Bible Women in Orissa.

AT the recent Orissa Conference it was reported that native Bible women were employed at Cuttack, Berhampore, and Piplee, when it was agreed that they be recognised as accredited helpers in mission work. When it is remembered that in Orissa there are four and a half million females, comparatively few of whom are able to read, the importance of having Bible women will be seen at once. In this new department of labour Mrs. Wilkinson, of Leicester, the devoted wife of our beloved brother Wilkinson, (who is still an invalid and confined to his room) takes deep interest, and desires to acknowledge, with sincere thanks, the following sums which she has received. She will also be pleased to receive further contributions towards the same object. Her address is, Gotha-street, Leicester. The amount required to support a native Bible woman is about £6 per annum. As an expression of love to Jesus, and as an acknowledgment of the obligations they owe to the blessed Bible, will not the women of England show compassion towards their benighted sisters in Orissa, by helping to send them the Gospel.

THE ANNUAL ACCOUNTS.-As the Mission accounts for the year must close at the end of May, will the Local Secretaries be good enough to forward their contributions and lists as early as possible to the Mission House, Wilson Street, Derby.

Contributions

Received on account of the General Baptist Missionary Society from February 16th

Subscriptions and Donations in aid of the General Baptist Missionary Society will be thankfully received by W. B. BEMBRIDGE, Esq., Ripley, Derby, Treasurer; and by the Rev. W. HILL, Secretary, Mission House, 60, Wilson Street, Derby, from whom also Missionary Boxes, Collecting Books and Cards, may be obtained..

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The Jewish Race.

SAUNTERING about the Place Bellecour, in Lyons, I chanced to see in a bookseller's window, the words, Le Judaïsme comme Race et comme Religion, par Ernest Renan. My attention was arrested both by the title and the author's name. I went in and bought the pamphlet. For if there is one subject that interests me with a completeness, only surpassed by Christianity, it is the chequered and thrilling story of that Judaism, in whose bosom our Christianity was born, and whose finest spirit finds its incarnation and ever-developing expression in the gospel of Christ. Besides, "the man and his theme" could scarcely be better mated than Renan and Judaism. Known everywhere as the writer of "a Life of Jesus" of captivating brilliancy and unreasoning heedlessness, he is also a perfect master of Semitic lore, the translator into clear and mellifluous French of the book of Job, and the Song of Songs, the author of a general history of the Semitic languages, and surpassed by few, if any, in the width, accuracy, and completeness of his learning on all questions relating to Judaism as a religion, received, adopted and avowed by a specially distinguished race.

The pamphlet, I find, contains an address given on the 27th of Jan., 1883, on the racial relations of the Jews to Judaism; and shows, in connection with various fruitful and nourishing suggestions, that the Jewish religion has by no means been restricted, as seems to be generally thought, to persons of Jewish blood, but has been accepted and practised by the members of many races, so that the Jews of to-day, though currently cited as a unique example of pure descent, are, as Lord Bacon said of the English, "a mixed people, and all the better for the mixing."

In its origin, Judaism, it is admitted, was as local and national as the religion of the Moabites; but it was subsequently lifted into the realm of universal principles, and placed on a humanitarian instead of a race basis, by the genius and devotion of the ever-famous prophets of the eighth century before Christ. "The prophets of Israel," says Renan, were the creators of pure religion." The "premier fondateur" of Christianity was Isaiah, 725 years B.C. "In introducing into the Israelite world the idea of moral religion-the idea of justice and of the secondary value of sacrifices-Isaiah preceded Jesus by seven centuries."

Even on Renan's principles that account of the universalizing of Judaism requires modification. Hosea, certainly, takes precedence of Isaiah in the grandeur of his conception of the glowing tenderness, quivering pity, and all-enduring love of Jehovah, if not in the clearness of his vision of a purely spiritual religion, and therefore must be regarded as the predecessor and teacher of the man who has been raised, by general, but confused opinion, to the exclusive rank of the "Evangelist" amongst the prophets. Abating the question of the date of the book of Job, it can hardly be denied that an early and potent rank, in this widening and humanising process, must be given to the members of that School of the GENERAL BAPTIST MAGAZINE, MAY, 1883.-Vol. LXXXV.-N. S., No. 161.

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THE JEWISH RACE.

Wise who have left, as the everlasting monument of their thought and inspiration, the Book of Proverbs, the Song of Songs, and the incomparable drama of Job. Yet, whatever the methods, and whoever the agents, the Hebrew literature itself is a witness to the supreme fact that the national idea in religion retires in favour of the universal; the spiritual ideal which has sufficed for a small race slowly broadens out into a brilliant evangel for humanity, and the revelation of God which illumined the path and cheered the spirit of the patriarch Abraham becomes, through a succession of differently gifted but "holy men of God, moved by the Holy Ghost," a redeeming energy for "all the nations of the earth."

Not at once was that ideal actualised; nor have we much more than brief hints of the mystic way in which the Eternal Love shaped the fitful and unconscious deeds of men into this beneficent and everlasting result. No doubt the ministry of pain was the messenger of mercy; and the dreaded dispersion and captivity of the people of God became the creator of a missionary instinct, and the origin of purer religious thought and fuller religious power. Wide breaches were made in the integrity of the Jewish race; and on the return from captivity mixed marriages were enacted on so large a scale that the Reformer, Nehemiah, recurred again and again, with increasing energy, to their legal prohibition. The dispersion went on, and increased; and an active monotheistic propagandism kept pace with it. The Spirit of God was poured out. A wide-spread movement against paganism set in, and signalized itself by many victories, a hundred and fifty years before the coming of Christ. Incalculable and exhaustless impetus was given to the movement by Jesus; triumphs were won for spiritual religion at a marvellously accelerated rate, though many converts from heathenism went through Judaism to Christianity. Yet owing, in no small measure, to the destruction of Jerusalem (an event in the religious life and history of the world it seems difficult to get any one to appreciate at its full value) enormous additions continued to be made to the ranks of the Jews from people's " of all languages and tongues under heaven." Thus for a period of not less than five hundred years (from 300 B.C. to 200 A.D.) the Jewish race incorporated with itself men and women professing the Jewish faith, utterly regardless of any and every difference of race-stock. The question of physical descent, or "blood," was wholly in abeyance, and the acceptance of the law of Moses, the customs of the Jews, and the faith and worship of a Hebrew, was enough to secure complete fellowship in this Broad Jewish Church.

Renan gives at length the evidence on which this important conclusion is based.* In the Wars of the Jews (Book VII., c. iii., § 3,) Josephus speaks of "great numbers" of Greeks in Antioch drawn to the Jewish worship, and making themselves part of the sacred community by accepting the capital act of circumcision, which definitely and at once placed them in the Hebrew fraternity. The energetic propagandism in Alexandria in the third and second centuries B.C. is notorious.

*Writing at Nice, I am unable to verify these and other references-such as Dion Cassius, lib. xxxvii. c. xvii. Juvenal, Satires, xiv. v. 95, et seq. Tacitus, History, v. 5. There is also a reference to a law of Antoninus Pius permitting Jews to circumcise their sons, but their sons only— and Renan says "that where authority existed to forbid a practice it is because that practice is wide-spread and of considerable extent."