persuaded to return to the sphere of their labours. Letters of a serious and powerful character were addressed by them to their former patrons, in the form of remonstrance rather than of submission, while the local secretary acted, as it has been thought, with harshness, and resorted to legal proceedings. The missionaries resumed their work among the heathen, and such of the people as chose to adhere to them. There were 4 missionary families, 104 native teachers, 54 schoolmasters, 50 children in the seminaries, and 17 adult students, for whom support to the amount of 2,500l. was annually required; the brethren were none of them in the possession of secular means, but they cast their care on Him who, they believed, cared for them, and whose are the silver and the gold. They made their appeal to fellow-christians in India. They assumed the appellation of "The German Evangelical Mission in Tinnevelly," and then made their objects and plans known to brethren in Germany, to German brethren in America, and Christians in Britain. Resources were furnished with liberality and promptitude from Scotland and America, and Mr. Rhenius was enabled, in the last letter which he wrote before his decease, to give thanks to God for seasonable supplies, sent to them as they needed. "We have gone on in this way already near the last twelve months, and the Lord is greatly strengthening our faith, so that we do not fear."-" So you see the Lord provides. Trust in him at all times." These expressions were written on May the 12th, and on the 5th of June, 1838, he closed his course! His end was peace; his bodily sufferings were brief and few, and a change to unspeakable blessedness was the prospect which opened to himself. But it left a family bereaved of their head and counsellor, and a mission weakened and prostrated, desolate brethren, and a wide blank in the ranks of the faithful army of the living God. The tears of his family and friends were mingled with those of many natives, christian and heathen. Most affecting was the sight, when, one after another, the catechists who were out in the district, and the people, came breathless to the house, to try if, by any means, they might once more behold the face of their longloved teacher. Many were too late, even to be present at the funeral; and for a whole fortnight after, catechists and people were coming in to the station, in order to mourn the loss of their spiritual father with his surviving brethren.

When the mission was resumed at the end of December, 1835, fifteen hundred and sixty-one families separated from the Church Missionary Society, and united with the German Mission. In May, 1837, they had increased to almost 8,000 souls; contained in families 2,200, and villages 210; instructed by 110 teachers: and in May, 1838, the increase had continued, and the blessing of God encouraged the labourers. All the German Missions had not so prospered; but it is probable that of native converts attached to the stations of the older and younger church societies, in the peninsula, where German missionaries have chiefly laboured, from Madras to Tinnevelly, there may be 30,000 people. The narrative we have given will indicate how far the predilections of the Hindoo converts are allied to the opinions and discipline of their long cherished teachers; and the probability that the most, if not all, are Lutherans in church government; and, that as far as doctrine is concerned, the formulas of the Anglican church are not of high authority among christian Hindoos. The Vepery mission, the Tanjore and Tranquebar missions, the Trichinopoly and Tinnevelly missions, and the native Christians at Cuddalore and Negapatam, are principally Lutheran. The apprehensions of Dr. Wilson, therefore, as Bishop of Calcutta, were not groundless, so far as the measure might affect the members and unity of the Church of England societies.

Dr. Claudius Buchanan wrote, during his "Christian Researches in India," a series of lively and familiar letters to his excellent friend, the Rev. David Brown, one of the first of modern christian ministers in India, and provost of Fort William College. In one of his letters, dated Madras, 6th August, 1806, he begs his friend to communicate to his daughter, then a child, some of the curiosities he had seen. "Tell H. that I saw, yesterday," he says, "St. Thomas's bones, preserved as a relic in a gold shrine; and that I saw his grave, whence the Roman Catholic pilgrims carry the dust." Gibbon speaks with uncertainty as to this Indian missionary, whether "an apostle, a Manichæan, or an Armenian merchant, who was famous as early as the times of Jerome." It is recorded in a Saxon chronicle, and by William of Malmesbury, that ambassadors from Alfred the Great visited the shrine of St. Thomas, towards the close of the ninth century, and returned from the neighbourhood of Madras with a cargo of pearls and spices. Marco Paulo, a Venetian traveller, whose journeys and voyages were performed in the thirteenth century, penetrated as far as the city of Malabar, or Mileapore, only a league distant from Madras, and was assured that on that spot St. Thomas had suffered martyrdom. La Croze asserts that here the Portuguese founded an episcopal church under the name of St. Thome; where they represented the saint as performing an annual miracle, till the English heretics took possession of Madras-Patnam, when he was silenced by their profane neighbourhood. The St. Thome, or Jacobite, otherwise called the Syrian christians, consider themselves as the descendants of the flock established by St. Thomas, whom they call the apostle of the east. But they trace their ancestry to Syria, whence the first founders of their church emigrated; and the Syro-Chaldaic is the language in which their church service is still performed. When the Portuguese first opened Indian navigation, the Christians of St. Thomas had been seated for ages in the peninsula between Malabar and Coromandel, and their character and colour seemed to countenance the idea of a mixture of a foreign race. Mileapore has long since declined, though placed more advantageously upon the coast than Madras; and possesses stronger recommendations for salubrity, sea air, and a fish market. Still known as St. Thome to the admirer of antiquity, or the inquirer after matters curious in history, it presents peculiar attractions, and is prettily situated on the beach to the south of Madras.

I occasionally visited this deserted ruin of christian antiquity; and in my rambles or inquiries heard the story of St. Thomas, the origin of the Luz church, and the process of popish conversions. The legend connected with the church represents the Portuguese colonists in quest of a place suitable for their settlement, and attracted by a flame issuing from the ground, as brilliant as if it were a burning naphtha stream. They hailed this as a divine indication of the site on which they should rear their ecclesiastical edifice, and an assurance that thus they should perpetuate the hallowed memorial of the martyred apostle's zeal and labours, sufferings and death. It is a mile beyond Treblicane, a Mohammedan suburb; as if the beast and the false prophet would either contend for victory, or join hands for dominion over the poor people. There are a small cathedral, and two well-built chapels, under the charge of a Portuguese bishop, and a sufficient supply of Romish priests, educated at Goa; who have been recently joined by Roman Catholic missionaries from Britain. Matins and