ent system of manufacturing our own publications. All this would have gone into the hands of outside parties who did our work. The Church now owns the valuable plants which would otherwise have become the property of jobbers.

With this review of the past it perhaps ought not to occasion surprise that the last General Conference advised that special services be held throughout the Church during the year, in commemoration of the success with which Providence had crowned the history of the Methodist Book Concern during the one hundred years of its existence. The following is the text containing the action of that body:

Whereas, The Book Concern of the Methodist Episcopal Church will complete its Centennial year in 1889; and,

Whereas, God has favored this agency of the Church with wonderful success, crowning the century with a quadrennial term of unprecedented prosperity, enabling the Agents to make a dividend and thank-offering of $100,000 for the Centennial year; therefore,

Resolved, 1. That the year 1889 be observed with such special services for thanksgiving to God for the prosperity vouchsafed to this oldest institution of the Church as shall inaugurate a new epoch in the history of the Book Concern, and insure from our people a more intelligent and hearty co-operation in promoting our publishing interests; and to this end let every pastor preach during the month of January at least one sermon appropriate to this anniversary, embracing the following points:

(a) The origin and growth of our publishing houses.

(b) Their relation to the spread of Methodism and practical Christianity.

(c) Their relation to the support of our disabled ministers, their dependent widows and children.

2. At each Annual Conference during the year let an evening be set apart for the observance of the Centennial of the Book Concern, with addresses from the Agents and others. Let the Bishops, as far as possible, give special encouragement to these anniversary exercises by their presence and exhortations.

3. Let the Presiding Elders provide for anniversary exercises at their District Conferences, devoting at least one session to this subject.

4. Let our Church periodicals of every grade join to promote the success of this jubilee.

5. Let the people every-where unite to make this a glad year for the worthy claimants upon the Book Concern by purchasing from our houses every needed supply of books, periodicals, and Sunday-school supplies.

6. To stimulate all to hearty co-operation and enthusiastic 15-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. V.

effort let it be understood that the largest per cent. of the net profits consistent with the demands. of the business shall be distributed as dividends to the Annual Conferences during the year 1890 for the benefit of the claimants on this fund.

Such services as are contemplated by this action would prove of incalculable benefit to the Church and largely increase the business of the Book Concern, with whose operations the people would become familiar.

It would seem at first view that the owners of publishing houses would need no arguments to convince them that in all their relations to the Church as pastors, they should aid in maintaining such houses by giving to them their first and most hearty patronage. The additional fact that these houses are maintained for the same purpose that the ministry is sustained by the people, should deepen the sense of obligation.

Although it is not the highest motive, yet it is not a dishonorable one, that would lead our ministers to provide for their necessities when sickness, or the infirmities of old age, shall have laid them aside from active duties.

The question of cheapness is a secondary one. Cheapness should not be a more prominent element in regard to books and papers than in regard to the pulpit. The services of the centennial year will undoubtedly turn the attention of the Church to all these important questions, and promote our publishing

interests.

During the history of the Book Concern committees have been appointed to supervise the work of the Agents. In the early periods these committees were appointed by Conferences in the immediate vicinity. Since 1848 the General Conference has appointed a General Book Committee from the different portions of the Church. Since 1872 local committees of three laymen, who form part of the General Committee, have had special supervision of the business in New York and Cincinnati, and the Church is largely indebted to these men for the important, though gratuitous, services which they have rendered.

For some years past those in charge at New York have felt the need of a building specially adapted to the publishing business. A valuable house was purchased under the authority of the General Conference in 1869, known as 805 Broadway. This elegant building was erected for a dry-goods store, and it was

found impracticable to adapt it to the peculiar demands of a publishing house. Ever since the purchase, the larger part of it has been leased to the original owner for mercantile purposes. For ten years past, our retail store has occupied the basement; the manufacturing business has been carried on in the old factory at 200 Mulberry Street, one mile and a half away, and while this factory was quite adequate to our work fifty years ago it is neither large enough for our present demands nor adapted to the improved machinery of modern times. Where a large number of papers are published, the editors should have their offices in the same building. Hence, at the request of the Agents, the Book Committee authorized the sale of both properties, then free from debt, and the erection of a building in connection with the Missionary Society, to which all the business and offices should be transferred. No more appropriate time could be selected for these changes than the Centennial year of the Book Concern. In pursuance of this plan, a solid building of granite, brick, and iron will be opened in New York during the year, which it is hoped will stand in all its symmetry and beauty for the hundred years to come. Into this building it is proposed to transfer all the manufactur ing business and offices of that house. With the increasing facilities which will then be furnished the largest demands can be met both in quantity and quality for long years to come. From its presses shall be borne day after day a literature pure, elevating, and saving to every part of this earth.

