tened by holding the higher attributes in abeyance, or brought into prominence at the expense of judgment and love of truth. Ripe scholarship and disciplined thought, even under the training he is receiving in America, will give to the negro a freshness, a manliness, a hopefulness, and a faith which will deliver him from the tyranny of his surroundings, widen his view of his own capabilities, make him conscious of belonging. to a race which has rich things in store for the world, and glo rify his heart with a thousand strange and fruitful sympathies and with endless heroic aspirations..

The negro who is really restless on the subject of caste in America is he who, from defective culture or lack of culture, has not half found out the calling of his race; who, conse quently, unduly impressed by his surroundings, is eager for im mediate success, and anxious to play his part well amid the circumstances in which he finds himself-aiming at technical skill, which is popular or fashionable, rather than artistic life, which may be unique and unpopular. Fascinated by the present, he cannot conceive any thing else, and harasses himself with the ever-recurring and ever-unsatisfying and unsatisfactory task of imitating imitators. The negro raised to Mr. Heywood's standard will feel the force of Emerson's words:

We like only such actions as have already long had the praise of men, and do not perceive that any thing man can do may be divinely done. We think greatness entailed or organized in some places, or duties in certain offices or occasions, and do not see that Paganini can extract rapture from a catgut, and Eulenstein from a jew's-harp, and a limber-fingered lad out of shreds of paper with his scissors, and Landseer out of swine, and the hero out of the pitiful habitation and company in which he was hidden. What we call obscure condition or vulgar society is that condition and society whose poetry is not yet written, but which you shall presently make as enviable and renowned as any."

*

Recognizing the force of these truths, the cultivated negro will have insight enough to discover his exact relation to surrounding superficial phenomena, and self-respect and independence enough to acknowledge the fact that his peculiar workcannot be done under the overshadowing influence of a foreign race; that there he cannot "communicate himself to others in his full stature and proportion ;" and, feeling this, he will turn

"Prose Works," vol. ii, p. 291.

to the fatherland, to "the one direction in which all space is open to him," and under the conviction that "he has faculties inviting him thither to endless exertion."

The teachers of the negro in America cannot have failed to observe that there seems always to be in the minds of their pupil some reservation which they cannot overcome, some hesitancy which they cannot explain, but which they attribute to a sort of modesty growing out of a sense of inferiority in the pupil. But the fact is, that, under the influence of the means of culture to which he has access, his race-consciousness is kindled into active and sensitive life, and he receives under mental protest many a dogma which for European growth and development is orthodox and inspiring. Not only the physical and metaphysical teachings often puzzle and contradict his deepest feelings, but even the Scriptures are at times a perplexity to him; and as he becomes acquainted with the original languages in which they were written, he feels that there is in them a temporary and local element which must be separated from the permanent and universal before the sacred records can utter what in the depths of his being he wants to say. But in America he will never be able to make the discrimination that will be useful to him. He will never be able to translate the letter, which is often adapted to another age and race, into the spirit of his own times and race. He is, therefore, lonely with his secret, with which nothing around him seems to sympathize. Development is denied him; he cannot expand. He fills his belly with theories and dogmas which to him are like the dry, hard husk. He cannot digest them, and they afford him no nourishment. Nearly every thing he produces comes from the memory; very little flows fresh from the heart. The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States is the result, in part, of just such experiences on the part of the Bishop Al- lens of a former day. They found that the waters flowing from the fountain which God had opened in their soul were slackened and half-choked by being forced through the pent-up and artificial channels provided for them in the white Churches, and they established that noble organization—the admiration of negroes every-where, which during the last fifty years has attained such wonderful growth-that the living streams of their unfettered nature might wind their own sweet way along the

meadows of an ecclesiastical Liberia. If the fare with which they were furnished in the new religious republic was ridiculed by their enemies as "ash cake," it was to them more than the wheat bread upon which they were starved in their previous connection. The food now dispensed to them was to their souls the very bread of life.

