A BIBLE-WOMAN FOR THE HEBRIDES. WE have lately trained in London, and engaged to support, a Bible-woman for HARRIS, one of the wildest of the Hebrides, by request of Mrs. Thomas, an Edinburgh lady, who takes a great interest in the people, and visits them yearly. The Biblewoman was born in Jura, and speaks both Gaelic and English. The people of Harris are poor, simple, industrious, and impressionable. They have pennies so rarely that they will pay for their Bibles by barter of eggs, fish, &c., and, of course, we must charge low prices, but we think the good woman has comprehended the meaning of the payment by instalments, in our Missions, viz., to cultivate self-help. Her letter will speak for itself, and show where she is settled.

"Dear Madam,

"June, 1878. "Kyllis, Stocknes, Harris.

"You will, I fear, think me ungrateful, after all the kindness shown to me when I was in London, that I have never written as desired, but when you know the reason I hope you will excuse me. When I landed in Harris, I was kindly received in the Rev. Mr. Mackenzie's manse. It was the subject of discussion there how I was to get over the rocks with my luggage, to the place set for me to begin my work. If I left my luggage in the store, which I did, and went on foot myself, then where was I to sleep for a night until there might be a boat coming round, which happens very often when it is not the busy season, as, however, it is just now? I went off, with a woman for my guide, eight miles, most of the way over rocks, or what seemed iron hills, and bogs, such as I never saw before; but I may say that I met with kind people, where I got a clean bed of straw, and fed with themselves on potatoes and salt herrings, for breakfast and dinner, tea after passage at night, and was almost three weeks in that way before I got my luggage, which accounts for my want of writing materials and strong boots for tramping.

"When one comes here one sees no appearance of food for man or beast. But in a little time it is seen that there are bits

R

corn.

of good ground between the rocks in some parts, which must all be worked with the spade, for no horses are to be seen. Both men and women are out just now, planting potatoes and sowing It is wonderful how they manage; they seem to have a cow, a few sheep, and a few hens, whose eggs mostly go to purchase tea and tobacco. Potatoes and fish they have. The women spin and make cloth of sheep's wool. They have very poor houses; their appearance outside is like an old haystack; of course the inside may be imagined when the cow is kept at the one end, and every fresh fire lit fills the place with smoke; that is the worst thing I meet with. Even now my little corner is thick with smoke coming from the kitchen; yet any effort at improvement at present would be counted worldly pride, as one woman hinted "that the Lord of Glory was born in a stable." However it is a very healthy place, and very pretty scenery. The first thing I noticed was that the young people were unable to read. There is an old school-house, very dilapidated; I got the key, and gave a lesson every evening and Sabbath, to women and children. They read English; I explain in Gaelic. I am very fond of that part of my work, but I have not yet got on much with my other visiting, as the people are mostly out. I have sold three of the Testaments, but the Psalmswith them are much missed.

"I feel it sad when I go among the sick people and find them without doctor or anything to eat except oatmeal. Shops are so far away, and what they have is so dear. The people scem generally well trained in religious observance outwardly. I am glad to believe you are interested in their spiritual welfare.

"Yours obediently,

"E. T."

Mrs. Thomas says: "HARRIS is stranger than any foreign land, the people were so long secluded. Our good Bible-woman does not know them yet. She is lodged with a comparative millionaire if she gets three meals a day. Very few of the people have cows. Swiss milk and butter have to be laid in store, when it can be afforded, and even sheep are scarce. Potatoes were not to be had for

seed this year, but potatoes are usually the staple food, oatmeal the luxury. Most of their cloth money goes for meat, and capital cloth they make for the rough overcoats now in vogue; Shetland shawls also, and admirable stockings. I wish I had more orders for them.

"I will get Gaelic Bibles and Testaments and take down when I go next month. When we resided there for awhile, I used to sell largely, getting books from the Bible Society at a reduced price. In the district in which our good woman now is, we had a Catechist for three years, and he was the means of a great revival of religion, and many people I believe were savingly converted, though needing to be built up.' When a minister came within six miles I had to remove the Catechist, and he is now doing good work in another small island, quite cut off from ordinances. We have now two Free Church ministers in Harris, amongst a scattered population of 4,000. There is only one road through the island, and that is away from the people, who are located along the bays. The Biblewoman is settled midway between the two ministers, and pretty much in the centre of the people, though cut off by the bays and rock walls."

