without civil law or physical force. It laid manacles on mind, and held in subjection by chains stronger than iron. In other lands one might be punished for teaching a slave to read, but the slave himself would be unharmed. He is too valuable. But in India it was the slave himself who was punished. He had no value for anyone. "If a sudra gets by heart any part of the Vedas or the Shastras the magistrates shall put him to death. If a sudra shall presume to read any part of the Vedas or Shastras or Purans to a Brahman, or Kshatriya, or a Vaisya, the magistrates shall heat some bitter oil and pour it into the sudra's mouth; and if a sudra listens to the Vedas or the Shastras, then the oil heated as before shall be poured into his ears, anseez shall be melted together and the orifices of his ears shall be stopped therewith." (Halhed's Gentoo Code.) "Let the same punishment be visited on him who kills a sudra (lowest caste man), as on him who kills a cat, owl, or lizard." (Laws of Manu, page 937.) Janab Khan struck copper coins and ordained that they should pass as silver. But when the taxes were paid into his treasury in this coin he had the same experience as those who issue paper money without gold for its redemption. The Hindus say that the wild lust of Mohammedans, whose very heaven was to be made up of joys the most debauchingly sensual, compelled their women to go veiled, resulting in the zenana system of seclusion in vogue to-day. In a harem of multitudinous wives, seldom visited, it would be human to err. I saw in the grand and gorgeous palace at Delhi a too human provision for them. It consisted of four very small rooms; first a place to leave their elegant palace robes; next a bath for purification of the body; then a mosque for the soul, to fit it for the passage; then an utterly dark cell, the only furniture of which was a crossbeam for suspension. Being cut down from this, the naked body dropped into a well one hundred and twenty-five feet to the level of the river. The euphemistic answer to the inquiry where such a lady of the court might be was, "She has taken a trip down the Jumna River." The men were not sent on that voyage. This, too, is very decidedly human.

The hobbles and clogs on the feet of progress in India have been many. This great empire has always been divided into many

separate, warring kingdoms. The asserted sovereignty of individual states was the ruin of the splendid republic of Greece, and was attempted to be of the more splendid republic of America. The degradation of any one man or class of men is so much subtracted from the sum total of greatness. In India the degradation touched the greatest number and was of the deepest character. In religion men sought out many inventions. As Paul says, they became vain in their reasonings, and their senseless heart was darkened. Professing themselves wise, they became fools. The divine remedy for all in the time of Christ was to give the Roman eagles free flight over three continents and to offer to make every man a free man, a child of God. The victory of the first gave free course for the second to run and be glorified. God duplicates his ways of working because they are the best and perfect ways. The cross of St. George flies from the perpetually radiant Himalayan peaks on flagstaffs, and streams in victory from sea to sea. This gives safety to any men or women missionaries to the Himalaya Mountains to-day and will protect them in Tibet to-morrow. Happy the missionary individual or Church that can go forward when the pillar of cloud and of fire so obviously moves on. There is much land to be possessed.

Henry W. Warren

ART. III.-THE NEW EMPHASIS ON RELIGIOUS

EXPERIENCE.

WHAT are the constituent elements of religious experience? Most Protestant Christians, and especially Methodist Christians, are open to the charge of having unduly emphasized the emotional elements. It is the reaction from that emphasis which makes the old-time revival methods ineffectual in most churches. Men no longer believe that emotional depression plus emotional exhilaration are the normal or necessary states of a soul making the acquaintance of God. Many affirm that glooms and raptures are not only unnecessary but positively unwholesome, and even irrational. But that is the extreme of reaction. Tumultuous emotion, while doubtless unwholesome when mistaken for the deeper verities of the religious life, may prove "the finest of the wheat" when grown in the good soil of holy purpose. The emotional is a permanent element in human nature. It is irrational to say we may look for the transports of human love, the fine flashing joys which come from sweet human intercourse, but must not dream of such results in connection with God. Much of the revelation of the Bible has its essence in the transforming experience of the mighty men of the Bible-by which we do not mean a dry chronicle of events in their lives, nor a catalogue of their opinions nor a record of their actions, but vision, glory, rapture, joyous conviction about God. And when we, as did they, brood upon God's truth and reverently and intently gaze upon his work, and by a visitation of his Spirit the splendor of them breaks in upon us and the soul spreads its wings for eagle flights, the glory is not a bit of hysterics, nor a delusion, but a valid and highly rational spiritual enthusiasm.

