a like experience in the reader. This power to awaken in the soul of the reader the same life which was in the soul of the writer is what gives the Bible its value and makes it in both senses a revelation: an unveiling to the soul of spiritual life because an unveiling of that life within the soul.

Jesus Christ is thus a supreme revelation of God. He had a consciousness of God. It was his supreme, abiding, dominating consciousness. "I am in my

care very little about theories concerning his Person or his metaphysical relation to the Infinite. He is to me the revealing or unveiling of God. To revere him is the highest worship; to do his work in his spirit is the highest life; to love him and be approved by him is the highest ambition.

Yours sincerely,

LYMAN ABBOTT.

He also said that we were to be in them as they were in each other. He reveals or unveils God to us because he reveals or unveils God within us. He enables us to see the picture which before was unseen, to hear the music which before was unheard. God was always within us, speaking to us, but we did not hear him. When we learn from Christ how to listen, then we begin to hear. To believe in Abraham Lincoln is not to believe that he was born at a particular time or place, nor even that he was constitutionally elected President of the United States. It is to believe that what he was trying to do ought to be done, and that he was trying to do it in the right spirit. To believe in Christ is not to believe that he was born at a particular time or place, or in a particular manner. It is not to believe in any theory which the Church or the doctors in the Church may have formed as to his metaphysical relation to the Father. It is to believe in him. It is to see the divine life, the life of the living God in the soul of a living man, revealed or unveiled in him, to see in him a supreme object of reverence, loyalty, and affection. Christ asked the young man, "Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, even God." The young man could not answer the question. He was speechless. He did not know why he had called Christ good. To believe in Christ is to know and to be able to answer that question. It is to say: I know no One so good as thou art; no One who so awakens my reverence and inspires my ambition One whose approval I so desire, whose life I so wish to imitate, whose spirit I so eagerly long to make my own.

This is my personal faith in Christ.

; no

I

Nearly two hundred Viennese gentlemen, lawyers, judges, merchants, physicians, State officials, artists, financiers, are on a visit in a body to this country. They have come, not to study economic or social conditions, not to attend a convention, but to bear to this land a gift of song. It is a gracious errand on which these men, representing circles of learning, wealth, and cultivation in the Austrian capital, are bent; and they have had a cordial welcome. They have sung at the White House and have been received by the President; they have also been welcomed by the Mayors of Philadelphia and New York; and at each place that they have visited popular appreciation of their coming has been evinced by the crowds that have gathered to cheer them, and by the stirring enthusiasm of audiences that have listened to their singing.

Like the concerts in the cities of Buffalo and New York of the Mendelssohn Choir of Toronto during the musical season now practically at an end, the concerts of the Vienna Male Choir have a marked effect upon international relations. Theirs indeed is a mission of peace. No one can hear the moving harmonies of their voices, and share in the friendly salutations exchanged between them and their hearers, without being caught by a feeling of admiration for the great empire they represent. At the close of one of their concerts-and the occasion was typical-as the last note ceased there was an instant of silence, and then a tumult of shouting. The audience rose, and accompanied their cheers with the waving of programmes, hats, handkerchiefs, scarfs,

anything at hand. The choir, held in their places by the mesmerism of this vast greeting, within a moment were cheering and waving their music books in response. There was in this something besides the note of praise for the performance and appreciation of the applause. It was as if hearers and performers alike were merged into one great throng expressing their joy in the art of music. Whoever could be present at such an occasion and remain callous to the sentiment of comradeship with which the whole place was electric has no music in his soul. It made at least one American hunger for more in American life of the spirit that has made Vienna the city of Franz Schubert, Johann Strauss, and Johannes Brahms. hearing that music, it would take him a full month, he is sure, and a hard, deliberate exercise of will to open his mind to the least feeling of enmity toward the peoples of Austria-Hungary. For an instant, at least, he himself tasted the flavor of Austrian patriotism.

