"O Lord, if I have not wrought sincerity in my soul, if my word cometh not from Thee, smite me in this moment with Thy thunder, and let the fires of Thy wrath consume me."

In the awful silence of that moment he stood motionless, when suddenly a beam of golden light, striking on the pale and furrowed. face, lit it up as with a celestial halo. "Behold the answer," said each man in his heart and many with their lips. Then, with the yearning solicitude of a father for his children about to be orphaned, he stretched out his wasted hand, and, in a voice in which tears trembled, pronounced the benediction on the people" Benedictione perpetua, benedicat vos, Pater Eternus."

But the curse of Rome was a terror to all weaker souls than that of the intrepid martyr. The Pope threatened, unless Savonarola were silenced or imprisoned, to lay the whole city of Florence under an interdict, which should cut it off from all intercourse with the world, and render its merchants and citizens liable to the confiscation of their goods. That argument conquered. The voice through which God spoke to Europe was soon si

lenced forever.

Despairing of the reform of the Church by the Pope, Savonarola had written a letter to Charles VIII, urging the convocation of a General Council for that purpose. This letter was intercepted by fraud and sent to the vindictive Borgia, who thereupon launched new fulminations against his victim. These new terrors influenced the magis. trates of Florence to abandon the prior to his impending fate, and at last to become the instruments of his ruin.

For the last time Savonarola addressed in words of cheer and counsel the brethren of San Marco. As they were assembled for evening prayers, sounds of tumult were

heard without, and soon a mob of armed men assailed the gates. Some thirty monks barricaded the doors and fought in their long white robes as bravely for their beloved prior as ever Knight Templar for the tomb of Christ. "Let me go and give myself up," he said, seeking to quell the strife. "I am the sole cause of this myself." abandon us," they cried. be torn to pieces, and shall become of us?" Yielding to their entreaties, he summoned them to the choir that they might seek God in prayer.

"Do not "You will then what

Meanwhile the frantic mob set fire to the doors, scaled the walls and burst into the choir. The civic guards soon entered and led away, as prisoners, Savonarola and his intrepid friend, Fra Dominico. A brutal mob, made up of the very dregs of the city, clamoured for his blood and wreaked their rage upon their unresisting victim. He was kicked, smitten, spat upon, and bitterly reviled. "This is the true light," cried a low ruffian, as he thrust a flaring torch in his face. Other wretches buffeted him with their fists, and jeered, like another mob in the presence of another Victim, "Prophesy who it is that smote thee." But, like the Master whom he served, who, when He was buffeted answered not, the patient confessor endured with meekness the very bitterness of human rage and hate. He was thrust into prison, and was soon brought to trial. Charles VIII. died, and all hope of General Council or of succour for Savonarola was at an end. The Pope and his creatures had their victim in their power.

"During many days," says the histor an of the event, "the prior was subjected to alternate examination and torture. He was drawn up from the ground by ropes knotted round his arms, and then suddenly let down with a jerk, which wrenched all the muscles of his sensitive frame. Fire, too, was at times put under his feet. How often torture was applied to him we

have no means of learning. One witness (Violi) declares that he had seen him, in one day, hoisted by the rope no fewer than fourteen times!"

In his lonely cell, in the intervals of his torture, the brave soul turned from the strife of tongues to commune with God. With his mutilated hand he wrote his meditations, which are still extant, on the thirtyfirst and fifty-first Psalms. "I shall place my hope on the Lord," he said, "and before long, I shall be set free from all tribulation."

His doom had long been decreed. Alexander Borgia had declared that Savonarola should be put to death even though he were John the Baptist. Sentence of death was therefore pronounced upon him and on his two devoted friends, Fra Dominico and Fra Salvestro.

On the morning of the 23rd May, 1498, after early communion in the prison, the destined victims walked together to the place of doom in the great square of the ordeal and of the "Bonfire of Vanities." The Pope's commissioner stripped off their gowns and pronounced the last anathema: "I separate you from the Church militant and triumphant." "That," replied with a calm, clear voice, the hero soul of Savonarola, "is beyond your power." A vast mob surged around the scaffold and the martyr pyre, but he seemed to see them not. With unfaltering step and with a rapt smile upon his pale, worn face, he went to his death. His last words were, like those of his Lord and Master and of the proto-martyr, "Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commit my spirit." His comrades in life and in death with equal dignity met their fate. They were first hanged till dead and then burned to ashes. As the torch was applied, writes the biographer, " from the storied Piazza, the saddest and most suicidal burning' that Florence had ever witnessed sent up its flame and smoke into the bright heaven of that May morning. On

porary, "his ashes were carefully gathered and thrown into the Arno."

