rank by rank, fell also to the ground; leaving their three chief leaders sitting on their horses alone. Then the Emperor and chief mandarin arose, and the latter solemnly bade the officers to do obeisance to their Emperor. One after another, they slowly dismounted, and each, as he came towards the Emperor, kneeled down, and, drawing his sword, performed the hara-kari, or national penal suicide. The chief mandarin, in a loud voice, commanded the people to return in peace to their homes, with the forgiveness and blessing of their Emperor. They obeyed; and the rebellion was at an end.

Of items of religious information nearer home, I may take note, that the Foreign Missionary Association of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Orthodox Friends has now seven missionaries in different fields; most of them engaged in Central Africa. The Society of Friends has altogether more than sixty foreign missionaries laboring in different parts of the world.

The missionaries sent out by all Protestant denominations together, from Europe and America, are hardly more numerous now than they were fifty years ago; their work being so much better done, generally, by their converts, the native preachers. Not an island in the Pacific is without its Christian church; not a spoken dialect in the world without its Bible. Yet the world has not, by any means, become altogether Christian, even in Christendom itself.

A great revival has just begun in Brooklyn. It has already reached New York, and is beginning to arouse interest in Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore. Crowds of men and women of all classes, especially the poorest and least cultivated, gather noon and night to religious services of a simple but most fervent character. Old men say they have known nothing like it since the days of 1857, or the Moody and Sankey meetings of 1874-76. By cable we learn that something of the same wave of religious movement has appeared in London, Berlin, and Paris. We ask, what are we to think of it? Is there a spiritual atmosphere, with its heights and depths, mysteriously swayed from land to land? We can only wait and see.

December 31st, 1931.

I have been reading over the pages of this diary for the year just coming to a close. This has led me to some retrospection, looking yet farther back, and comparing the present with the last century. The 19th century was proud of itself; and we of the 20th have hardly gained all that we should in true humility. Both centuries have had their great events and great advances; and both, their weaknesses, errors, and absurdities. I will venture a comparison of some of these.

The most absurd things of the 19th century, I think, were these: the decree at Rome of the infallibility of the Pope; England's bolstering up the Turkish Empire for fear of Russia attacking India; Lord Beaconsfield's administration altogether; the financial policy of the American green-back party; the belief in spirit-rapping, in the first principles of Herbert Spencer's philosophy, and in the sufficiency of Darwin's theory of natural selection to account for the ascent from lower to higher species; the shot-gun quarantine in the South against yellow fever; the toleration of the waltz, in otherwise civilized society, when even Lord Byron denounced it; and the unreformed spelling of the English language.

As the greatest national crimes of the last century, I would name the British government forcing by war the trade in Opium upon China, and the long-continued bad faith of the United States government towards the Indian tribes of the West.

Perhaps the greatest wonders of the 19th century were the invention of photography, solar spectral analysis, the radiometer, the phonograph, the photophone; in public affairs, the reunion of the old and new school Presbyterian Churches, and the disappearance, by civil war, of negro slavery in the United States.

The greatest triumphs of the first part of the 20th century have been the abandonment of all tariffs for protection in the United States, as well as in Europe, establishing perfectly free trade throughout the world; the successful introduction of woman's suffrage in almost every State of our Union; the acceptance of the principle of arbitration, through international congresses, in all governmental disputes, by the great powers of both hemispheres; the practical conquest of intemperance, by the abolition of drinking-houses everywhere; and the disappearance of sectarianism amongst Christian denominations,—excepting only the persistently exclusive claims of the three great historical churches.

We are clearly not yet at the close of history. Is the world nearly prepared for its great consummation? Not yet are fulfilled the beautiful prophetic words of the poet Cowper, now far too seldom read:—

"Error has no place;
The creeping pestilence is driven away!
The breath of Heaven has chased it. In the heart
No passion touches a discordant string,
But all is harmony and love. Disease
Is not: the pure and uncontaminate blood
Holds its due course, nor fears the frost of age.
One song employs all nations; and all cry
'Worthy the Lamb, for he was slain for us!'
The dwellers in the vales and on the rocks
Shout to each other, and the mountain tops
From distant mountains catch the flying joy,—
Till, nation after nation taught the strain,
Earth rolls the rapturous hosanna round."

Not in our time have dawned such days as these. But, let our hearts be lifted up: they will come yet. Some New Year's bells will

"Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be."

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1931: A GLANCE AT THE TWENTIETH CENTURY***

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