We hope to excite an interest in this work among the Northern Isles, for which we have advanced 107. from our little Foreign and Country Fund. The old Gaelic schoolroom wants repair for a Mission-room and home for the Bible-woman; and very likely the Mission will this year cost from 30%. to 407. If, as we hope, we have found the right instrument, the funds will come. There is a charm in again sowing the seed in the fields of labour of the early Celtic or Gaelic Church, to which Paul wrote the Epistle to the Galatians. None but the Gael could understand or speak the language of the Gael; and Irenæus, Bishop of Lyons, in the second century, mentions the existence of churches among the Celtic nations, and laments the necessity of having to learn Celtic; for, as we are told in Hallam's "Middle Ages," vol. iii., chap. 9, the great Italian missionaries were usually quite ignorant of the language of the Britons.

Those who have visited the Hebrides-that "wonder-land of

rock and sea," which in varied weather presents such contrasts of dreary moors, and dismal hills, and lonely lakes, with the splendours that sunshine and sunset can shed over the same, will never forget the transparency of the mountains, the rich reds and browns of the coast, the silver-grey rocks with their patches of rose-bell heather; and here and there they will remember a crag overlooking the loch where a Druidical arch, or solitary pillar, "the standing stones," or "mourning stones," of the district, remain to tell of a priesthood long vanished away, or that only survived in their Christian successors, the Culdees.

In the memoir of Bishop Ewing, lately published, there are some interesting sketches from his native Diocese of Argyll. He says, "Those who sail along these shores, and land in any of these mountain coves, will find in almost every bay the ruins of some ancient chapel or oratory; small and weather-beaten and unroofed as it is, it is the church of some Celtic father, and his cell is close at hand. They were solitaries, these men sainted afterwards by Rome, such as Brendan, Finian, Fillan, whose name still marks their church, or the well beside it of that clear water peculiar to Argyll. There, among the grassy knolls, or under the cairn overgrown with fern and ivy, through which the foxglove and wild-rose lift their heads, sleep, and have slept for one thousand years (may we not say for eighteen centuries ?), the remains of a Christian apostle and his congregation.”

But how came such teachers there?

Often driven by persecution doubtless, these pilgrim Gaels, during the first and second centuries, may have come over in some Phoenician galley first bound for the south of Britain for commerce in tin.

Arrived among their Celtic kin, we may suppose them in some long summer twilight, when the sea was a "sea of glass," and the greys and pink purples, of the rocky isles around, seemed set in lakes of gold,-discoursing to a circle of listening Druids, who, won by Celtic sympathies, were willing to hear of the God-man, Christ Jesus, and of the wonders of His death and resurrection. The poetic souls of the bards could ascend to a belief in miracles and in the supernatural.

It is not beyond our credence that the Lord who had said,

"Go ye and teach all nations," may have been invisible in the midst of many such Druidic companies, inclining their hearts towards Himself, and showing them through His messengers that He had now in His humanity made sacrifice for sins, which once for all had been accepted of the Father, and must put an end to their bloody offerings on the altars of their "Gilgal" stone-circles.

He who in the days of His flesh had forgotten to eat the meat that His disciples brought Him in a vision that they "knew not of," of fields of souls "white already to harvest," had just revealed Himself to the representative woman of Samaria (alas! too like in her impurities to Hosea's Gomer), remembering His covenant with the fathers as He sat on the edge of Jacob's well, near the grave of her ancestor Joseph. (See John iv.).*

Is it not therefore in fair sequence, to think of the same Divine Presence with these her modern Celtic kinsmen whenpossibly in the same century-the news of the same "living water was brought to them, "Water out of the wells of Salvation" (Isaiah xii. 3), which the Druids who drank of it might minister again to the warlike and quarrelsome Picts and Scots, and Celts and Gaels ? The notion that the name of Pict was derived from painting their bodies is said now to be exploded among antiquaries. Picta in Welsh meant a fighting man, and the word was also derived from a root, signifying a separated place or people. And probably as the pilgrim teacher returned to the recesses of his cell, prayerfully to study the sacred records of his Hebrew Rolls, side by side with his Greek Gospels, he would on reviewing the labours of his day turn back to Israel's prophet Hosea, and muse on his first chapter on the ordained symbolic marriage between Hosea and Gomer; perhaps the Culdee, or Chaldee, or Galatian teacher would have clearer light than has been seen in subsequent ages on what that marriage meant. Had he not himself been telling of God's mercy

• The link between Samaria and the Cymri—and in consequence that of Israel with the Celtic and Gaelic races-is proved by the Rock or BEHISTUN, and by our BLACK OBELISK in the Nineveh Gallery of the British Museum.