lowly
advanced. As they came within a few hundred yards, the Emperor left his
palanquin, and he and all his suite prostrated themselves in silent
prayer to God. As if struck by a power from on high, the rebel soldiers,
rank by rank, fell also to the ground; leaving their three chief leaders
sitting on their horses alone. Then the Emperor and chief mandarin
arose, and the latter solemnly bade the officers to do obeisance to
their Emperor. One after another, they slowly dismounted, and each, as
he came towards the Emperor, kneeled down, and, drawing his sword,
performed the hara-kari, or national penal suicide. The chief mandarin,
in a loud voice, commanded the people to return in peace to their homes,
with the forgiveness and blessing of their Emperor. They obeyed; and the
rebellion was at an end.

* * * * *

Of items of religious information nearer home, I may take note, that the
Foreign Missionary Association of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of
Orthodox Friends has now seven missionaries in different fields; most of
them engaged in Central Africa. The Society of Friends has altogether
more than sixty foreign missionaries laboring in different parts of the
world.

The missionaries sent out by all Protestant denominations together, from
Europe and America, are hardly more numerous now than they were fifty
years ago; their work being so much better done, generally, by their
converts, the _native preachers_. Not an island in the Pacific is
without its Christian church; not a spoken dialect in the world without
its Bible. Yet the world has not, by any means, become altogether
Christian, even in Christendom itself.

A great revival has just begun in Brooklyn. It has already reached New
York, and is beginning to arouse interest in Philadelphia, Boston, and
Baltimore. Crowds of men and women of all classes, especially the
poorest and least cultivated, gather noon and night to religious
services of a simple but most fervent character. Old men say they have
known nothing like it since the days of 1857, or the Moody and Sankey
meetings of 1874-76. By cable we learn that something of the same wave
of religious movement has appeared in London, Berlin, and Paris. We ask,
what are we to think of it? Is there a spiritual atmosphere, with its
heights and depths, mysteriously swayed from land to land? We can only
wait and see.

_December 31st, 1931.