Let greatly mistaken, we have here stumbled upon a most important part of it. Let English ladies 'haste to the rescue." English ladies of social position and education devote themselves to the work of teaching, from house to house, their adult Hindu sisters, who are literally perishing for lack of knowledge, none caring for their souls.* In some quarters this suggestion will be denounced as Utopian: we do not care to reply to such an objection. Where, out of a female population of upwards of seventy millions,† there are but twenty thousand under instruction, and most of those are withdrawn from school before they have reached their teens, we are not to be told that the only earthly means by which the case of those women can be met are impracticable and Utopian. We would ask Miss Marsh, Mrs. Wightman, and Mrs. Bayley, to show us their opinion.‡ Free from the anxious cares of domestic life-'the unmarried woman careth for the things of the Lord'- a female member of the mission family on each central station would have the protection and comforts of a home; as the colleague of the Missionary's wife, she would have a ready passport to the homes or harems of the daughters of India; welcomed as an angel visitor, she would sit among her darker sisters, and teach them the story of the cross.§ We cannot doubt that many a Christian woman will rise from the perusal of these pages with a very thoughtful heart, and we venture to hope that at no distant day some sister of mercy, 'fired with a zeal peculiar,' will inaugurate a new era in the evangelization of the East. *The Zenana Schools of Bengal have yielded encouraging results. Intelligent Baboos have admitted governesses to teach their wives and daughters, and also paid for their services. That venerable Missionary, Lacroix, just before his death, wrote to Dr. Duff, For a long time to come, I feel assured, the best way (because most in accordance with the feelings of the people) to promote female education in India, will be through means of domestic instruction.' The Rev. John Fordyce, speaking of these Zenana Schools, observes: 'If the Lord be pleased to raise up agents to carry out this plan on large scale, it will go far to unlock many a prison home, and to solve one of the most perplexing of missionary problems.' If the population be taken at two hundred millions, of course the number of women would be considerably more than we have stated. 'I would go a step further, and advocate the agency of female Missionaries in India. It would not be their duty to preach in the bazaar, but to go from house to house, and speak to the native women of the love of Jesus, wherever they find access.'-Conference on Missions at Liverpool, Paper by Rev. Mr. Leupolt. It is to the Christian mothers of our land that we must look for help. It is now the happy privilege of their daughters to come forth as messengers of peace and mercy, to break the fetters of superstition and ignorance in which India has so long been bound, and to teach it that truth which makes us free.'-Sir J. S. Login. Ghost-Lore and Table-Rapping. 167 ART. VII.-Footfalls on the Boundary of another World. With Narrative Illustrations. By ROBERT DALE OWEN. Trübner. THAT there are powers above us and around us, unseen, but having intimate relations with us, is a world-wide belief. Few nations have been found so degraded as to have no idea of Deity presiding over and controlling the powers of nature; and none that have any traditional literature are without the notion of a world of spirits occasionally manifesting itself to mortals. The charm of all ancient poetry-Oriental or Classical, Scandinavian, Romantic, or Teutonic-lies mainly in this, that it represents man in relation to the invisible world; man exercising his corporeal powers, aided or thwarted by incorporeal natures-Divine, angelic, demoniac, or human-which exercise their forces in a far more direct and powerful manner than through the cumbrous organization of flesh and blood. We may disbelieve every word of each particular narration-so perhaps did those who first listened to it; but if we as well as they had not a deep-seated belief in the general principle, and an instinctive desire towards that disencumbered nature, this lore would have no such charm for us. The traditions of men on this subject are confirmed as to their general principle by the records of inspiration. The Bible tells of miracles which were wont to attest every direct revelation of God to man; of visits which men used to receive from angels (ayyeλo), messengers not always nor even often making it plain whether they were disembodied spirits of men, or belonging to some other order of intelligent beings. It tells also of principalities and powers of darkness continually acting as the enemies of God and man. In accordance with human tradition it represents flesh and blood as always quailing in the manifested presence of spirits, however friendly in their character; and it denounces as the grossest wickedness and rebellion against God the conduct of those who seek a forbidden confederacy with them, for the purpose of knowing what He has hidden in the future, or acquiring a power over the elements of nature beyond what He has permitted. The whole Bible is based on the idea of a spiritual world standing in intimate relations with our own. In the infancy, whether of individuals or nations, supernatural agency affords the easiest and most acceptable explanation of all phenomena of which no other cause can be traced. Let children be told that the thunder which they hear is the voice of God, the lightning the flashes of His eye, and they will reverently believe that some dreadful wickedness has been committed to call for such expressions of anger; just as Christopher Columbus is said to have persuaded the American Indians that an eclipse of the sun was the sure token of Heaven's displeasure against them for their evil intentions towards him and his companions. But as individuals or nations advance towards maturity, they learn that all natural phenomena depend on approximate causes more or less distinctly understood. The thunder, which was once regarded as a personal voice, turns out to be the echo of electric explosions among the clouds; the eclipse, which darkened the sun at mid-day, is found to be occasioned by the moon intercepting his beams, according to a well known law of her evolutions. We are taught that even the winds and waves, which appear so uncertain in their action, are subject to rules of sequence as invariable as those of the rising and setting sun. The beams of knowledge dispel the fairy frost-work of fancy; and the myths of infancy are surrendered for the studies of manhood. Now the reaction of our minds against the credulity of our ignorance is likely to drive us for a time into the regions of scepticism; and only by slow degrees, after much wayward eccentricity, do we learn to hold an even and steady course in that path which is illuminated