version. His representations were attended to; and a mission of eight monks, with an Archimandrite, set out for the Aleeutian Archipelago. The rigours of a polar voyage, the drifting iceburgs, intense cold, stormy seas, and dangerous rocks, tried the strength and courage of the party. The barren shores yielded no corn or fruits. The very sun of the northern skies seemed to have a curse upon it, says our narrative; and even the natives could hardly live in their climate. After much suffering, half the company were shipwrecked between the islands and the main land. The three survivors, Father Macarius,' 'Father Juvenal,' and the monk German,' planted the cross, and divided the field of labour between them. Macarius took the islands, where he preached with great success. 'Father Juvenal' established himself on the Cadiac, and soon had a circle of neophytes about him; but his missionary boldness brought a premature martyrdom upon him. He persuaded some of the new converts to let him have their children, to send to the Company's 'Russian-American Schools' for education; and he was departing with his infantine charge, when a furious band of natives, who chose to suppose that he was stealing the children, set up a pursuit, and overtook him. His own party were ready to fight for him, but he would not let them; and he gave himself into the hands of the pursuers, on the condition that they would not harm his converts. They took him, and killed him on the spot. His blood brought horror and remorse to his murderers; and the popular report was that he appeared to them after his death. The monk German erected his hermitage' on another part of the coast, and employed himself in instructing Aleeutian converts; and there he died, in 1838, after a long and devoted life. The reduced mission was unable to do its work, and a pause, says our French document, like one of the long polar nights,' followed. The cause received some discouragements. A new Bishop, designed for Kamschatka, was shipwrecked on his way. The nearest Bishop was that of Irkoutsk, and he had too much to do in his own wide diocese to spare any labour for the Aleeutians for a long time. But he kept them in his eye; and, in 1826, the Bishop made choice of le Père Veniaminoff,' to conduct a mission there. The latter, after many internal struggles of diffidence and hesitation, accepted the post. Arrived at my new parish,' he writes, after a long and painful voyage, I hastened 'to acquaint myself with my flock. I find myself amongst Russians, Aleeutians, Coloches, and Coluges. It gives me 'much delight to see the fervour of the Aleeutians; their docility, attendance at church; their reverence, their touching confi'dence in their pastor; the delicacy of conscience, almost too scrupulous, with which they confess, and their simple-minded empressement to expose the very least faults they see in them

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'selves. The women leave their homes, and their infants in 'their swaddling clothes, to come and hear the gospel preached. A preacher would be a zealous one indeed who was not very tired after he had fatigued an Aleeutian congregation. They have profited in the school of adversity, misery, and privation; it has disciplined them for the gospel. Their compassion for "others' sufferings is equal to their patience under their own. It is quite their character, as a nation. I have seen, in their periodical seasons of famine, the poor share their last fish with their neighbours. They never revenge an injury, and their only notice of it is a stern silence, which often lasts several days together.' The Coluges' were a more difficult people to deal with; and M. Veniaminoff, after several delays, took advantage of a plague raging among them to go into the thick of them, with medicines in one hand, and the word of life in the other; and a prejudice against Christianity, so great at first as actually to ascribe the plague to the anger of the gods at the new doctrine, was soon surmounted, and converts flowed in. The zealous father then crossed over to the Cadiac, the scene of ‘le Père Juvenal's' labours, and found, to his great joy, a Christian nucleus still left in the country, true to the faith, and keeping alive the memory of the martyr. After thirteen years of intense labour, spent in voyaging, travelling, preaching, catechising, and getting up all the different dialects of the Aleeutian language, and translating the gospels of St. Matthew, St. Luke, and the Acts of the Apostles, for the benefit of the converts, the evangeliser left a population of ten thousand converts, a great part of them his own, for St. Petersburgh, to receive a missionary mitre, and the Bishopric of the regions he had converted. He has now returned to his see of Kamschatka; and Bishop Innocent is carrying on and extending, in his missionary diocese, the work he has begun.

The historical career of the Russian Church brings out strongly peculiar characteristics in her, partly native, partly Eastern. She has imbibed much from the genius loci; and her saintly standard of rough, earnest simplicity, the character of her hermits, monks, and prelates, shows Christianity upon aboriginal northern ground, and the Catholic element animating a peculiar popular material and mind. A spirit rests A spirit rests upon her forests and lakes, her wide plains and rolling rivers. The Volga, the Don, and the Dnieper, have had their barbaric waters breathed upon: they are what they were, and they show their native spirit, but they show it converted. The genius of the North was certainly caught, and caught successfully, at the conversion of Russia; and the Gospel, while it moulded and spiritualized the natural religion, heart, and reverence of the Northern mind, left at the same time the air of their original upon them.

Christianity does not annihilate nature, but changes her; it allows her genuine stamp to remain, when it is simple nature, and not evil nature, that is the subject-matter; and it brings her under the action of grace, in accordance with her previous state and composition. The Russian Church supplies an instance of this; and we are awed, or startled, or affected; we admire, and are amused; as saintly depths or boldnesses, scenes of pathos or greatness, or eccentricities, or quaintnesses pass before us; but all is in keeping, in harmony; the whole is the multiform result of the material combined with the religious element which has converted it ; and while we see Christianity in a character somewhat different from the one with which we are familiar, we may see it genuine, hearty, and aspiring, and feel inclined to allow for differences, and penetrate through the veil of circumstance and peculiarities of outward guise to the real Gospel form and image underneath.