As we now place this record upon the pages of the Methodist Review, we are well assured that the review of the coming hundred years from the height of the second centennial year of the Methodist Book Concern will be one of satisfaction to the Meth. odist Episcopal Church which shall then cover the land. Our devout prayer is that the business of the Book Concern may be so conducted during the next hundred years that the blessing of God may rest upon it. Then shall it fulfill its important mission in educating, elevating, and saving this world.

S. Hunt

ART. V. THE ROYAL GIFT OF IERMAK, THE ROBBER, TO CZAR IVAN GROSNUI.

THE reign of Ivan Grosnui (1533-1584), the Awful One, commemorated in the bylinas or ballads of his people, and in the descriptive music of Rubenstein, stands alone in history for inventive cruelty and for wide devastation. In these achievements but two other characters can compare with him; both of them linked with his lineage and race-Tamerlane and Genghis, devastators whose wandering careers, filled with wanton destruction, cannot be dignified by the name of reigns, although their influence over the wild hordes of northern Asia has impressed itself with permanence on the customs and traditional laws of these latter. But as compared with any Asiatic or Roman throned tyrant, bearing rule over a country of defined boundaries, Ivan, the autocrat, sovereign over the second largest empire of the globe, has a horrible preeminence as the destroyer of his "children," according to the Russian conception of the relation of the subject to the sovereign-the powerful maniac endowed with a Caucasian brain, and a moral nature perverted to the pattern of that of the Tartar ancestors of his mother; a being to whose eyes nothing was so beautiful as the convulsive writhings of his victims, and whose very fingers, dark and contorted, took on the shapes of the pincers and prods with whose use upon living, quivering flesh, in his hours of relaxation, he delighted to divert himself.

Yet in the promise of his youth-for, like most of his kind, the opening of his career was hopeful of strength and thought applied to beneficent ends, even as Lucifer was beautiful and dutiful, before overcome by his monstrous self-exaltation-this powerful, appalling figure in the declining dynasty of Rurik appears as a high-hearted paladin of Christ, a crusader for the orthodox faith, incorporating into his empire the great khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, putting to flight the armies of aliens, "infidèls"--pausing, too, to weep at the spectacle of their dead laid low by the hard necessities of war-and causing the Moslem powers to tremble from the Bolor-Tagh, the easternmost mountains of Turkestan, to the Straits of Gibraltar.

Inspired by these achievements, prodigious for a young mon

arch of thirty-two, and supported by an army ready to follow him wherever he chose to lead, Ivan determined on the conquest of the Baltic provinces of Livonia, Esthonia, and their outlying regions to the east and south; an undertaking that cost him much strenuous and but transiently effective toil, that helped woefully to develop the savagery of his character, and that laid a burden of grief upon himself, a hard strain of men and money upon the empire, down to his latest day. The elec tion of the Transylvanian, Stephen Batory, to the throne of Poland-a man destined to be a thorn in the side of Russiathe imbroglio of Swedes, Danes, and Poles in the thirty years' contest embittered the tsar's later years, and were indirectly the cause of the tragic finale of his atrocities-the murder by his own hand of his son, the tsarévitch: the one being, in all the Russian world, to whom with any hope or trust he could have transmitted his conceptions for the future of the autocracy he had laid deeply on foundations of death, and had cemented with the blood of some sixty thousand of his patient, passive people.

In these closing years of gloom, when, shut in the Kremlin, he feared to go out with his army, and feared its inactivity, when nearly every house in his capital mourned for the bright and the brave laid low by the Opritchniki, the infamous elected guard of the sovereign, when a miasma of melancholy brooded over the empire, when its industries languished and its people went as mourners about the streets, strange tidings were brought from the dim, mysterious East, the land of the Ougre and the Hun, the lands of Ob and Konda, whose names Vasili, son of Ivan Veliki the Great, had wrought into his many-worded czarinian title; tidings that quickened the pulses of the wanderloving Great Russian of the north, and put heart into the suffering Muscovites; tidings that were passed from lip to lip by merchant and burlak along the "roads that run," the great river-roads of the Volga and the Dneiper, and that awoke a fresh light in the keen eyes of the Kazak sentinels guarding his military-monastic outlooks on the steppes of the Ukraine.

These tidings, vague at first, but increasingly assured as they were reported from the messengers who bore them, reported a wondrous offset to the losses of the West: the discovery, the occupation of a north-eastern new world; a half continent