and its duties. Nearly all his instructions point to some activity; they are addressed rather to the will than to either the intellect or the emotions. His unmistakable object is to induce men to take some action, rather than to possess some emotion or to entertain some opinion or conviction. I may refer briefly to three specific addresses to illustrate this principle, but I believe that it will be found to pervade equally all Christ's teaching. The first is the Sermon on the Mount. He begins this sermon with blessings pronounced, not upon sound opinions on even such fundamental topics as God and immortality, but upon the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, the peacemaker; that is, upon traits of character which inhere in the will and manifest themselves in action. Lowliness of spirit, meekness, mercifulness, peaceableness, are neither opinions nor emotions; they are compatible with a great variety of creeds, and are to be found alike in emotive and unemotive men: they are dispositions to a certain type of activity. He goes on to urge on his disciples, not certain tenets, but certain courses of conduct-they are to let their light shine, to seek kindly relations with offended brethren, to live purely in social and domestic relations, to keep from evil the tongue and the heart, out of whose abundance the mouth speaketh, to treat even their enemies with kindliness and to regard them with benevolence, to pray with simplicity and in secret, to give their lives wholly to God's service, not to worry, not to judge others, to treat all men with justice and good will, to measure other religious teachers by the kind of lives their teaching produces; and, finally, the sermon ends with the remarkable declaration that "whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken unto a wise man who built his house upon a rock." What is this but saying, by a figure impossible to misunderstand, that the foundation of character is not believing certain opinions, but doing certain things? What is it but saying that deed is the foundation and creed the superstructure, not creed the foundation and deed the superstructure? The second discourse is one delivered at the end of Christ's ministry, in which he portrays the final judgment. Here men are separated on the right hand and the left, according to what they have done in life for their fellow-men; and, lest in future ages theology should insist that this feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting the sick and the imprisoned was based upon a conscious faith in Christ which, in speaking to his disciples, Christ takes for granted, he makes it clear that neither those who fulfilled the law of love nor those who failed to fulfill it thought of Christ in either what they did or what they omitted to do. The third discourse of Jesus Christ, and the one which may, perhaps, be regarded as the most theological of any reported in the four Gospels, is his conversation with the eleven at the Last Supper, reported in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth chapters of John. In this the same principle that spiritual life is built on doing God's will, not on either opinion or emotion, is not less marked than in the other two. Judas saith unto him (not Iscariot), Lord, how is it that thou wilt manifest thyself unto us, and not unto the world? Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him. . . . If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in his love. . . . Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you. Thus, in his last and most sacred discourse, in the intimacy of those last hours with his faithful friends, Christ lays the foundation of the deepest spiritual life on doing his commandments, as, in his inaugural address delivered before a great congregation, he laid the foundation of the social world-life of his followers. Modern psychology, if I understand its teaching aright, confirms scientifically this method of character-building; for it teaches that action often precedes and produces both thought and feeling. The man who spits out his momentary anger in venomous or profane words does not get rid of it; he intensifies it by expressing it. On the contrary, if he suppresses the expression, he does or may do something to suppress the impulse itself, and presently even to regard intellectually the real or fancied insult in quite a different fashion. Both his emotion and his intellect get their color from his activity, and are modified, if not made, by it. Though on the subject of physiological psychology I speak with reserve, I believe that I am right in saying that it is at least a wellaccepted theory, if not a demonstrated fact, that every such activity reacts on the brain in molecular changes there, which tend to harmonize it with the action and to make the repetition of such action easier in the future. This fact is illustrated by the well-known history of the battlefield, on which the soldier enters at first with reluctance, "uncommon stiff and slow," but, after the first shots have been fired and the first blood has been shed, becomes for the moment often wild with the "revenge that knows no rein," partly inspired thereto by the passion of his com- . rades and partly instigated thereto by his own deeds of vengeance. I cannot doubt that the practice in the Church of repeating the Apostles' Creed together has done much, in accordance with this law, to strengthen faith in the essential facts of historic Christianity, partly by the sympathy extending through the congregation, partly by the mere expression in verbal phraseology of the faith embodied in that creed. I have taken considerable space to elucidate and enforce this method of character-building, which regards thoughts and emotions as the superstructure and action as the foundation of life, because theology has generally assumed the reverse to be the true order. Indeed, so radical and revolutionary is the very simple truth which I attempt to put before my readers, that it is doubtful whether I shall even get their consent, in many cases, to consider it. The mind, anchored to a traditional and unseen hypothesis, is moved from its apparent position for an hour or two by a new idea sweeping by it like an increasing tide, but presently reverts to its former status, from which it has really never been moved. But any reader who has followed and even tentatively accepted the theory of this paper can easily apply it himself to the great religious problems. Let me