the Catholic faith has made on the Spanish people, so that not the waters of many years of suffering and impiety have been able to efface it.

The following passage is so much to the point that we think we do well to transcribe it. The writer, as a Protestant, confounds the obedience rendered to the divine authority of the Church with "a blind submission to priestly authority," and, as an American citizen, identifies the honour paid to rulers and superiors with "loyalty to mere rank and place;" but his testimony to the sterling qualities of the Spanish people is not the less valuable on that account; perhaps only the more so. "The law of progress is on Spain for good or for evil, as it is on the other nations of the earth; and her destiny, like theirs, is in the hand of God, and will be fulfilled. The material resources of her soil and position are as great as those of any people that now occupies its meted portion of the globe. The mass of her inhabitants, and especially of her peasants, has been less changed, and in many respects less corrupted, by the revolutions of the last century, than any of the nations who have pressed her borders, or contended with her power. They are the same race of men who twice drove back the Crescent from the shores of Europe, and twice saved from shipwreck the great cause of Christian civilization. They have shown the same spirit at Saragossa that they showed two thousand years before at Saguntum. They are not a ruined people. And while they preserve the sense of honour, the sincerity, and the contempt for what is sordid and base, that have so long distinguished their national character, they cannot be ruined."-Ticknor's "History of Spanish Literature,” vol. iii. p. 323.

With respect to the custom of dancing before the Blessed Sacrament (alluded to at p. 11), we have received the following additional particulars since the article was in type: "Within the church there is the dance at the Christmas midnight Mass, in the Cathedral of Seville. It is performed by six little choir-boys in the sanctuary, and is called de los Seises. Outside the church you have dancing at any village procession of Corpus Christi, by some graceful lads, castanet in hand, who keep carefully a backward step. Occasionally a few girls will take their place to sing a loa of praise and triumph (in the same position), at intervals in the procession. The "Pange Lingua " is sung by all present, alternating with the dance, until they return to the porch of the church, when the hymn alone is heard. The same thing occurs in the processions of August 15th, September 8th, and December 8th, before the image of the Blessed Virgin, when it is carried beyond the church door with cross, banner, and canopy. On all such occasions a play is acted in the afternoon, in the open air, by the youthful performers, which is succeeded by a general dance."

33

ART. II. THE ABYSSINIAN SCHISM.

1. Ludolfi Historia Ethiopica. Francofurti ad Mænum. 1681.

2. Bruce's Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile. 5 vols. Edinburgh, 1790.

3. The Highlands of Ethiopia. By Major Harris. 3 vols.

Longmans. 1844.

London:

4. Life in Abyssinia. By Mansfield Parkyns. 2 vols. London: J. Murray.

1853.

5. Travels, Researches, and Missionary Labours in Eastern Africa. By the Rev. Dr. Krapf. London: Trübner & Co. 1860. 6. Wanderings among the Falashas of Abyssinia. London: Wertheim, Macintosh, & Hunt. 1862.

By Rev. H. Stern.

AMONG the primitive schisms and heresies which have

existed, age after age, in a sort of petrified state, in the wide regions of the East, the Abyssinian state Church holds a singular place. It deserves our attention on several grounds: for example, as a disfigured relic of the missionary successes of the Catholic Church in the important times of S. Athanasius; as a Christian community still exhibiting that admixture of Judaism which turns us back in thought to the earliest Christian converts and their peculiar difficulties, as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles; as an involuntary witness to the Catholic Church, on the one hand, by its even exaggerated admission of certain practices alleged by Protestants to be only innovations of Rome, and on the other, by the vague and contradictory character of its doctrines, accounted for by its long-continued separation from the supreme authority of Catholic truth; finally, as the religious organization of a barbarous people, who are both physically and politically of much interest to the student of history-in the former respect, as holding, in an ethnological point of view, a sort of midway position between the Caucasian and Negro races; in the latter, as affording the solitary instance in Africa of a degree of civilization that exceeds the savage culture of kingdoms like Dahomey. The Abyssinians probably have been a nation of much higher rank than they are at present: they possess regular institutions modelled on the Christian type, however debased; and they have a literature apparently much resembling that of the earlier mediæval period of Europe, and a learned class possessed of a cultivation not despicable, considering their opportunities. VOL. I.-NO. I. [New Series.]

D

So that we may safely predict at least this much, that if Africa, as many well-informed thinkers believe, is one day to be raised from the degradation in which it has grovelled throughout so many ages, Abyssinia is destined to play some great part in such restoration. If we add to all this, the history of its civil revolutions, highly curious as those of an empire in much the state of the early times of Saxon England; its reconstruction, in our days, we may almost say, whilst we write, by a barbarian conqueror of great ability, Kasai, or Theodorus, whose name scarcely reached Europe amidst the tumult of our own Russian war; the heroic efforts of the Society of Jesus in the seventeenth century to reclaim this fallen Church, then but just becoming known to Europe, which had hitherto heard of it only as the mythical kingdom of Prester John; the repeated exertions of late years made by Mgr. de Jacobis and his illustrious companions for the same object, ending alike in their sufferings and expulsion, as though individuals only, and not whole communities, as a general rule, are permitted the grace of being converted from schism,-if, we say, these fields of inquiry be added to the foregoing, the reader will perceive that the whole subject is not only one of unusual interest, but that, in order to its just treatment, we cannot include in the compass allotted to an article more than a limited portion of the entire discussion. What we propose, therefore, to confine ourselves to at present is the constitution, doctrine, and ceremonies of the Abyssinian Church, premising some account of the early relations of the Abyssinian people to the Jewish nation, and of their conversion in the fourth century.

