people still identify true religion with the life of the wandering mendicant. The other day a lady, the wife of a missionary who has spent many years with her husband at a mission station in Southern India, told me that when Christianity really takes possession of a native of India, when he becomes really converted, he is frequently anxious to take up the wandering ascetic life. I shewed my friend the Acts of Judas Thomas, and she was interested to find in it so much of the ethical type which an Indian convert would naturally be disposed to admire. These converts, remember, are Protestants who have heard of Christianity only through the stately and respectable formularies of the Church of England or through one of the sects of English nonconformists. O testimonium animae naturaliter—asceticae! But if asceticism grows so naturally and inevitably on Eastern soil it must be a fact of human nature with which we have to reckon—to direct and educate, it may be, but not altogether to repress. Even if the heathen 'ascetic' of modern India has often more points in common
