rican Baptist Society at Nellore sends two missionaries to 935,000: and the American Lutheran Mission, occupying the two districts of Rájmundry and Guntoor, has provided five missionaries for 1,580,000. We feel the destitution still more, when we look at the towns and villages which these districts contain. Vizagapatam contains 50,000 people; Vizianagaram, 28,000; Guntoor, 12,000; Masulipatam, 60,000; Ellore, 20,000. Masulipatam has a district of 4,510 square miles: and contains 1583 villages, with hamlets double that number. Near Masulipatam itself is the town of Godoor with 3000 people: Beizwarah contains 4000 more than fifty villages contain between 2000 and 4000 inhabitants each. Yet except the chief town itself, not one town or village of that large district contains even a missionary school. The district of Rájmundry again contains twelve towns, each numbering from 6000 to 12,000 inhabitants.

Passing onward to the MYSORE, the same appalling inequality is apparent. The Mysore proper contains 3,410,382, among whom are established only four or five missionary stations with ten European missionaries. If we add BELLARY and KURNOOL, on the same upper level of table-land, whose population are of the same tribe and speak the same language, Canarese, we add 1,503,789 : and if we take in DHARWAR in the same country, we must add many thousand more, giving a total Canarese population amounting to more than five millions above the ghauts on the table-land. To these have hitherto been sent twenty missionaries who reside at ten stations. The total number of Canarese christians is 800. If we compare the Mysore with Scotland: how different does its supply of God's ministers appear. The Congregationalists in Scotland, with a hundred churches, are looked upon as a somewhat insignificant body, and yet they have three or four times the number of pastors which the Mysore has of missionaries. If we add the numerous ministers of the United Presbyterian Church; the eight hundred ministers of the Free Church; and those of the Establishment; we shall find more than two thousand ministers labouring among a population of two and a half millions, while for the five millions of the Mysore and Bellary there are no more than twenty. How can it be expected that, when marked religious progress is somewhat slow even in Scotland, it can possibly be rapid in our Indian provinces. Nor shall we improve matters by looking into the details. Scotland has large towns: but so has the Mysore: towns that may be considered numerous and well peopled, considering the poverty of the country. Bangalore in cantonments alone has 93,000 people; besides

the thousands in and around the pettah: the town and talook of Mysore contain 88,000: Seringapatam, 12,000: Chittledroog has 14,000, without a missionary: the talooks of Toomkoor and Coonghul, with one missionary, 101,000. The Bellary district has four missionaries resident in the town of Bellary. That town is the head of the district; and numbers 37,126 inhabitants with a large military force. Were it situated in the more settled parts of the United States, it would probably have not less than forty ministers of the gospel. But besides Bellary the district contains sixteen other towns all of which have 4000 inhabitants or more. Thus Kumply has 7,000: Hospett, 8,000: Gooty, 4,400; Adoni, 19,000; Harponhully, 6,000; and so on. Many have been visited by missionaries, but in none of them have they made a permanent settlement. To these sixteen towns, with above 4,000 persons each, add the 12,000 villages which are spread over its surface of 12,000 square miles. Such instances might be endlessly multiplied.

The TAMIL Country has been to some extent better supplied: but there are parts of it lamentably destitute. From Pulicat to Cape Comorin, the Tamil speaking population number 11,555,868 persons: they are divided into nine districts, some of which are very extensive and contain important towns. The total number of European and American missionaries resident among them is seventy-five: of whom sixteen are in Tinnevelly alone and seventeen in the province of Tanjore. I will not weary you with pointing out all the large and flourishing towns; and shewing the disproportion between the number of their teachers and the population to be taught. I will mention the case of one district alone, whose utter destitution you will at once perceive. NORTH ARCOT possesses a total population of 1,485,000. It includes in greater abundance than usual well peopled villages and towns. Thus Vellore contains 120,000: Arcot, 16,000: Wallajapett, 20,000: Raneepett, 18,000: Goriatum, 10,000: Amboor, 11,000: Arnee, 16,000: Tripatty, 9,000: and six others, each 4,000 or more; all carrying on good trade and in prosperous circumstances, yet among them all, there is but ONE missionary in the town of Arcot. If we enter the adjoining district of SALEM, we find one missionary among 942,000 people. In Coimbatoor, with 1,152,862 people, there are two missionaries resident in the chief

town.

The province of TRAVANCORE is supplied in a similarly disproportionate manner. Out of its 1,280,000 the London Missionary Society has placed eight missionaries in eleven districts with 505,000 people;

and the Church Missionary Society eight missionaries in twenty-one districts with 775,000. Again we say: What are these among so many? In whatever way we take up the subject, whether we look at parts or at the whole, we cannot fail to realise a deep conviction that in South India the work of the Lord is but just begun. We may rejoice to know that 76,000 persons are called by the name of Christ and have the gospel regularly preached to them as their chosen authority in religion: or that more than 10,000 are so advanced in knowledge and character as to be admitted to the Communion of the Lord's Supper. But on the other hand we see but one hundred and eighty missionaries, European and native, in the whole population of twenty-seven millions: and find, scattered over the country, towns with fifty, thirty and twenty thousand inhabitants where none reside at all: while thousands upon thousands of villages have never been entered by missionaries to preach the gospel even once in the half century. The more fully therefore, we enter into detail, the deeper will our conviction grow, of the real spiritual destitution in which this great portion of our Indian empire lies.