by the light of science, blended with that of faith. It was the misfortune of European society that the ages of its ignorant faith were under the dominion of a crafty and avaricious priesthood, who worked on the credulity of the people to promote the aggrandizement of the Church. Hence the numberless and monstrous legends of mediæval miracles, apparitions of ghosts, demons, and what not, the fabrications of wilful deceit; or, at best, the offspring of imaginations perverted and diseased by the unnatural influences of monastic life. As the most profitable of all the lying wonders of Rome was the purgatory of a future life, so the very bathos of superstition was the belief that those regions of punishment lying beneath their feet might actually be entered from an opening on the surface of the earth; and that the man who could endure the discipline now in the flesh would be exempt from the liability to suffer it hereafter in the spirit. The purgatory of St. Patrick lay, relatively to the rest of Christian Europe, in the direction which mankind from the remotest ages had supposed to be the place of departed spirits,-the sombre regions of the setting sun, not absolutely inaccessible to the adventurous pilgrim. Here was a cave under the care of a small staff of Augustine monks, which was for ages the wonder and glory of Christendom. Whoever was bold and pious enough to endure for twenty-four hours the terrors of the purgatory to which it led might thus expiate all his sins, past and future, The Purgatory of St. Patrick. 169 which otherwise would cost him ages of torment. Numbers from all parts of Europe made the attempt, and more perished than ever returned to tell their adventures; for, according to Jacobus Vitriaco, Whoever went into it, not being truly penitent and contrite, was presently snatched away by demons, never more to be seen.' In the case of those who were found alive when the cave was opened by the monks after the twenty-four hours, their experience in the various fields of punishment, the extremes of cold, followed by those of heat, fiery serpents, toads, spits, while tempting demons surrounded and threatened,—all was carefully written down by the priestly guardians of the place for the edification of the faithful throughout Christendom. If the reader supposes that this was an obscure superstition, prevailing chiefly among that class of people who in modern times have resorted to the island for penance, let him turn to the patent rolls of Edward the Third's reign, and, under date 1358, he will find the copy of a testimonial of which the following is a free translation: 'The King to all and singular to whom the present letters shall come, greeting. Malatesta Ungarus, a noble gentleman and knight of Rimini, coming into our presence, hath declared that lately, leaving his own country, he has, with much toil, visited the purgatory of St. Patrick, in our domain of Ireland, and for the usual space of one whole day and night remained shut up therein as one of the dead; earnestly beseeching us that in confirmation of the fact we would deign to grant him our royal letters. Though the assertion of so noble a man might be accepted by us as sufficient, yet considering the extreme perils of this pilgrimage, we are further informed concerning it by letters from our trusty and well beloved Almaric de St. Amand, our Justice of Ireland, also from the prior and convent of the said place of purgatory, and from other men of credit, as also by clear proofs that the said nobleman hath duly and courageously completed his pilgrimage; we have therefore thought proper to give to him favourably our royal testimony concerning the same, that there may be no doubt; and that the truth of the premised may more clearly appear, we have been induced to grant to him these letters with the royal seal. Given at our palace at Westminster, the twenty-fourth day of October.' There is also the copy of a safe-conduct, or passport, granted by Richard II. in 1397, to enable Raymond, Viscount of Perilhos, Baron of Seret, Knight of Rhodes, and Chamberlain of Charles VI. of France, to visit the purgatory with a retinue of twenty men and thirty horses; which Raymond afterwards wrote a narrative of his adventures in the Limousin dialect, with all the usual horrors. The most gifted tongue could not relate, the most forcible and copious writer could not adequately describe, such dreadful tortures and punishments. Woe to sinners! Alas for those who do not repent in this world! All the ills of this life, labour, poverty, exile, imprisonment, disgrace, misery, calamity, wounds, and even death itself, are nothing to the pains of purgatory.' Such were some of the medieval 'footfalls on the boundary of another world.' The light of the Reformation dispelled, at least from the English mind, the terrors of purgatory, and the notion that a mitigation of its tortures might be procured through priestly influence. But there remained a general belief in disembodied spirits, good and evil, and the possibility of intercourse with them; as well as a solemn sense of the sin of any commerce with evil ones. In the seventeenth century we find Jeremy Taylor, in his episcopal capacity, investigating a ghost story, which was afterwards communicated in writing by his lordship's secretary to the editor of Sadducismus Triumphatus. The leading facts of the story are, that the ghost of a man named James Haddock appeared first on horseback on the highway to one Taverner, whom he had known in the flesh, a lusty, proper, stout, tall fellow,' and desired him to carry a message to those who were wronging his fatherless boy in the matter of a lease which ought to have stood in his name; the reason alleged for appearing to him being, that he was a man of more resolution than others. But Taverner did not care to meddle with what did not concern him; and the ghost returned again and again, threatening to tear him in pieces if he did not carry the message. Whereupon Taverner, who was in the service of the Earl of Donegal, consulted his lordship's chaplain; and the chaplain took him for a further consultation with the incumbent of Belfast, whose only difficulty, after hearing the details, was whether it would be lawful to do the errand in case the spirit was a bad one. However, considering the justice of case, it was determined to go, and the chaplain accompanied the man. It would seem the details of the wrong were admitted to be as the ghost had revealed them. A few days afterwards the bishop was holding a court at Dromore, and, having heard of this strange transaction, he summoned the parties before him for an investigation. Alcock, the secretary, who was present throughout, says that my lord styled it a strange scene of Providence,' and was satisfied that the apparition was true and real. He adds, "This Taverner, with all the persons and places mentioned in the story, I knew very well, and all wise and good men did believe it, especially the |