After

In

That is one effect of the tour of this choral society; and it has not been confined to this country. The society has fostered in itself the traveling habit. the nearly sixty four years of its existence the Vienna Male Choir has made sixty-two trips. It has visited Italy, Turkey, Greece, Egypt, France, England, Germany, Belgium. Wherever it has gone it must have implanted, not merely good feeling for its native land, but even affection. It cannot have been otherwise. Of its musical effect what can one say? What, indeed, shall one choose to leave unsaid? To hear it sing the Schumann ritornelle, "Die Rose, Stand," is to have a new experience, not only of the tonal coloring of male voices, but also of the emotional depths of music; to hear it sing the Spielmannslied by Richard Heuberger, the assistant conductor, is to wonder if any woman could resist if she were wooed in such tones; to hear it sing German folk songs, or the equally melodious if less naïve dance music of Johann Strauss, is to be reassured that the sway of Richard Strauss and the music of metaphysics is not universal.

The most distinctive trait, however,

of the Vienna Male Choir, or, as its German name is, Der Wiener MännerGesang-Verein, is its splendid amateur spirit. Too much has the word amateur implied the amateurish. Here is a society whose musical ability it would be hopeless for any professional singers to attempt to surpass; yet it receives not a cent for its services-not even for the payment of its expenses. All the receipts at its concerts go to charity. We know what is meant by a standard for amateur sport; the Vienna Male Choir has established the loftiest standard of amateur art.

For its trip to America the society chartered an ocean steamship for what happened to be the vessel's maiden voyage. The expenses of the journey, we are informed, are paid by some of the wealthier members of the society. Founded in 1843, it has maintained this spirit from the beginning. In Vienna it has built a marble monument to the greatest native composer of the cityFranz Schubert. It has established the Schubert Medal,

66 which," as a historical sketch of the society says, "is given from time to time to persons and corporations that have won distinguished merit in the encouragement of male choral music." It is constantly called upon to aid in municipal festivities and in charitable projects. Every candidate for membership in the society must first pass a rigorous examination in singing and in musical ability; his social standing must be vouched for by two members; he is then subjected to vote. Its high character is thus well guarded. Among its honorary members have been Mendelssohn, Liszt, Wagner, Bruckner, Johann Strauss, and Brahms. The present musical director is Eduard Kremser. The assistant director, Richard Heuberger, is a professor in the Conservatory of Vienna. It is not surprising that such an organization should have received honors at the hands of the Emperor of Austria and the German Emperor, and that it has received almost unqualified praise from critics in many lands.

Is it too much to hope that we Americans shall some day take time from our problems in engineering, in industry, in self-government, to cultivate such disinterested love for art?

The Spectator

Guide-books contain many valuable though uninteresting facts, but they often fail to prepare one for the essential features of a country. Baedeker has a great deal to say about Normandy; but though the Spectator had plodded through interminable pages, he was not prepared for the two striking elements of Norman life which must impress the most casual looker out of a car window-apples and washing. It is impossible that every dweller in Normandy should take in washing. It must be their own washing. Furthermore, it must be always washday somewhere in the world, to paraphrase the poet. Yet Normandy seems to have incredibly more than its share. From town to town, perched on picturesque hills rising beside quick-flowing rivers, the rural railways run through miles and miles and more miles of apple orchards and washing-day. The Norman housewife does not seem to have so much as heard of a clothes-line. If she has a fence, she uses that for the larger things, but it is entirely inadequate even for them. The sheets are usually put on the fence as far as it will hold them up, and then about two feet of them trail floppily out on the ground. Smaller articles are spread on the bushes, the hedges, the well-curb, or the lower branches of the nearest apple-tree. As rural Normandy is full of cows, pigs, chickens, goats, cats, and children, it would seem as if the last state of that laundry must be worse than the first. Perhaps that is why they have to keep on washing steadily day after day. As for the apple orchards, they cover the land. The trees are small and scraggly, the apples small and wormy. The apple harvest was on in full swing when the Spectator traveled through the land of William the Conqueror; and methods did not appear to have changed since that hero's day.

