provided that its operation was limited to a man's own kin. The recognition of the brotherhood of the human race has been a slow and painful lesson, and perhaps even yet some portions of it remain to be learned. We should not, therefore, be harsh in our condemnation of archaic men whose moral standard was different from our own, because they, without hesitation, did acts or observed forbearances which, among those who walk by a better light, would call forth merited reprobation.
One suggestion of a practical character I will, in this connection, venture to offer. One of the great difficulties that missionaries have experienced in dealing with those people whose society is archaic has been the ruinous social consequences of conversion. In such circumstances a convert must literally obey the precept of the Gospel, and, if he desire to follow his new Master, must leave all. He becomes an outcast from his own people and his father's house; but his new religion does not supply him with a new place in the world. A religion which has adapted itself to a system where the social unit is the individual, strangely misfits a convert who has never known any other form of society than that of the clan. Yet in its early days Christianity was formed upon the ancient type, and the Church was practically an all-receiving non-genealogic clan, in which every new comer found his appointed place and his fit society. To some such primitive form it will have to revert when it deals with people whose social state is imperfectly developed. Amongst them the Church must compete, as once among our own race it competed, with the household and the kin; and the mutual relations of Christian men must, under such conditions, be rendered far more intimate than for a thousand years they have been in Europe. I believe that, in India at least, some of the missionaries perceive this necessity. Villages have been
