well and would probably get up. While lying there the young man told the story of his leaving the old home in the country for employment in the city, where he fell into bad company, and then into crime which landed him in prison. After the cholera had spent itself in the prison, a pardon was procured for the young man, and we had him up at our house, hoping that the good work the doctor of medicine had done might be continued, "as well for the body as for the soul."

The life of a physician and surgeon abounds in scenes of interest, painful, sometimes pleasant. Each one of these lives would furnish material for a volume. It was emphatically true in the case of this brother of mine, who closed his practice and his life in the year 1864 at the age of fifty-three. His practice and his life, I say, because they ran together until the very end. He made his daily rounds until Thursday, though suffering with a dreadful cold. On Friday he saw patients at home, and called in a physician for himself. Saturday this doctor took me aside and asked if I knew the condition of the patient.

On

"He is dying, I believe," was my answer. "He is,” replied the doctor, "and I am astonished: this morning I had no thought that he was in danger."

I watched the action of his heart: feebly it went on with its work for a few moments and then stopped; went on again and stopped again; and then went on. We fought the inevitable steadily, knowing too well that defeat was sure. His aged mother, under more than eighty years' burden, wiped the death-damp from his brow, and with tenderness unspeakable moaned plaintively:

"My son, my first-born son !”

I said to him: Brother, is your soul in peace?" And he answered: "My hope is in the Lord Jesus Christ and in him only."

And so he died. He saved others, even convicts in prison with cholera, but himself he could not save. Death destroyed the body; Jesus, the conqueror of death, was the Saviour of his soul,

If you think it not becoming that I should relate this story of a brave brother's heroism in pestilence and prison, I would plead in excuse that more than half a century has passed since he fought this good fight he has been sleeping in his grave more than twenty years, and this story is but a weak tribute of fraternal love.

FIVE MARTYRS OF ERROMANGA.

LAST Saturday evening I had great satisfaction in meeting with the Rev. W. H. Robertson, a missionary from Erromanga, one of the New Hebrides group of islands. This island was made conspicuous in religious history more than forty years ago by the murder of an illustrious missionary, John Williams, and an English gentleman, Mr. Harris, his companion.

Just forty years ago I made an abridgment of the Life of John Williams, which was published by the American Sunday-school Union, and called "The Martyr Missionary of Erromanga, who was murdered and eaten by the savages in one of the South Sea Islands." It was therefore with peculiar interest that I now met a successor of that noble martyr, and learned from him the subsequent history of the island and its missionary work.

John Williams was sent out from England as early as the year 1816. Robert Moffat was set apart with several others at the same time. Such eminent English ministers as John Angell James, George Burder and Dr. Waugh participated in the services. Moffat went to Africa, Williams to the South Sea. One of them afterwards saw Ethiopia stretching forth her hands unto God, and the other heard the islands of the sea rejoicing in his law. After long years of wonderfully successful labor, Mr. Williams was making a missionary voyage among the islands and seeking to plant missionstations on some not yet occupied, and where the language

of the natives was unknown to him. With four or five others, he went ashore on the island of Erromanga, and in half an hour was set upon by the savages and cruelly beaten to death, with Mr. Harris, a friend who was with him. Others escaped to the boat and were saved. This awfu! event filled the religious world with horror, and served to fasten attention upon the dark places of the earth filled with habitations of cruelty.

Years passed on and the island that had drunk the blood of these martyrs remained in the darkness of paganism, with only feeble attempts by teachers from other islands to arrest the cannibalism that prevailed, and to give to those pagans a knowledge of a higher life. At length the Rev. G. Nichols Gordon and wife went out from Canada, in 1857, under the care of the Canadian Missionary Society. They succeeded in winning the favor of the natives so far as to be allowed to settle among them and to begin to do something for their good. An epidemic broke out after Mr. and Mrs. Gordon had been there four years, and the superstitious natives attributed the evil to the coming of these missionaries. And so they murdered them both.

Again the island was left desolate. It richly deserved the wrath of God; and had he forever cut it off from the light of the gospel, the sentence would have been just. Who would now think of venturing into this den of wild beasts to subdue and convert them? Would it not be madness to try another experiment? And who would be responsible for the blood of another martyr, poured out upon the shore of that inhospitable isle ?

But when was God ever without a witress, a martyr ?

At length in the fulness of time a younger brother of the murdered Gordon said to his Canadian brethren, "Here am I: send me.” And they sent him in 1864. In the zeal of young love for Christ, he took his life in his hands and went with his widowed mother's blessing over wide and trackless seas, and found this isle of blood where four precious lives had been sacrificed and no good done! Was it right to go? Does God call for such sacrifice? He went alone, save that

one like unto the Son of man was with him. He lived among the natives. He learned their language, translated portions of the Bible into their tongue, and made known the gospel. And they rose up and slew him. Mr. Robertson tells me they hated the gospel that he taught, and they killed him because they hated the truths that he spake unto them. Another martyr, the fifth in doleful succession, and the island is still not sunk in the sea. Surely the Lord is long-suffering and very gracious or he would not bear with these cruel and wicked men.

Three months after the younger Gordon was slain the Rev. Mr. Robertson arrived at the island with his wife, and took up the work that had been so often drowned in blood. The population of the island is about 2600 in number, and they had settled on the shore in two divisions about twenty miles apart. One of these divisions, a thousand people, were disposed to receive instruction and to tolerate teachers. They sowed the seed, precious seed, weeping. Perhaps the ground was more fertile because it had been made rich by the blood of the saints who had given their lives for Christ. And after years of fruitless toil the blessing came. The windows of heaven opened and the rain descended. These cannibals learned the way of life. They cast away their awful rites and ceremonies with which they had sought to propitiate their gods as cruel as themselves. One thousand of them have partially turned away from paganism and are learning to know there is one living and true God. Thirty schools are in successful progress. Christian churches are organized. Two hundred and fifty have received the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper. And the word of the Lord has free course and is glorified there, as it is here. Some of those islands are as thoroughly Christian as any country on the face of the earth. On some of the islands the horrid customs that formerly were practised, making life itself a terror and perpetual crime, have been abandoned. In their place the arts and industries of civilization, with all the blessings of peace and order and domestic and social virtue, prevail. These are the triumphs of Christianity. These

uttermost parts of the earth are now given to Jesus Christ for his inheritance.

Is the gain worth the cost? Yes, a thousand times, yes! Nothing truly great and good was ever bought for less than blood. The Son of God laid down his life for us. Deliverers of nations have had to march through seas of blood to establish liberty. All great discoveries have cost human lives. And it always will be so. Perhaps no victories of the Cross have been achieved with less sacrifice of human life than those which have given the Pacific Islands to be set as stars in the Redeemer's crown. And no annals of the gospel are richer in heroic deeds than the story of the Sandwich Islands, the Fiji Islands, the New Hebrides, indeed all Polynesia, whose records are now so familiar that they have lost the halo of romance with which they were invested forty years ago.

The age of martyrs has not gone by. The Spirit of Christ, who counted not his own life dear unto him, is just as living and burning to-day as when the Eternal Son exclaimed in the councils of eternity: "Lo, I come to do thy will, O God!" And if the wilds of Africa, Corea, or the frozen North demand volunteers, they are just as ready and as many as when they went forth two and two, everywhere preaching the Word.

And it is something to have met and to have taken by the hand a living man who has been baptized for the dead, one who has gone into the field and to the spot where his fivę forerunners suffered martyrdom in swift succession. Williams and Harris, George Gordon and his wife, and Douglas Gordon, his brother-five martyrs of Erromanga! I see them now before the throne in bright array; having washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb, they are kings and priests before God.