Again there are the Again there are the studding the country

:

Let us not forget another thing: the effect which such a state of things has upon a missionary's own mind: as he contrasts the feebleness of his own efforts with the vastness of the evils with which he contends. Mr. Fox has described it very clearly in one of his letters: "I am lost and bewildered in the multitude of my work. There lies before me the crowded population of this large town, Masulipatam, with 60,000 inhabitants they are to be preached to, to have an impression made upon them. If I go to one part one day, and to another part another day, my time and labour are dissipated. If I keep myself to one portion, my labour is swallowed up in the great flood of heathenism... villages in the suburbs: fine, populous villages. numerous villages and still more numerous hamlets all round about. Where I am to begin, I know not. Then there ought to be schools, to be established, to be looked after, to be watched and taught. I cannot so much as begin them. And so, though I may be preaching continually to the adults, there is the rising generation growing up in their heathenism. ... Above all it is only a very limited portion of the day that I can be engaged in out-of-door work: the short periods before and after sunrise and sunset. Then comes the work of translation: tracts there are in some numbers: books are only yet by ones and twos. Who is sufficient to unite in himself these multifarious duties, for tens and hundreds of thousands?" Another extract from one of his

letters illustrates the state of the people so situated. "I rode 250 miles in a straight line through a populous country, passing through villages every three or four miles, and seeing others in all directions; occasionally also coming to considerable towns: but in all that district there was not a single christian missionary, not one person from whom a heathen might hear the word of life. My road lay parallel to the sea coast, at no great distance from it, but I might have gone inland for 100, 200 or 300 miles and, except in one place, have found the whole land equally wanting in christian teachers. My district is nearly 100 miles each way, it is impossible that I can visit even the chief villages for two or three days each, during the six months in the year in which the weather allows me to be out." We have then the argument of numbers in an appeal to christian churches for greater sacrifices and more zealous efforts to instruct the people of Southern India.

THE STRENGTH OF SUPERSTITION.

BUT other arguments exist besides. The people of South India are idolaters equally with the Hindus among whom we dwell. They are in bondage equally with the people of Bengal: they have prejudged the question of changing their religion as firmly and as erroneously as have our neighbours. They have the same, if not stronger, obstacles in the way of accepting the gospel. CASTE, which is so strong with the Hindus of North India, and produces so much open enmity to the gospel, is even stronger in South India than in Bengal. The existence of a large class of Párias, deemed outcast, has made all Hindus of caste the more watchful in keeping themselves from pollution. The bráhmans being fewer in number than with us, and the outcasts so numerous, the Sudras, who are of no rank here, are men of great respectability there. The varying degrees, in which different ranks may pollute a superior, are distinctly defined. The Párias may not sit in presence of the Sudras, and frequently have schools been temporarily broken up, because the missionary wished to teach both together. In Travancore the different classes cannot approach nearer than a fixed number of steps. One class, the Náyades, must never presume to enter a village even to purchase food: they must call out for some one, leave the money on a stone, and are left entirely at the mercy of his honesty, as to whether they will receive any thing in exchange. The lower classes are often severely beaten for infringing the prescribed rules. The extreme is reached in

one poor set of people, so excessively low, so intensely degraded in public estimation, that they are never to be seen by the light of day. When so many Párias have become Christians, I need not stop to describe the estimation in which the whole body are held by the heathen: nor to exhibit the powerful obstacle which this high caste spirit places in the way of a candid acknowledgement of that truth which an unbiassed judgment must approve. The same cause has tended to promote great bigotry among all classes of Hindus, and to elevate the comparatively small caste of bráhmans into a class more powerful than with us. This is particularly the case in Travancore, in Madura and in Tanjore. Every brahman in South India is a great personage, and I believe almost all live by their priestly office, instead of being driven like thousands in Bengal to support themselves by honest trade.

THE GREAT TEMPLE ESTABLISHMENTS.

ANOTHER cause of the great influence of Hinduism in Madras is seen in the wealthy temple establishments, by which numerous bráhmans are supported, and in which festivals are celebrated upon a grand scale. We have no temples in Bengal like the celebrated temples found throughout the Tamil districts of the Madras Presidency: and it may be interesting therefore to give some information respecting them. They are made somewhat in the following way. The actual shrine of the idol is usually a low, common-looking stone-building at the side of a broad, well-paved court. Near it will be found a large hall with a flat roof, supported in most cases by a thousand pillars; this hall has no walls on its outer sides, but is left entirely open. Sometimes the pillars are well carved, sometimes they are common slabs of stone. Near the great hall there is usually a tank, entirely faced with stone steps, and having a small temple of six or eight pillars, rising from a stone platform in the very centre of the water. The court in which the shrine, the hall and the tank are situated, has many smaller buildings about it, sometimes with massive figures of bulls; and is generally enclosed by high stone walls. In the entrance of these walls is built the most conspicuous portion of the whole establishment, viz. a tall heavy-looking TOWER, sometimes rising to the height of two hundred feet. These towers are shaped like a wedge, sloping off on the four sides, but wider than they are deep: their top is straight, and is ornamented with the representation of a flame of fire bursting upward. These towers are the most conspicuous objects in the temple; but are not parti