recur to a specification which I used in the opening paragraph-prayer, Christ, the Bible. He who accepts the method which I have here indicated will not wait until he has become convinced that God hears prayer, or even that God is. He knows that he himself has aspirations. These aspirations he will not suppress. To some of them he can give no expression to even his dearest friends; in some cases because they are inexpressible, in other cases because they would not be and could not be understood. He will not wait until he has become acquainted with God before he utters them. He will, in the quiet hours which he reserves for self-communing, breathe these aspirations outward and upward. If he can find only an altar to an unknown God, to the unknown God he will give them expression. And in these hours of communion, so silent and secret that he knows not whether he is communing only with himself or with another also, he will welcome the quietness of spirit, the larger hope, the strengthened purpose with which at times he will come forth from this mere endeavor to give expression to his unexpressed and best self, as possible answers to his prayers, unborn, yet perhaps not unknown to his unknown God. He will read the story of Christ's life. Instead of stopping to consider the question, What think ye of Christ, whose son is he? he will follow where that life leads. He reads, for instance, Thackeray's ironical advice: "What a man has to do in society is to assert himself. Is there a good place at table? Take it." Then he reads Christ's counsel to his disciples: "When thou art bidden, go and sit down in the lowest place, that when he that bade thee cometh he may say unto thee, Friend, go up higher." Christ's counsel commends itself to his social taste and to his ethical judgment, and he resolves to follow it, and does follow it. Thus he reads Christ's life for the purpose of getting light on his own life and inspiration for his own living. He begins to live on Christian principles, to attempt to carry out Christ's spirit; and he relegates all consideration of Christ's miraculous birth, supernatural character, and divine authority to the future. He makes his question, not, What shall I think about Christ? but, How shall I live like Christ? If he does this, he may never get a Christian creed, but he will gradually grow into a Christian life; and whether the creed follows or not is quite a secondary matter. Or he reads Paul's declaration that the Bible is profitable for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. He resolves to use it for this purpose, and see whether it is as good as Paul thought it was. He declines to consider the debated questions respecting the inspiration and authority of the Bible. Leaving those in abeyance for the present, he reads its spiritual ideals, and finds that they reprove his life; its spiritual counsels, and finds that they suggest better paths in which to walk; its directions concerning practical life, and finds in them much to guide him in moral perplexity. If he finds in it some things which seem to him incomprehensible or even unworthy, he leaves them for future consideration; or, should his conscience reject them altogether, he does not therefore reject what does illuminate and inspire. In brief, I advise the reluctant skeptic, who desires to know the truth in order that he may do right, to reverse the order and give his whole present attention to doing right that he may know the truth, in the faith that right conduct, though a long road, is the best road to wise beliefs; that faith in God comes from praying, faith in Christ from following, and faith in the Bible from practically using it. L. A. Cuban Industrial Relief The following letter from the Rev. Horace Porter, assistant pastor of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, tells clearly the actual conditions in Cuba, and shows the effectiveness of the methods adopted by the Cuban Industrial Relief Fund. Mr. Porter visited Cuba and the farms of the Relief Fund for the express purpose of obtaining positive personal knowledge of the facts: The pitiable condition of Cuba is due to a remarkable combination of causes. One was the abolition of slavery. This was in 1885but fourteen years ago. Righteous as that was, it nevertheless caused in Cuba, as in our own Southern States, a period of distress until agriculture could readjust itself to new conditions. Almost simultaneously with the ending of slavery came the great permanent decline in the price of sugar. These two causes brought hardship, even ruin, to many plantations. Supreme over all other causes of Cuba's desolate estate have been Spanish tyranny and taxes: Spanish tyranny, which, studying to crush out all personal liberty among native Cubans, had imprisoned, executed, or exiled multitudes of Cuba's noblest citizens; Spanish taxes, which by their enormity have been for generations a wasting consumption upon the business life of Cuba. There was no honorable course left for the Cubans but that of rebellion against Spain. Hence the terrible wars of 1868 to 1878, and of 1895-98. The homes in rural Cuba are now nearly all of them in ruins. The plantations are abandoned. By the tactics of Weyler probably two out of every three of the rural population of Cuba have been laid in their graves during the past three years. What remains of that population is still largely within the reconcentrado huts which outskirt the cities and villages. In some neighborhoods conditions have decidedly improved. In others there is still great destitution. Many of the survivors are as yet but living skeletons. Many of the children have that hideous enlargement of the abdomen which tells the sad tale of starvation. I saw a family at their principal meal, which consisted of a few green bananas. These were spread upon a rough board. They had no table, no crockery, no cooking utensils. I saw a room where eleven widows lived. Up to noon of that day they had eaten nothing. I saw an emaciated young woman, an orphan of about seventeen years, who is paralyzed. She cannot walk or even stand. She lives in a bare, cheerless room which is absolutely without furniture or utensils of any kind excepting her crude cot and her chair. With her thin, bony fingers she tries to weave a straw hat, one per day. She gets eleven cents for it. This is her living. I visited numerous homes where there are many sick and hungry and almost naked people. In some huts we found people of evident culture. In some cases