A strong Eastern, as well as native, character pervades her, and she reflects the light which originally illumined her. She goes back, in thought and sentiment, to the source from whence she sprung; and the claims of the East are felt powerfully, and mingle with the religious poetry of the people. Her monastic discipline; her book of saints; the annals of her Metropolitans, and associations, wide and various, all take her to the East. Constantinople sent the missionaries that converted her; Constantinople enlightened Oskold and Dir, Olga and Vladimir, and the old Varangian corps; and the Greek Empire, and Patriarchate of the East, are associated with the earliest dawn of the Gospel upon her. She looks on Athos, and sees the place where her S. Antony revived his mission. The popular pilgrimages to Jerusalem show the Eastern mind. The very names of her saints: her Hilarion, Theodosius, Theognostes, Isidore, Macarius, Cyril, Hermogenes, take her to the East. Her Eastern services and ritual take her back to the very Eastern fountain-head; and were S. Basil and S. Chrysostom to reappear, they would hear in Russia the self-same unaltered liturgy that they assisted at themselves in the fourth century. She has imbibed the dogmatic traditionary spirit and ceremonial taste of the East. She is the child of the East, and she is like her parent. The Eastern sun blends with, and colours the popular visions of Russian glory and conquest; and a deep enthusiasm, which any Russian Emperor could any moment take advantage of, exists about Constantinople. The people look upon it as belonging to them, and grudge its occupation to the infidel. The old legend and prophecy, the popular rhyme, promise them its capture; they look forward to the day. Russia seems the natural proprietor of the Eastern capital; and an invasion of Turkey would, any day, carry people's feeling with it, though the balance of European

power, at present, prevents one. The Russian Church has had the simply nationalist Muscovite tendency in her, going along with the Eastern; but the Eastern has overcome the Muscovite: and large and disproportionate part as she is of the Eastern Church, she, nevertheless, has never absorbed the East into herself, and made it Muscovite, but always belonged, in her mode of thinking of herself, to the East,—not the East to her. She keeps up the filial sentiment, and attaches herself to an Eastern catholicity.

Thus Eastern in her source and antiquities, she yet mingles much of Western sentiment with her system; and the Russian Church, like the country, is half European, half Oriental. She has run through all the popular religious developments of her Western sister, not borrowing them apparently, but producing them out of her herself, and following her own instinct. The 'culte' of the Virgin and the Saints, the veneration of relics, and the rest of the medieval devotional system, have grown upon her. She has pictures, and the West has images; her people prostrate themselves, and the Westerns bow. Her people abound in salutations and kissings, which the West has not. She is Asiatic in her forms of veneration and respect; but the mediæval sentiment is the same in both. In the same way she has run through the course of political power that the Western Church has; she has had her baronial abbots, her princebishops, her castellated monasteries, and armed tenantry; and the same movement that deprived the Western Church of her secular insignia, deprived the Eastern of hers. The two, without connexion, and in spite of animosities, have run remarkably through the same career, and have had the same growth, expansion, activities, abuses. The Russian Church even now, in spite of her weakened position, reaps the effect of that tremendous swing of power which she has had formerly; and she enjoys the prestige of her energetic and effective mediaval reign, in the inherent inbred affections of the popular mass, the genuine product of the labours of ages gone by, and become now the very birth and natural growth of the soil. Providence has exempted the Russian Church from some of the great difficulties of the Western, and she has a more simple people to govern, and the Western forms of heresy do not harass her. It only remains for us to hope that she will not take advantage of her position in this respect to enjoy repose and carelessness; that she will do more than retain her prestige, and live on her past days; that she will add energy to her devoutness, and thought and policy to her sanctity; and prepare herself to meet the trials and aggressions which the progress of the age, the influx of opinions, and the world's quickening circulation may be preparing.

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ART. II.—The Elements of Morality, including Polity. BY WILLIAM WHEWELL, D. D., Master of Trinity College, and Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Cambridge. London: J. W. Parker.

THERE are reasons which, in the present day, attach especial interest to ethical works proceeding from the University of Cambridge. It is always a curious study to mark the workings of the human mind, as it toils along amidst conflicting influences, and aims at elaborating unity from the most contradictory materials. But curiosity becomes anxiety, when we remember that we are contemplating the results of a somewhat anomalous system, now actively engaged, at one of England's chief seats of learning, in forming the character of her sons; and this for times which promise little mercy to those, who shall fail to identify themselves thoroughly with their principles, or shrink from urging them to their utmost consequences.

Many true and loyal spirits, whom Cambridge is proud to reckon among her children, freely allow that in one part of her teaching she is far from perfect. To say that she is capable of producing good, as well as great, men, would be asserting what no one cares to deny. A long list of eminent names might easily be adduced to establish, how well adapted are her institutions to foster that goodness, which no human means can originate. Should we inquire what method it is which is found so effectual in the work of education, we may readily conjecture the general scope of the answer. Appeal would be made, and justly, to the combination of scientific pursuits with the study and practice of religion. Where, it might be asked, are we to look for good fruit from systematic mental culture, if it is not to be found in an University, which at once demands trust, and encourages inquiry, by uniting the inculcation of the Christian faith to the formation of habits of the strictest and most rigorous analysis? Nor would it be right to pass over the many indirect influences, obvious even to the most careless observer, which must ever work most powerfully for good in places like our English Universities. It is no slight privilege and advantage to spend even a few short years in scenes full of past associations, which bear directly on the present; where thoughtful minds, indifferent to the common motives of the world, and apt to shrink back when the crowd is pressing forward, can hear a voice calling them to solemn emulation of the dead; where art still breathes much of the spirit which begot her, and appeals far