But there are many drawbacks to this imperium in imperio. It grew out of a temporary and local necessity, and, like all such products, must be partial and limited in its influence. Does it not become this most honorable and useful body--this first-born of African Churches-this pledge and proof of Africa's future evangelization-to inquire whether they may not increase their efficiency and even develop their central strength by taking a wider, deeper, and more practical interest in the land of their fathers, in their kith and kin in Africa? Their system is capable of indefinite development in the vast and unoccupied field which this continent presents. The message to them, as a Church of Christ, is, "Go ye into all the world;" -not only over the United States, from California to New York and from. New England to Texas, but to "regions beyond," especially to the lost sheep of their own race. Their talents, it occurs to us, are not as useful and as profitable as they might be made. This is a drawback and a mistake. If it be sinful to wrap our talent in a napkin and hide it in the earth, it is only one degree less sinful so to handle it as to make it yield twofold only where it might yield ten. We are persuaded, however, that it is not the courage they lack for the work, but conviction. The same self-control and self-reliance, the same energy and independence, which led to the founding of the African Churches in the United States would readily, if there were earnest conviction on the subject, sacrifice the charms of home, the comforts of civilization, the aesthetic and sensuous attractions of an enlightened country, for the labors and toils and privations of the wilderness. They are quite equal to, and have shown themselves worthy of, the great achievement of taking possession of the whole valley of the Niger for Christ. Let them arise and come, and they will find in the home of their widowed parent that "the barrel of meal will not waste, nor will the cruse of oil fail." Freedom from restraint ought not to be our ultimate and final object, but FREEDOM TO WOR

SHIP GOD: and the desire for such freedom is, in certain aspects of the subject, among the happiest of the popular instincts of the negro race.

It is remarkable that the message which Moses was commanded to bear to the tyrant Pharaoh was not "Let my people go that they may be free," but "Let my people go that they may serve ME." As long as they remained in a strange country under a foreign race they could not render that service for which they were fitted, and which God requires of every man. They could not serve the Lord with their "whole heart," the undiminished fullness of their nature, in carrying out the purposes of their being. "How could they sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" Their race impulses and instincts were hampered, confused, and impaired. So with the negro in America. Although their gatherings, of whatever nature, are usually marked and enlivened by a stream of religious feeling which continually flows with a rapid and sometimes boisterous current, still they cannot fully know God in that land, for they see him through the medium of others. Here and there there may be a "Caleb, who has another spirit within him, and follows the Lord fully;" but the masses are distracted by the disturbing media. The body, soul, and spirit do not work in harmony. The religious passions are predominant in their influence among them, and they show a co-operative and successful energy in ecclesiastical organizations; but in their political struggles there is no attempt at any logical or reasoned solution of their difficulties. "The negro," says Rev. Joseph Cook, "has gone to the wall in Mississippi, in spite of having a majority there and the suffrage. And he is likely to go to the wall in South Carolina. He is going to the wall even where he has a majority; and his inferiority in politics results from his lack of education" -such an education as he can never receive in America. let him be delivered from the restraints of his exile; let him be set free from the stocks that now confine him, and he will not only arise and walk, but he will point out the way to his eminent success, which, in his particular line, only he can find out, and which he must find out for himself. He will discover the central point from which the lines may be easily and infallibly drawn to all the points of the circle in which he is to move effectively in the true work of his race for his own elevation and

But

the advantage of the rest of mankind. He will prove that what in African history and character seems nebulous confusion is really a firmament of stars. There are stars, astronomers tell us, whose light has not yet reached the earth; so there are stars in the moral universe yet to be disclosed by the unfettered African, which he must discover before he will be able to progress without wandering into perilous seas and suffering serious injury. Let him, then, return to the land of his fathers, and ACQUAINT HIMSELF WITH GOD, AND BE AT PEACE.

ART. VI.-THE GREAT EPIC OF INDIA.

The Ramayan of Valmiki Translated into English Verse. By RALPH T. H. GRIFFITH, M.A., Principal of the Benares College. Five vols. London: Trubner & Co. Benares: E. J. Lazarus & Co. 1870-1874.

The Ramayan of Tulsi Das. Translated by F. S. GROWSE, M.A., B. C. S. Book I, CHILDHOOD. Allahabad: North-western Provinces Government Press. 1877.

In an article on "Dante" in a former number of this Review, the author wrote: "We count but four as having in the course of literature risen to the first class of epic poets-Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton* . . . . The Iliad,' the 'Eneid,' the 'Vision,' and 'Paradise Lost' exhaust our catalogue." To these must be added the illustrious name of Valmiki, and in this catalogue a place not the lowest must be given to the "Ramayan."

The hero of this poem is Rama or Ram Chandra, the seventh incarnation of Vishnu, (the Preserver in the Hindu Triad ;) and, although he was born as other men are, and sinned as other men do, still he was a wonderful personage; as the Hindus recount, "virtuous, heroic, firm, true, grateful, good, kind, bounteous, and holy, just, and wise," comparable with "Sun, Moon, Indra, Vishnu, Fire, and Air." Of the ten incarnations of Vishnu Ram Chandra is by far the most popular, and the hold he has upon the hearts of this hero-loving nation can hardly be over-estimated. In every part of the country "RamRam!" is a common term of salutation; by river's bank and under the peepul's shade devotees sit days at a time repeating, from dawn till dark, "Ram-Ram! Ram-Ram!" The Janam + Ibid., p. 51.

* Methodist Quarterly Review, January, 1852, p. 50.