such people have been able to return to their land, build a hut beside the ruins of the old home, and begin life anew. But many are too weak and too poverty-stricken to do so. "Will the Cuban work?" This is a fair question. My own observations lead me to say emphatically that the rural Cuban is a willing worker. Repeatedly I saw Cuban men, women, and boys crowd about the Outlook farmyard by daybreak eager for work. They would plead for it. They would withdraw in sorrow if denied work. Granted it, they labored faithfully day after day. Some, so emaciated and sickly that I wondered at their strength, worked faithfully, though slowly, all day long, One of the saddest sights was that of aged women hoeing in the fields. Under present conditions there is little or no color-line among Cubans. On the Outlook farm one sees working agreeably side by side white men, colored men, black men. The same is true among the groups of women. Outlook Farm Number One is doing a noble work. There is urgent need for an Outlook Farm "No. Two" near Matanzas. A Cuban physician one day surprised me by the following remark: "You know The Ou-look? It is an American paper, very fine.. I love to read it. It is written in such sweet English and good spirit." He sees an occasional copy of the paper at the industrial farm. THE CUBAN INDUSTRIAL RELIEF FUND Joseph and Frederick B., Pittsburg, Pa. .$5,584 13 10 00 25.00 5.00 10 00 5.00 50.00 50.00 L. E. McK., Buffalo, N. Y 1. F. B., Chicago, Ill.. W. P. E., Peterboro', N. H 1 00 From a Friend, Lake Placid, N. Y. 10 00 L. D., Long Beach, Cal. 2.00 S. D. W., Riverhead, N. Y. 1 00 501 5.00 10.00 25.00 A Friend, England H. M., Pine Hill, N. Y The Spectator recently received a note from a lady whom he knew to be full of occupation, and marveled that his busy correspondent spelled out the date, " February the twenty-seventh." He has noticed that this has for some time been the feminine fashion. Had the question been put to the leaders of it, "Why don't you save your time by writing, as formerly, Feb. 27, or, as some more economical spirits do, simply "2/27"? the answer might have been, Why should we save time when we have more of it than we know what to do with?" Whether the innovation be a device of the time-killers, or whether it be an ambitious imitation of the ponderous formality of Presidential proclamations elaborately spelling out their anno domini date, might be an interesting problem for persons of leisure. This social phenomenon set the Spectator to thinking why the art of abbreviation should be in certain points less cultivated in our labor-saving, time-saving modern world than anciently. In a superficial view it would seem to be particularly dear only to the railroads and the colleges, which supply the curious but unversed mind with conundrums in the letterings attached to freight-cars, and to the names of distinguished or favored persons. The irreverent are emboldened thereby to misinterpret "D.D.," for instance, as "Deplorably Dull," but wags sometimes come nearer the truth. The Spectator remembers a friend who pointed him to a locomotive inscribed N. Y. C. & H. R. R. R., with the remark, "That's what defeated Mr. Blaine New York, Cleveland and Hendricks, Rum, Romanism, Rebellion." But the Spectator believes that the Romans of Cicero's time could give points in this matter to any who think they can set a better fashion than that of laboriously writing all phrases in full. Where our correspondent writes, " I am well, and hope you are the same," Cicero wrote "S. V. B. E. E. Q. V.”—a fortunate fashion, indeed, for one who had to scratch his epistle in capitals on waxed tablets. It was a decidedly economical fashion, too, when the thing in hand was a sepulchral inscription in stone, and perhaps not unworthy of suggestion to those who in these days of coffin trusts would lessen funeral expenses. The Roman stone-cutter's bill was considerably reduced when it was the fashion to engrave "Erected in Memory of the Well Deserving " in four letters, "B. M. M. P." So many-sided an art as that of abbreviation requires to be exemplified by whoever treats of it. The Spectator observes a large public demand for it in certain lines, as in editorials, sermons, prayers, as well as an intense private demand in those literary filtering stations known as editors' rooms, the writers to which would do well to remember the old Yale professor's criticism: "Disquisitions are directly as quality and inversely as quantity.' The only visible points where the contrary tendency to elongation is conspicuous are sky-scrapers, suspension bridges, Atlantic liners, and purses. The Spectator has even heard Cæsar's three-word despatch to the Senate announcing his victory, and Descartes's three-word argument for his of abbreviation to one significant vocable own existence, criticised as each capable in that strenuous region of our country -a criticism which may have originated where the demand on an intruder to vacate the premises is compressed into the monosyllable "Git !" "Leave to print " ad libitum is happily restricted, like the franking privilege, to the honorable contributors to the "Congressional Record." The Spectator thinks that all others, whom destined to write either for the types or a natural facility of expression has prethe waste-basket, would do well to practice early and often with the blue pencil. A master with that instrument has sug gested to novices that a good beginning may be made by scratching the word 66 very" at least nine times in ten, as an encouragement to more effective achievements in benevolent self-suppression. In long sermon, that he had no time to make view of a certain preacher's excuse for a a short one, the Spectator deems it probable that an anti-fat regimen of this sort would inure to the effectiveness of many public speakers, lay as well as clerical. in the innocuous desuetude to which an The Spectator finds something pathetic unbelieving world has relegated the manycolumned recommendations at the end of breviation of English spelling. A few the Century Dictionary for a further abjournals of repute have shown a trifling "curtesy" to this high authority, and gone so far as to print "tho" for though, while one or two colleges have sent the Spectator their "catalog," but the literary public seems to regard these rare compliances merely as harmless idiosyncrasies. The Spectator confesses himself baffled to give a rational account of this general repudiation of the wisdom of the British |