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carried her to the summit of some rocks five hundred yards north of the fall. After circumnavigating Victoria and Tanganyika lakes, and floating down the Congo fourteen hundred miles, and after a journey of seven thousand miles over broad Africa and its waters, she was consigned to her resting-place above the Isangila Cataract, to bleach and rot to dust."

August 4 every thing useless was abandoned, and they began their last overland journey, "a wayworn, suffering, feeble column, nearly forty men sick with dysentery, ulcers, scurvythe victims of the latter disease steadily increasing." "Only three days off from food!" "Next day, when morning was graying, we lifted our weakened limbs for another march. Up and down the desolate, sad land wound the poor hungry caravan; in melancholy and silent procession, voiceless as sphinxes, we felt our way down into a deep gully, and crawled up again and camped. It was night before all had arrived." They could go no farther, apparently. In this extremity Stanley resolved to send a letter to the coast, and three of his men volunteered to carry it. In two days an answer came from the residents of Boma, and with the answer, food for the starving expedition. They were saved, and the solution of the problem of the centuries was revealed to the civilized world.

Stanley and Cameron had each a similar experience as they approached the Atlantic coast. Starley converts it into drama; Cameron tells the tale of suffering and deliverance in his usual matter-of-fact way.

"The marching powers of my men had gone from bad to worse, and I saw that some decisive step must be taken or the caravan would never reach the coast, now only one hundred and twenty-six geographical miles distant. Upward of twenty men complained of being unable to walk far or to carry any thing, swelled legs, stiff necks, aching backs, and empty stomachs being the universal cry." He resolved to throw away every thing, tent, boat, bed, every thing but books and instruments, and, with a few picked men, make his way to the coast, and send back relief for the remainder. After a few days of forced marches the forlorn hope came in sight of the sea, and, when utterly exhausted and worn out, he dispatched a note to Katombéle, and received as hearty a welcome from the residents as Stanley received from the merchants at Boma. Cameron,

nearly dead of scurvy, sent his men in a schooner to Zanzibar by way of Good Hope, and himself took passage for England.

Stanley accompanied his expedition, or the relics of it, back to Zanzibar, every-where lionized, at Embomma, at St. Paul de Loanda, at Cape Town, at Zanzibar, in England, and in America. It is with just pride that he records, in the Preface to his volumes, the honors showered upon him by every learned Geographical Society in Europe, and that his achievement was crowned by a unanimous vote of thanks by both Houses of the Congress of the United States, an "honor more precious than all the rest." Of the expedition one hundred and fourteen died; eighty-nine were returned to Zanzibar; fourteen were drowned; fifty-eight died in battle. Small-pox and dysentery

were the two most destructive disorders.

On the 17th of November, 1874, the expedition took the "first bold step for the interior; on the 26th November, 1877, the relics of it went ashore at Zanzibar." How did Stanley part with his black followers? "Sweet and sad moments those of parting." "Through what strange vicissitudes of life had these men not followed me!" "What noble fidelity these un tutored souls had exhibited! The chiefs were those who had followed me to Ujiji in 1871." "For years to come there will be told in many homes in Zanzibar the great story of our jour ney, and the actors in it will be heroes with their kin. For me, too, they are heroes, those poor ignorant children of Africa, for, from the first deadly struggle in savage Ituru to the last staggering march into Boma, they rallied to my voice like veterans, and in the hour of need they never failed me." Stanley has unbounded faith in the future of the black man. He is (at this writing) again in Africa. What is his errand? He has told no one. Something he will doubtless accomplish, and African soil may yet become the resting-place of the mortal remains of the indefatigable traveler.

Present appearances afford just ground for hope that the nineteenth century will not close without adding to its numberless triumphs in science, art, discovery, wealth, and civilization, the thorough exploration of the entire continent of Africa, said by Malte-Brun to be the "last portion of the civilized world which awaits at the hands of Europeans the salutary yoke of legislation and culture." Savage Central Africa is being

brought to the knowledge of geographers, bit by bit, with a rapidity paralleled in our own West, so rapidly that we need not be ashamed of ignorance of the latest phase of African discovery if an intelligent Bostonian could innocently ask “in what State Montana is situated!" Let the remaining twenty years of the century be as fruitful in discovery as the last twenty, and but few of the squares made on the map by intersecting meridians and parallels will longer tantalize by their blank whiteness; lake coasts, mountains, and rivers will not longer be laid down from unreliable native and Arab information, the dotted lines of doubt will be replaced by the firm tracings of actual survey or personal inspection.