The sources of our information are chiefly the great work of Ludolf; the modern travellers in Abyssinia, such as Bruce, and, in our own times, Harris, Parkyns, Krapf, and Stern; the letters relating to Mgr. Massaia's and Mgr. de Jacobis' mission in the "Annals of the Propagation of the Faith," and some MS. letters from a native Abyssinian priest, written from the country in the years 1853-55, and kindly communicated to us by the respected ecclesiastic to whom, then at Rome, they were addressed.

Abyssinia, in classical and ecclesiastical language Æthiopia, called by its inhabitants Hábesh, is an extensive region of somewhat undefined limits, stretching from Sennaar and Taka north to beyond the Galla countries on the south, and from the White Nile to the Red Sea east and west. It formed for many ages one empire under sovereigns claiming descent from Menilek, son of the queen of Saba (or Sheba, to use the name more familiar to English literature) by Solomon, and called by the title of Negus. But from the sixteenth century this empire

was broken up by invasion and intestine disorders into three great divisions, Amhàra, Tigrè, and Shoa, each under its own. rulers, though paying an empty deference to the shadowy representative of the line of Solomon, who still remained at Gondar, as he does even now, like the king of Delhi under British dominion till the times of the Indian mutiny. As we said above, the whole or almost the whole of the ancient empire of Abyssinia has lately been reunited by a successful adventurer, who has caused himself to be anointed emperor by the Abuna, or Metropolitan of Abyssinia, of whose office we shall have much to say further on. The legend of the connection of ancient Æthiopia with Judæa is worth relating, however mixed up with fable. It is recorded in the ancient chronicle, entitled Kebir Za Negust, or "Glory of the Kings" (Mr. Parkyns thinks the rendering should rather be "Deeds of the Kings"), annals of which the historical value for early times is certainly not great, since they declare that the world was divided by direct inheritance from Adam into the two great empires of Ittopia and Romia, the former possessing all regions to the south of Jerusalem, the latter all the north. According to this authority, Maqueda, Queen of Ethiopia, having heard from the merchant Tamerin of the wisdom of King Solomon, undertook a visit to him, and remained for a time in the land of Israel. On her return, she bore a son to the Jewish monarch, whom she called Menilek, and who was afterwards sent to be educated at the court of his father. When he had grown up, he came back to Æthiopia, attended by Hebrew nobles from every tribe, and a body of elders under Azarias, son of Zadok, the high-priest, and carrying with him the ark of the covenant and the tables of the law, which he had, by a pious theft, taken out of the temple, the doors of it having been miraculously opened for that purpose. The ark is believed by the Abyssinians to be preserved in the celebrated church of Axum, called Hedar Tsion, under the custody of an officer called Nabrid. The Queen of Saba resigned the throne in favour of her son, and at her death ordained that no female should in future sway the Æthiopian sceptre, and that the princes not succeeding to the throne should be kept prisoners in a mountain fortress, an institution actually observed for ages in Abyssinia, and which has supplied the idea of the beautiful romance of "Rasselas," which, however, gives a picture of splendid captivity little resembling the reality of the duresse to which these unfortunate descendants of royalty.were subjected.

The line of Menilek held the dominion over Ethiopia undisturbed till the year A.D. 960, when it sustained a rude shock from the Jewish population themselves, who had sprung from

the settlers sent forth in the time of Solomon. These people, called Fálashas, had become very powerful, and when the Abyssinian emperors accepted Christianity in the fourth century, they refused to give up their national faith, elected a Hebrew sovereign, and seized the mountain fastnesses of Simien and Bellesa, where for several centuries they abode under kings and queens called invariably Gideon and Judith. In the middle of the tenth century, a princess of this race, called Esther (by the Amhara, Issat, signifying "fire"), a heroine of daring and unscrupulous character, seized the opportunity of an epidemic which had carried off the emperor and weakened Abyssinia, to surprise the rock Damo, where the captive princes of the royal house resided, massacred them all, and proclaimed herself queen. The infant successor to the imperial throne, however, was saved, and escaped into Shoa, with which fragment of the old empire his descendants were contented for many generations, whilst the dominion overthe rest of Abyssinia passed after a time into the hands of a Christian family. In the thirteenth century, the representative of this family was induced by Tekla Haimanot, the most celebrated of the saints of the Abyssinian schism, to resign in favour of the then chief of the house of Menilek, who transmitted the power as well as the title of Negus of Abyssinia to his successors until the disruption of the empire to which we have adverted, and to enter into details of which is beyond the design of the present article. The arrangement made by Tekla Haimanot included stipulations affecting the Church, which we shall afterwards notice. It is called in Abyssinian history, "The Era of Partition." The Fálashas maintained an independent existence under their own princes until the beginning of the seventeenth century, but were at length driven out of their mountain district, and scattered through the Amhara, where they are still found living in their separate villages in the provinces of Dunbea, Quara, Woggera, Tschelga, and Godjam. They form a very remarkable fragment of the Jewish people, and their presence derives the greater attraction from the striking Jewish features which the Christianity of the Abyssinian schism presents.

The conversion of Abyssinia to Christianity, according to a general and credible tradition, commenced in the year 330, and was brought about in the following way: Meropius, a Tyrian merchant, landed on the Ethiopian coast on his way to India, and was murdered by the natives, who made slaves of his two sons, Frumentius and Edesius. These captives were brought to the court of the emperor, where their abilities and discretion gave them a prevailing influence, which enabled them ere long