forgotten His church, misguided and wrong though it be. I have looked all the field over with despairing eyes, and I see no hope but in Him. This movement must and will become a purely religious The light will spread in the churches, the tone of feeling will rise, Christians, north and south, will give up all connection with, and take up their testimony against, slavery and the work will be done.'

one.

Yet another commentary on her own work is too precious to be omitted:- This story is to show how Jesus Christ who liveth and was dead and now is alive for evermore, has still a mother's love for the poor and lowly, and that no man can sink so low but that Jesus Christ will stoop to take his hand. Who so low, so poor, so despised as the American slave? Yet even to this slave Jesus Christ stoops from where He sits at the right hand of the Father, and says: "Fear not thou whom man despisest, for I am thy brother: Fear not, for I have redeemed thee; I have called thee by thy name: thou art Mine!"'

The issue of this story so fervent, pathetic and graphic, struck a deadly blow at slavery. In a brief space of days from the date of its publication it had destroyed the action of the Fugitive-slave Law' throughout the Northern States, and advanced toward the achievement of arousing the public sentiment of the world. The popularity of the work surpassed all precedent.

It appealed to men of influence and many of the leading minds of the day hastened to express their warmest approbation of it, but it also contained elements that made it attractive to all classes of readers. The wild heroism of the slave-mother making her escape for the sake of her child, leaping by the blocks of ice across the Ohio River, formed a picture that seized on the popular imagination. The flight of the slave family and their rescuers, closely pursued, and making their successful stand on the tops of the rocks, sated the keenest appetite for the 'sensational.' The character of the negro-child Topsy opened a rich vein of humour and tenderness. The death of Eva, so beautiful in form and spirit, wielded a power of pathos over the hearts of many bereaved households, and indeed over hearts and households universally. Uncle Tom was a striking picture of a Christian martyr of the negro race, while the character of the fierce and cruel planter Legree exposed to the indignant gaze of mankind an embodiment of the iniquity of slavery. At the same time there was throughout the book a most pointed presentation of simple gospelteaching, often in the very words of Holy Scripture, which sent an evangelic message to every land into whose language it was translated. The Act of Pope Pius IX., who lost no time in placing Uncle Tom's

Cabin on the Index Expurgatorius, may be taken as a striking testimony to the Scriptural and Evangelical character of the book,

to

VII.

FIRST VISIT TO EUROPE.

IN advocacy of the cause of three million slaves, Mrs. Stowe proceeded press the message of her book upon the great ones of the earth. Prince Albert hastened to express his appreciation of the copy sent to him, and the chief literary men of England replied in similar terms. Thus the author obtained some gratifying proofs of having achieved one point on which she had set her heart-the enlisting of the sympathy of British statesmen. Among others, Lord Carlisle returned his deep and solemn thanks to Almighty God' for enabling her to perform so great a service to the cause of Freedom. Mrs. Stowe rejoined with an earnest and lucid statement of her views on the whole question; she claimed to have achieved certain distinct results : (1) To have moderated the bitterness of extreme abolitionists; (2) converted to abolitionist views many whom that bitterness had repelled; (3) inspired the free coloured-people with self-respect and confidence; (4) promoted a kindlier feeling generally towards the negro race,' The Earl of Shaftesbury, in a letter which Mrs. Stowe received with great joy, said, 'None but a Christian believer could have produced such a book as yours; it has absolutely startled the whole world, and impressed many thousands by revelations of cruelty and sin that give us an idea of what would be the uncontrolled dominion of Satan in this world."

That the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin had been animated by no feelings of mere literary ambition, was proved by her publication of the Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, a work which was calculated to dispel the dream of fiction, revealing as it did the sources of plain fact from which her fascinating story had been framed.

This work taxed her strength greatly, and accounts for the unsatisfactory state of her health at this time.