The Norman farmer and his family first go out and knock the fruit down with clubs. Many of the orchards were freshly plowed, and the apples lay heaped in the furrows, which a night's rain had filled with water. When they have lain there from one to three days, they are

loaded with a shovel into the high wooden Normandy carts without springs, and are driven to market or to the railway. Every freight train that the Spectator saw had numberless cars, open, roofless, and filled with apples, small, hard, and resistant-looking-for the survival of the fittest has naturally cultivated these necessary qualities. The end toward which they travel is the cider-press; and any one who has drunk Norman cider can testify how bad that end is. The Norman drinks cider as the rest of France drinks its vin ordinaire. Emerson has said that "we gain the strength of the enemy we resist," and that may be why the Norman, nurtured on such a drink, and resisting its effects, has conquered wherever he has gone. Certainly no stranger drinks it twice, and the acid rottenness of its bouquet is a thing not to be forgotten.

A Nor

That it does not injure the indigenous inhabitant, however, is proved by the crowds that throng the Norman marketplaces. The Spectator had the good luck to follow up market day through the whole district from Mont St. Michel to Rouen. In Coutances the market day is Thursday; in St. Lô, Friday; in Bayeux, Saturday. It is thus arranged so that peddlers and exhibitors of stock can go on from one town to another, and the traveler shares the benefit of this continuous performance. mandy market is like a county fair, a rummage sale, and a farmer's institute mixed up together under the shadow of a Gothic cathedral. The cathedral is always the middle of things in a Norman town. Long before the Spectator's train reached St. Lô, the twin spires of Notre Dame, high on the hill above the river Vire, announced the ancient town; and when the cars stopped at the little station, every man, woman, and child on board started off at once up the steps of the Place Gambetta toward the cathedral square.

Needless to say that the Spectator climbed the steps too, followed by a small but indefatigable cripple who had marked him for his own. Right in face, across the wide square, the great gray

Gothic front of the cathedral towered up, massive, splendid, grotesquely and richly carved; its portals open, its aisles echoing with emptiness. A few women and children had slipped in from market to pray. One man in a blue blouse was among them-but only one. Who would be in the cathedral on a day when so much was going on outside in the bright autumn air? Even the cripple was impatient to be out in the market-place, and insisted that there was nothing to see in the big church--which was disappointingly true, for the old stained glass was too much injured to be impressive, and a profusion of whitewash was the prevailing note of the interior.

But the market-place--there was a picture! Old gabled houses framed in the rest of the square, and steps of all sorts led up to it from winding side streets all around. Brown, broad-faced peasant women, in queer flat white caps with starched visors, were selling everything imaginable in improvised booths, with umbrellas or canvas awnings over them. They and the cripple were alike pained and astonished to find that the Spectator did not care to buy halters, or coffee-pots with three feet, or crockery, or brass pots, or postals, or silver jewelry, or candy in jars, or lamp-shades, or clothes, or comforters, or candles for the church, or rope, or bird-cages, or galvanized ware, or artificial flowers. As for the Spectator, he sympathized with Diogenes, who, in a like situation in the market-place at Athens, philosophically remarked, "Thank the gods that there are so many things that Diogenes does not need !" Around the fountain were the sellers of fruit and vegetables, sitting behind great bunches of carrots, cut melons in slices, pumpkins, lettuce, pears and apples and grapes. Pans of pears baked in pastry were evidently a local delicacy, and roast chestnuts smoked at every turn. Women carrying heavy baskets slung by a strap of leather came and went, and other women carried steaming coffee-pots and hot lunches across the market-place to men too busy to leave carts and bargaining.