In the narrow cell at San Marco, in which Savonarola wept and watched and prayed, hangs a contemporary painting of this tragic scene, and by its side a portrait of the martyr monk with his keen dark eyes, his eagle visage, his pale cheek, and his patient thought-worn brow. In a case beneath are his vestments, his crucifix, rosary, Bible and MS. sermons. As we gaze on these relics, thought and feeling overleap the intervening centuries, and we seem brought into living

contact with the hero-soul, who counted not his life dear unto him for the testimony of Jesus.

The ungrateful city which exiled or slew her greatest sons, Dante and Savonarola, was overtaken by a swift Nemesis. Soon the Medici returned in power, and long ruled it with an iron hand. When Rome, the proud city of the Seven Hills, "that was eternal named," was besieged, taken and sacked by a foreign army, the prophetic words. of the great prior were remembered. Florence for a time again drove the Medician tyrants from power. Again "the Council elected, and proclaimed Christ the King of Florence, and the famous cry, Viva Gesu Christo Nostro Re,' was once more the watchword of the city." But despotism was again installed.

on the ruins of freedom, "and for long centuries the light of Florence was extinguished."

In fitting words a recent biographer of the great Reformer thus concludes his fascinating memorials of his life:

"It seemed like the acting of a piece of historical justice when, nearly four hundred years after the martyrdom of the prior, the late King Victor Immanuel opened the first parliament of a united Italy in the city of Florence, and in the venerable hall of the Consiglio Maggiore. The representative assembly, which gathered in the hall of Savonarola's Great Council, bridged over centuries of darkness and misrule, connecting the aspirations of a hardly-won freedom in the present with those of a distant and glorious past, and secured permanently, let us hope, for the whole of Italy the precious liberties for which the Monk of San Marco died."

THE headline of this article is the title of a "Manual of Missions," by W. Johnson, B.A., Missionary of the London Missionary Society in Calcutta for thirty-one years. Such a writer expressing his convictions, detailing his experiences, and making his suggestions, is certainly not open to Lord Dufferin's criticism of "the intelligent traveller who has come to India for three months with the intention of writing an encyclopædic work on its government and people, and who is therefore able to speak in a spirit of infallibility denied to us lesser men." Mr. Johnson's long and close contact with the Indian peoples, as well as his extensive experience in missionary work among them, makes him a safe guide in any attempt on our part to become more perfectly acquainted

with the vastness, complexity and difficulty of the Church's problem in that strange land. It is proposed, in this paper, to follow the leadership of this veteran, and so far as our limits will allow he shall speak for himself.

The field open for our inspection, if not the world, is a large fraction of its habitable surface, and a larger fraction of its human masses. If Russia be excepted, the continent of Europe will about cover the area of the Indian Empire. The last census gives 280,000,000 as its population. Two religio-political communitiesthe Hindus, numbering 200,000,000, and the Mohammedans, 50,000,000include the larger part of the people. Burmah, recently annexed, gives 10,000,000, who are Buddhists in religion and Mongolian in race.

These are in their turn divided and subdivided into nationalities distinct and different from each other in race, language, customs, character and civilization. The divergence here is as great as is to be found in the climate of the country, as it varies from the sweltering heat of the southern plains to the cool and bracing atmosphere of the northern mountains. Both ends of the scale of civilization are in India. Perhaps nowhere else will one be in so good a position to study the various stages of the development of the human animal, from the naked and savage hill-man, with his stone hatchet and arrow-heads, his headhunting and polyandrous habits, to the Europeanized native gentleman, polished, refined, literary, and of advanced political ideas. This is upon the surface every where visible.

There is another India, that "of hoary superstitions and errors, of deep prejudices, of ancient traditions, of long transmitted antipathies. Into this deeper and darker India the missionary has to descend, to familiarize himself with it, and there to wrestle against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world,