Oh, we're sunk enough here, God knows!
But not quite so sunk that moments,

Sure though seldom, are denied us,

When the Spirit's true endowments
Stand out plainly from its false ones.

There are flashes struck from midnights,

There are fire-flames noondays kindle,

and the flames of religious ecstasy may be the "authentic fire" of God.

But the glories of religious feeling have doubtless been overemphasized. Religious rapture is not open to all. That a soul may cultivate its sensitiveness to things divine is not to be doubted. If it will maintain the conditions of humility, purity, and loyalty which the Gospel lays down any soul may have acquaintance with God, but all have not in the same degree of development the power to see the invisible and to estimate the wealth of the treasury to which faith is the key. To insist, therefore, upon any standard of spiritual vision or spiritual emotion as a condition of fellowship with those who believe would be illiteral and absurd. To "become certain of God," to use a phrase of Harnack's, may stand not as a description of certain moods of the soul as a statement of the result of all the experiences of the soul. And we must not be so unwise as to believe that feeling is the only route into the certainty. Clear vision is a most satisfying religious experience. Intellectual emancipations and satisfactions such as Browning hinted at when he said,

The acknowledgment of God in Christ
Accepted by thy reason solves for thee
All questions in the earth and out of it;

the "Vision of Sin" which Dante had, and Tennyson, not because they were acquainted with the sins described but because they could see; that clear perception of sin's nature and results, conviction of its danger, horror at its tragic work, were not these visions religious experience-made possible by knowledge of God? And when quietly we review our conduct, look our tempers in the face, search our motives, even though the process be unemotional is it not religious experience? Or when in the presence of great truth its inner meanings break upon us and the soul exults in clear vision, "This Vision-is it not He?" When thought is disciplined, checked in its riots, brought under control, made the interpreter and courier of the King, is the ordered thought of the mind captive to Christ no part of experience? Emotion may help to give insight, and we need the hours of insight to give us material to fill the hours of patient, sturdy, indomitable purpose. But

we must not confuse the emotion with the vision, nor fancy that the one equals the other.

Nor must we forget purpose as an exceedingly precious bit of experience.

The things in hours of insight willed

May be in hours of gloom fulfilled.

Those choices by which the soul is irrevocably committed to what it sees in its moment of insight are among the richly vital things. In Professor Coe's analysis of answers received from college students to the query "What is permanent in religious experience?" it is shown that seventy-seven per cent found permanent religious experience in things volitional as against seventy-one per cent finding them in things emotional. From which the lesson is plain that "states of the will as well as of the sensibility are included in religious experience." When one makes a holy choice, adopts a lofty ideal, sacrifices self for others, holds persistently to duty though the decisions involve pain in the making and patience in the keeping, such surrenders of the life to righteousness, even though quite unemotional, are veritable glories of experience. The appeal of Jesus to our hearts is not alone as a patient sufferer but as an heroic leader. His life does not merely melt us to tears; it stirs us like a bugle blast. We think not only of the meek humility with which he endured the scorn of men but of the splendid purpose with which he faced the devil and death. The perfect submission of the garden was no more religious than the indomitable will which won the battle in the wilderness and made his face like flint as he looked from Hermon to Calvary. And his cross shows not only meek submission but heroic resolve. To use Dr. Parkhurst's words, "It is at once the tenderest and the sternest thing in all history. It is pathos, but it is flint. It stands for the weeping obstinacy of our God." And when we choose a course which means impoverishment, pain, unsatisfied hungers, as sometimes we must; or a course which provokes misunderstanding, loss of sympathy, and perhaps defamation, and quietly accept the consequences in obedience to our vision of duty, our resolute tread in the chosen path is surely religious experience. There may or