I attended a service on Thursday morning in the Greek Church. Not understanding the language or motions, I supposed the priests were preparing to perform the marriage ceremony for a well-dressed and handsome couple who stood by themselves in a recess. But the service being short, the supposed bride kissed the crucifix held up to her, and both retired, passing quite near me, entered a carriage, and drove away. It proved to be King George and Queen Olga. The young king looks amiable, and is said to be quite democratic and unassuming, whether of choice or necessity does not appear. He is a Lutheran, and has a private chapel and chaplain in his palace, while his wife is of the Greek Church of Russia. The government gives but a meager support to the higher clergy. The Metropolitan Bishop of Athens receives but one thousand and seventy-five dollars; other bishops less. From this and other facts it would seem that the Greek Church has not a stronghold in Greece. A pure and earnest type of religion, I am persuaded, would rapidly commend itself to the people. As a result of the ecclesiastical degeneracy in Greece the educated men are reported to be infidel. Therefore the learning of this rising Greek microcosm of letters threatens to become a mighty power of mischief, because unsanctified.

Now, what is vital Christianity doing to resuscitate this dead Church, or to supersede it? What Protestant agencies are at work to leaven the Greek schools with evangelism, and regen-. erate the head and heart of the Hellenic race? I found five Protestant organizations represented in Athens. The first and oldest mission is that of the Protestant Episcopal Church, founded more than fifty years ago by Dr. and Mrs. Hill. They are still there, though the doctor has passed into the venerable state of emeritus superannuation, being an octogenarian of eighty-six years. His work chiefly consists in teaching schools. He employs American ladies as teachers, and they make part of his family. Dr. Hill fraternizes more with the Greek Church than with the other Protestant missionaries. I was told that the Greek priests are so well pleased with him, that they have intimated a willingness, in case of his death, to give him a funeral. His schools are large, and, though subject to the inspection and teaching of the Catechism by the Greek priests, they are evangelical in their tendency.

The second mission is Congregational, under Dr. Constantine, supported through a committee composed of the president and professors of Amherst College. Dr. Constantine preaches every Sabbath to a congregation of forty, with a Sunday-school of the same number. He has written and published a commentary on the New Testament in modern Greek. The doctor is doing a good work, and if all his irons were made red hot by a baptism of the Holy Ghost he would burn his way into the Greek heart.

The Presbyterians of the South are represented in the person of Rev. Mr. Kalipatharkis, a man of Greek origin, like his colleague, Dr. Constantine. His work, however, is more discursive. He itinerates, and depends more upon public preaching. In this line he meets with some opposition and danger from violence. He, too, has a good school, and is evidently diffusing an evangelical influence. Another Greek, Rev. Mr. Sacularis, represents the Baptist Church, and is doing similar work, with the same moderate success.

The Woman's Union Foreign Missionary Society, whose head-quarters are in New York city, had two female workers in Athens. One of them, Mrs. Fluhart, is a Methodist. Excepting this lone prophetess, in this abnormal relation, Methodism has no part or lot in the matter of Greek evangelization. These ladies impressed me as being both earnest and spiritual, and they had a most interesting school. Since we were there the government officers required them to hang a picture of the "Virgin" on the wall of the school-room, and allow the priests to come in and catechise the children. This they refused, and the school was closed. They have now gone to Cyprus, where John Bull will see that they have fair play.

I might mention another agency, which will show the unrest and struggles of the Greek mind in relation to religion.

There lives in Athens a materialist, who has published the English Prayer Book in the native language, to which he has appended moral exhortations. Being a man of wealth, he circulates the book gratuitously. He professes to be influenced. by motives of patriotism, and justifies his inconsistency on the ground that morality and religion are necessary to the existence and prosperity of the State. There is, also, an association

called the "Friends of the People," which gives free public lectures, secular and religious.

From all these facts it appears that the unclean spirit of polytheism, and of groveling baseness and brutality, which characterizes the Turk and the Arab, has gone out of the ruling spirit of the Hellenic people. The Greek mind is "empty, swept, and garnished" by literature and civilization, so far as that can be done by those agencies. Now the danger is that the unclean spirit, finding the Greek mind in such a prepared condition, will "take to itself seven other spirits," and re-enter, when the last state of that nation will be worse than the first. What is the duty of the living Churches in such an emergency? Is it not that at any expense and without the loss of a day they should preoccupy this educated moral vacuity with pure gospel truth? What missionary field on the face of the globe demands such haste? or where else shall we find forces so potential ready to our hand? Greece, to-day, is a magazine of literary and intellectual thunderbolts. These are active agents, that cannot lie inert, like buried gold and fossil remains, doing neither good nor harm for ages. It is in their nature to make themselves felt for good or for evil. If they are sanctified, Greece may soon be next to England as an intelligent evangelizer; if not, she will soon supplement German rationalism and French infidelity.