It was a picturesque place, but it was nothing-absolutely nothing-to the crowning attraction of St. Lô that day, the "little pig market." The Spectator happened on that after he had choked off the crippled guide, so to speak, on hot chestnuts, and escaped down the little street along the cathedral wall, where a beautiful old stone pulpit looks out over the pavements, and every variety of choice Gothic gargoyle grins on the passer-by. Something was happening in the square beyond and behind, up the hill, that sounded like a bagpipe competition. But when the Spectator got there it was not Highlanders and kilts that he saw, but dozens and dozens of little white pigs in little crates filled with straw, ranged in rows up one side of a tremendous "Champ de Mars," big enough for a regiment to maneuver in. On the far side were scores of high carts, with donkeys tethered beside them; down the middle ran a market for barrel-hoops for hogsheads, six in a bunch, in illimitable quantities. But the pig market was the main feature. Five or six in a crate, all white, all plump, all pink of nose and skin, the piglings lay cuddled together, heads toward the middle, sweetly sleeping whenever they had a spare moment from being bought and sold. But this was seldom. Every moment, up and down the long rows of crates, numberless buyers lifted them up, judicially, by tail and front leg, "hefted" them, and considered their points. Every pig protested loudly-whence the bagpipe obligatoand if dropped back again, unbought, gave another wail before cuddling down. But the crescendo came when, bought and paid for, this pigling and that were borne off to the buyer's cart. Then, indeed, the innocent, torn from his companions, thought that his last hour had come, and started on his swan-song. When a dozen of them were trying for high C at once, and the donkeys on the other side responding to the top of their ability, the noise of that field of Mars was equal to several pitched battles; and the Spectator will never, to the last hour of his life, forget that humorous and operatic marché au petits porcs in the vast sunny square of St. Lô.

T

HE Japanese came to America by our own procurement. At whose instance the policy of aggressive friendship toward Japan was first adopted by the Government of the United States does not clearly appear. There had been trouble over the treatment of shipwrecked sailors of American whaling vessels, and the historic letter borne by Commodore Perry in 1853 had its first draft at the hands of Daniel Webster in May, 1851, and was recast by his successor, Edward Everett, in November, 1852. In the third annual Message of President Fillmore to Congress, dated December 6, 1852, a reference is made to the extension of our settlements on the shores of the Pacific, and to the new direction which had been imparted to our commerce on that ocean. A direct and rapidly increasing intercourse had sprung up with eastern Asia. The waters of the northern Pacific, even into the Arctic Sea, had of late years been frequented by our whalemen. The application of steam to the general purposes of navigation was becoming daily more common, and made it desirable to obtain fuel and other necessary supplies at convenient points on the route between Asia and our Pacific shores. Then followed this notable passage of the Message: "Our unfortunate countrymen who from time to time suffer shipwreck on the coasts of the eastern seas are entitled to protection. Besides these specific objects, the general prosperity of our States on the Pacific requires that an attempt should be made to open the · opposite regions of Asia to a mutually beneficial intercourse. It is obvious that this attempt could be made by no power to so great advantage as by the United States, whose constitutional system excludes every idea of distant colonial dependencies. I have accordingly been led to order an appropriate naval force to Japan, under the command of a discreet and intelligent officer of the high

est rank known to our service. He is instructed to endeavor to obtain from the government of that country some relaxation of the inhospitable and antisocial system which it has pursued for about two centuries. He has been directed particularly to remonstrate in the strongest language against the cruel treatment to which our shipwrecked mariners have often been subjected, and to insist that they shall be treated with humanity.”

The President's letter, for whose conveyance a fleet of six vessels was provided, was incased in a rosewood box bound with gold, and was addressed "To His Imperial Majesty the Emperor of Japan." It was signed "Your good friend, Millard Fillmore.'

But it happened that the Emperor of Japan had been condemned for some two hundred and fifty years to live in dignified retirement, and that the real ruler of Japan was the master of three hundred military clans, known as the Shogun. The Shogun held his court at Yedo; the Emperor passed a life of effeminate and somewhat poetic luxury at Kioto. Nevertheless, the Emperor in his sacrosanct isolation remained the visible embodiment of the State, and by 1853 a movement was fairly under way to restore to the Imperial House the power of which it had been bereft.

He who would understand the modern Japanese must study, from such materials as are available, the course of their national life in the two hundred and fifty years of peace that followed the battle of Sikigahara, at which the lords of the feudal clans met their final defeat and were compelled to accept the rule of the victor, Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the Shogunate. It is certain that the evolution from the old to the new was not per saltum, but, like most other historic processes, a slow and gradual one. The Shogunate was already doomed when Commodore Perry's black ships