people who cannot go to a university centre for study, while it started in England, and while the great need which exists in England was to a large extent met by our system of free high schools and public schools in America, still answers so directly to the conception of Christian helpfulness which marks American life, that its results in our own land have been wonderfully broad, wide, and deep, and the work takes on proportions here which its founders in England never contemplated.

So the idea of the University Settlement among the poorest in our cities, originating in the Christian fervor of Arnold Toynbee, found immediate answer in the heart and the life of the noblest and most aspiring of the young men and young women of our universities and colleges. The fine old legend of "noblesse oblige" is recognized in the world of intellect; and all the richest blessings that attended the recognition of this law of God where it reached the heart of one nobly born are found now as the noblest born of the sons and daughters of God among us take up the blessed law of service, and give their lives to the enlightening and the lifting up of those sodden masses of humanity that render terrible the worst districts of our larger cities.

As these conceptions grow upon the Christian consciousness of the land, God's own promise is fulfilled, "I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams, and on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit."

The young in our churches feel the spirit of loyalty to Christ, of brotherhood with their fellows, and of desire to serve Him to whom they owe all, while the "dew of their youth" is still on them; and the Christian Endeavor movement, latest and most marvellous of Christian organizations, girdles the globe with its millions of praying and working young Christians.

Christian women feel the accursed inroad of the saloon upon the home; and combining to defend the sacred ties of home and to rescue husbands, brothers, and sons, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, binding together women of all nations, is the most significant outgrowth of the new revelation of Christian womanhood.

There springs up a deep sense of pity and of spiritual yearning

for the millions who still sit in darkness. The movement known as the Students' Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions stirs the centres of higher learning, and binds together in ties of prayer and of deepened interest in foreign missions ten thousand young men and women who offer themselves for the work of holding up the cross of Christ in the dark places of the world.

CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM-THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST ON EARTH.

The Christians thus stirred for conquest in foreign missions, recognize afresh their duty to those who are nearest to them but are without God and without hope in the world. Christian socialism becomes a stronger power. The Christian church faces as never before its duty to make itself felt day by day in the relations of trade and commerce as a living power for righteousness, and as a helpful, healing influence in the sin-sick life of

men.

Arbitration, to put an end to international strife; arbitration, rather than strikes and lockouts, to settle differences between employer and employed; the Christian effort to promote profitsharing, that the godless law of cutthroat competition in business may give way to the law of fairness and kindness, in profit-sharing; the systematic effort upon the part of thousands of conscientious Christian business-men and Christian ministers to aid in the bringing in of the new and better social and commercial life, through the progressive steps of arbitration, profit-sharing, and co-operation;-by all these influences in the rapidly accelerated life of the nineteenth century here on this western continent, we see that the vision of the living Christ is more and more a power in the lives of men.

THE CLEARER VISION OF CHRIST IS THE SOURCE OF POWER.

Most marvellously has the thought of the world been centred on Christ in these last years. Attempted destructive criticism. has only made clearer the historic reality and the wonderful ethical power of the Christ whom the Gospels declare to us. The highest ideals of advancing civilization culminate in Jesus Christ. When representatives of other systems in the Parliament of Religions declare their noblest tenets, we rejoice in whatever of truth they hold, but do we not see more clearly than ever before

the ground of our loyal confidence that what all their systems lack is richly given in the life of Jesus Christ "in whom dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily"? "He who was the mightiest among the holy and the holiest among the mighty, with his pierced hand has lifted the gates of empires from their hinges, turned the course of history from its channel, and still rules the ages."

As the matchless perfection of his life is revealed, we see a standard such as philosophy, without the living example of God made man, was powerless to attain. The mysterious, all-subduing power of holy love is in this living ideal. Even the mad cry of the anarchists for a new order of things is met and silenced, as the brotherhood of mankind is revealed in Christ who is "the desire of the nations" even when they know not what they need. May God grant that in the religious life of the continent whose discovery, in the fulness of God's time and for the working out of God's purposes, we celebrate, the image of Christ may be more clearly seen, that he who is lifted up may draw all men to him!

THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF PROT

ESTANT CHRISTENDOM.

THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF AUSTRALASIA.

BY REV. H. B. MACARTNEY, M.A., INCUMBENT OF ST. MARY'S, CAULFIELD, VICTORIA.

As regards discovery, Australia is the youngest continent in the world, but as regards size, it contains 3,100,000 square miles when taken together with Tasmania and New Zealand. In other words, it is only smaller than Europe by 680,000 square miles, and is larger than the United States, exclusive of Alaska, by 47,000 square miles. But although we thus occupy one third of the entire area of British dominion, our population is under four millions.

I. If judged by our MORALITY, we must be to a great extent an irreligious people. The love of money, with gambling, "statutes that are not good," intemperance, secret forms of vice, and the love of pleasure, prevail to a frightful extent.

Wild speculations and the issue by men of repute of fraudulent balance-sheets have only very recently covered us with dishonor. The "Land Boom" of 1888 will long be remembered in Victoria. In that year the wave of folly in making haste to be rich rose to its highest point, and has since broken into the foam of personal ruin and commercial disaster. The population of Melbourne is now about half a million, but 73 per cent of this total is the increase of but the last ten years. The country people forsook the soil in their eagerness to mingle in the many excitements and gayeties of the town. I need hardly say that the overcrowding of a great city with such ends in view had a most ungodly tendency. The congregations inland decreased in numbers, while the city churches gained little or nothing.

The Victoria Parliament has, moreover, been lately guilty of one great act of immorality in enacting a new law of divorce.

Whereas the divine law specifies one sin, and one only, as a ground for sundering man and wife, the new Act makes it possible to separate them on other grounds, such as ill-treatment and wilful desertion. It was sorrow enough that some years previously marriage with a deceased wife's sister was legalized, thus denying the "one-flesh" relationship of married persons; but this is infinitely worse. The effect has been, that whereas in 1881 there were altogether only nineteen divorced persons in Victoria, there were 196 in 1891, though the Act was only then in its infancy. The morals of our people are now being threatened from quite another quarter. Opium, with which England so long cursed China, is now cursing her colonies. I have myself seen opiumdens in Melbourne crowded with young Europeans getting their earlier lessons in the use of the deadly drug.

As regards the drink traffic, I grieve to report that we occupy a most unenviable position in the eyes of the civilized world. England's annual expenditure is 47. 1s. 6d. per head of the population, whereas New South Wales spends 47. 12s. 3d., and Victoria 51. 14s. 5d. We have, however, in Melbourne a very powerful society called the Victoria Alliance. It has for its aim "Prohibition for the new century through the will of the people;" for its platform, "Complete local option, with women's vote and no compensation;" and it contends, in the words of the late Chief Justice Higinbotham, "for the indisputable principle that the community has the right to determine for itself whether it is expedient that intoxicating liquor shall or shall not be sold." The Woman's Christian Temperance Union has taken fast hold in the colonies, chiefly owing to the visits of earnest and eloquent advocates from the United States. But the hope of Australasia lies chiefly in her children. The Secretary of the Victorian Band of Hope Union wrote to me on February 16: "Fromwhat I can gather the cause is progressing in New Zealand, especially in the North Island. Indeed, a prominent worker expressed his belief the other day that it was the only department of temperance work that was progressing at all." Victoria has 222 bands, with 22,000 members, to which must be added the membership of the Roman Catholic League of the Cross and other societies, bringing up the total number of young abstainers to something like 40,000. A splendid forward movement is now being made in Victoria, called "The Ten Thousand More Scheme." A certain day was agreed