Railroads and telegraphs will intersect the lands. Slavery will be blotted out. Munsas, Mtesas, Mirambos, and Riongas will be civilized by the united influences of commerce and Christianity. The three great enemies to the progress of Christianity in Africa are slavery, rum, and gunpowder. Mohammedanism, with its slavery and polygamy, is but a slight advance on pure heathenism. To the Christian Africa is one of the most interesting portions of the globe to-day. Some of its tribes are quite advanced in civilization and the arts, and some are fearfully low and degraded. Arab slavers have cursed. one side of the continent, and Portuguese the other; but slavery is coming to an end. Probably but few more costly exploring expeditions will be fitted or needed to settle the few geographical questions that still remain unsettled. Merchants and missionaries will gradually extend the area of geographical knowledge, and colonies may yet be projected on the borders of interior lakes and rivers, and the African, in the providence of God and the order of events, will yet emerge from childhood, and develop all the powers and capacities of the fully civilized

man.

ART. III. THE BASLE SESSION OF THE EVANGELICAL ALLIANCE.

Siebente Hauptversammlung der Evangelischen Allianz, gehalten in Basel vom 31 August bis 7 September, 1879. Berichte und Reden herausgegeben in Auftrag des Comité der Allianz, durch CHRISTOPH JOHANNES RIGGENBACH, D.D., 2 Bände, Seiten 1054. Basel, 1879.

THE small is always bringing to pass the great. Christianity, with its measureless productive power, seems to delight in its easy potency to measure the long distance between the little mustard seed and the great sheltering tree. One day in May, 1839, while the New York anniversaries were in progress, a few persons met in a room of the American Tract Society, and formed themselves into a group for the purpose of promoting brotherly union among all evangelical Christians. Having taken an organic shape, the society purchased several hundred copies of a thin volume with the title, "Fraternal Appeal to the American Churches," which were distributed gratuitously among leading ministers and laymen in the various Churches of the country. The association was short-lived. It lacked cohesive power, and its plan seemed at least visionary. But it was the first effort of which there is any record, in any country, of an attempt to group the Protestant Churches into a sisterhood, with the avowed object of accomplishing work and realizing results desirable alike by all. Good thoughts never die, and this one crossed the Atlantic, and took shape almost simultaneously in England, Germany, and France. Even the failure of the first attempt in New York did not discourage further effort at organization, for, in 1845, the late Rev. Dr. S. S. Schmucker prepared an address on Christian Union, and, having obtained the assent and promise of co-operation of about fifty ministers and laymen, placed their names to his address, which he termed an "Overture for Christian Union," and called a meeting during the anniversary week of 1846.

Meanwhile a society had been formed in London, in the Wesleyan Centenary Hall, in February, 1845, and in June following held its first public meeting. Arrangements were there made for the first general meeting, to be convened in London in August, 1846. Invitations were extended to the American Churches to co-operate, and these were promptly accepted.

The conference called by Dr. Schmucker in New York did not take place, but was dropped by common consent, as not now necessary. When the London meeting occurred, it was found that the leading European Churches were represented, that there were delegates from the United States, and that the popular interest far surpassed all expectations. It was at this gathering that a confederation was formed, bearing the name of the Evangelical Alliance. From that time to the present its object has been definite and unchanged, and the work it has accomplished has entered into the positive gains for our common Protestantism.

The doctrinal basis of the Evangelical Alliance was laid down at the first general session of the Alliance in London, and was afterward approved by all the European branches, and by the American branch in January, 1867. It is as follows: 1. The divine inspiration, authority, and sufficiency of the holy Scriptures. 2. The right and duty of private judgment in the interpretation of holy Scripture. 3. The unity of the Godhead, or the trinity of the persons therein. 4. The utter depravity of human nature in consequence of the fall. 5. The incarnation of the Son of God, his work of atonement for the sins of mankind, and his mediatorial intercession and reign. 6. The justification of the sinner by faith alone. 7. The work of the Holy Spirit in the conversion and sanctification of the sinner. 8. The immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the body, the judgment of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, with the eternal blessedness of the righteous, and the eternal punishment of the wicked. 9. The divine institution of the Christian ministry, and the obligation and perpetuity of the ordinances of baptism and the Lord's Supper.

There have been thus far eight general sessions of the Alliance: London, August, 1846; Paris, August, 1855; Berlin, September, 1857; Geneva, September, 1861; Amsterdam, August, 1867; New York, October, 1873; and Basle, September, 1879.

The Basle session was different in many respects from all its predecessors. There was a degree of confidence and hopefulness as to the work to be done, and the part to be taken by the Alliance in the great future of Protestantism, which could hardly be expected of the body in its earlier period. As might

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