True to her ancestral character, Greece is destined to be a nation of ideas. Her thin soil and rugged hills necessitate this. Thought is born of rocks, and genius of hard times. In every age we find the muses and genius nestled among mountain peaks, and perched on crags, and dipping their wings in troubled waters. Greece, like New England, Scotland, and the hill country of India, is required by nature to give birth to intellectual greatness. Anciently she felt these mental throes indigenous to her soil, and, having no Star of Bethlehem to guide her wise men to the infant incarnate Light of the world, that lay sleeping in Mary's arms, they gave to the world the highest type of heathen philosophy, and a universal standard of flowing numbers. It was a spontaneity. She did her best. It was not her fault that some of her theories turned out to be philosophy falsely so-called; it was the want of light; and now that she has come out of her grave the only nation that has had

a resurrection in the history of the world, and is beginning instinctively to build up her ancient glory in the kingdom of letters, it must be that Providence has a mission for her of no ordinary magnitude. It may be the divine purpose that from this little "Ephratah" the Saviour shall go forth again to resuscitate the extinct apostolic Churches. The literature of Greece is now circulated in Thessalonica, Smyrna, and other sites of these old apostolic foundations. Greeks print twentyfive daily newspapers.

The Church cannot afford to neglect these occult forces and pent-up energies of New Greece. They are irrepressible, and must become a "savor of life unto life, or of death unto death." The duty of the hour is to saturate the schools and literature of Greece with spiritual Christianity, and we must cease to depend on the scholastic method, and mass our strength on direct preaching. Who will go, without purse or scrip, if need be, and preach on Mars' Hill? If I were young I would haste to this moral waste, where the letter killeth, asking only to be ac.credited by my Church and commissioned by the Holy Ghost.

ART. VI.-MILEY ON THE ATONEMENT.

THE Atonement is the heart of the Christian organism. As our Lord Jesus Christ, in the act of crucifixion, thrust forward his heart, as his head reclined to the right, and as the Roman soldier pierced the pericardium with his spear when the atoning death was achieved, making the physical organ visible, so is the heart of God revealed in all the vital functions which the atonement affects. A defective theory of Atonement involves cardinally a defective theology. It is heart disease in its highest, worst, and most fatal form. A true theory of Atonement sends its life-blood into every fiber and tissue of a body of divinity, and compels the health of symmetrical "proportion of faith," as the apostle calls it, by throwing off what is extraneous, and healing what is defective. Andrew Fuller thought systematic theology should begin at the cross as the center of divine manifestation, and from that focal point of infinite light, love, justice, wisdom, and condescending

almightiness, the endless rays of all divine attributes, purposes, plans, and works could be traced to best advantage.

Methodism has had from the start a homogeneous and symmetrical theology. It is such a theology as will bear being preached. It has not one set of dogmas for the creed and catechism and another for the pulpit. Truth never needs suppression; still less is it capable of contradiction. A complimentary representative from a Calvinistic denomination told our General Conference a few years ago that Calvinists preached like Arminians. If Arminianism is good for the pulpit, it is good for the creed, the catechism, the theologic treatise, the profession of faith; for the one ought to be the exponent of the other, and truth is sacrificed if there be disharmony.

So busy has Methodism been in preaching its saving truths, demonstrated as truths by their widespread saving efficacy, that we have had very little time to formulate them into a literature. Dr. Miley, who has shown by his footnotes and otherwise that he has surveyed the field, frankly confesses that our literature on this central theme of salvation is very meager. Methodism is rich in literature. We have our precious biographies, our sacred lyrics, our biblical comments, our systematic divinity, our homiletics; but anthropology and soteriology have not taken wide and specific literary form.

A new ecclesiastical era is upon us. What Amherst has been to Congregationalism and Princeton to Presbyterianism, Drew, Evanston, and Boston are about to be to Methodism. A book-making age has come to our Zion. Whether it will be best for the unity, simplicity, and effectiveness of our faith remains to be seen. This book of Dr. Miley's, at all events, is a great gain in the right direction. We hail it with pleasure.

It is natural for a teacher to write didactically. This excellent book is evidently prepared for didactic purposes. The didactic needs of the author in the lecture-room doubtless necessitated it, and the material is put in the form of a textbook, which will probably take its place in our theological seminaries and in the revised course of study for our traveling preachers.

Dr. Miley's cast of mind is logical, perhaps too severely so. Logic is shy of tropes and metaphors. Logic keeps the naked