In April, 1853, Mrs. Stowe, accompanied by her husband and brother, sailed for Liverpool on a tour to Europe. She went in the first place to Scotland, in response to a highly appropriate invitation from the Anti-Slavery Society of the Ladies and Gentlemen of Glasgow.' The preparation of the public mind for her reception may be gauged from the fact that, up till the previous December, twelve separate editions of her work were issued, and eighteen different London Publishing-houses were at work supplying the demand. Mrs. Stowe had written a special preface to the European Edition'

published in Paris. In it she says, 'The mystery which all Christian nations hold in common-the union of God and man through the humanity of Jesus Christ, invests human existence with an awful sacredness, and, in the eye of the true believer in Jesus, he who tramples on his fellow man is not only inhuman, but sacrilegious.' As an indication of the state of feeling on the continent, it may be noted that, in Germany, one of the leading journals called on the abolitionists of America to adorn the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin with a civic crown. In spite of much weakness of health, Mrs. Stowe attended large gatherings in Glasgow and Edinburgh, which invariably took the form of anti-slavery demonstrations. On one of these occasions at Edinburgh, the 'national penny offering' of the workingclasses was made: it consisted of a thousand sovereigns on a magnificent salver.' The journey southward was broken at Birmingham, where a great Abolition-Society meeting was held. In London, Mrs. Stowe was received at the railway station by the Rev. Thomas Binney and other friends. Among the statesmen to whom she was immediately introduced were Lord Palmerston, Lord John Russell, Mr. Gladstone, and the Duke of Argyll. These interviews invariably bore upon the cause which the author had at heart, and social gatherings at which she met such men as Macaulay and Hallam, Whately and Bunsen, were utilised for the same purpose. At Stafford House, Lord Shaftesbury read an address on behalf of the ladies of England which was destined, after many days, to receive a memorable reply. With the cordiality of personal friendship, the Duchess of Sutherland presented Mrs. Stowe with a superb gold bracelet' in the form of a slave's shackle, inscribed, 'We trust it is a memorial of a chain that is soon to be broken.' The ladies of Surrey Chapel presented the author with an inkstand, constructed in the form of a slave having his shackles struck off his feet. After a tour of some weeks on the continent, in Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, and a brief sojourn in England to say Farewell, Harriet Beecher Stowe sailed for America. Of this visit she says. Almost as sadly as a child might leave its home, I left the shores of kind, strong old England—the mother of us all.' Her grateful impressions of this visit were speedily embodied in her Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands.

VIII.

WORK AND SUFFERING.

THE years 1853-54 were marked by a keen agitation on the question of the extension of slavery in Kansas. Mrs. Stowe took part in this, and her passionate Appeal to the Women of America' was sown

broadcast over the land. The statesman, Charles Sumner, had strengthened her hands by supplying her with much authentic information. In a correspondence with the celebrated Abolitionist, Mr. William Lloyd Garrison, Mrs. Stowe complained of that gentleman's distrust of Christian congregations, in terms which won him to a happier frame of mind.

Our author was by this time engaged on her important work called Dred; or, the Great Dismal Swamp, a name chosen from the history of the negro revolt in Virginia in 1831. Of this work Mr. Sumner predicted that it would lend him 'powerful aid in his struggle for Kansas, and would overthrow the slave-oligarchy at the Presidential Election,' a hope in which he was not disappointed.

Dred having been finished by the summer of 1856, Mrs. Stowe a second time set her face for England, where, after a few days' business with her publishers, she was most cordially received by the Queen and Prince Consort. The return to America was marked by a distressing bereavement, which was carefully concealed from her for certain days. Her eldest son Henry Ellis had been drowned while bathing in the river near Dartmouth College, where he was a student. A year after this sad event the bereaved mother writes to her daughter- Henry's fair, sweet face looks down upon me now and then from out the cloud, and I feel again all the bitterness of the "eternal-No!" Never-never in this world shall I see that face, lean on that arm, hear that voice. But weak, weary as I am, I rest on Jesus in the inmost depth of my soul, and am quite sure that there is coming an inconceivable hour of beauty and glory, when I shall regain Jesus, and He will give me back my beloved one whom He is educating in a far higher sphere than I proposed.'

During this sad period Mrs. Stowe sought relief of mind in labour and wrote her well known Minister's Wooing. This was an effort to portray the religion, theology and manners of the older life of New England. Mrs. Stowe again, in 1859, sought change of scene, and took her last trip to Europe, accompanied by all her children except the youngest. The visit was marked by a renewal of friendship with Lady Byron, between whom and our author from the first there had subsisted a deep bond of sympathy in their common devotion to the cause of the slave.

IX.

THE GREAT WAR.

THE awful struggle between North and South was by some people at the time attributed to the work of Mrs. Stowe, but it was rather the outcome of a long chain of events of which her book may have