at Neustadtl, to replace the old wooden building now falling into decay, was prohibited on the ground that the subscriptions would endanger the taxes, and several other Protestant movements have been crushed in the same way. But if by extraneous aid a start can once be effected there is no doubt that flourishing, self-supporting congregations would soon be established in many Bohemian towns.
The present opportunity is a very special one, and it is sincerely to be hoped it will not be allowed to pass unused. The effect of the centenary celebrations held last year, and the literature published in connection therewith has been great and widespread. Writing of it, Pastor Kaspar says: “There was not only a bright light thrown on our past history, teeming as it does with sore trials and unbounded mercies, but real gifts also were brought to us. There is now to be observed in all our congregations a spiritual freshness and a hearty reuniting.”
Carlyle, who had so often to describe places and events in Bohemia, has done the Bohemians no service. It was enough for him that they were “abhorrent of German speech.” They fare better at the hands of the writer who deals with “The Latest Bohemian Literature” in the Westminster Review, in whose concluding sentences we thoroughly concur. “We may well,” he writes, “congratulate this little people—who form a Slavonic island, environed, and in too many places permeated with Germanism—upon the noble stand they have made for their nationality. . . . It is not too much to say that there is no nation in Europe which so heartily deserves the sympathy of all liberal-minded Englishmen as this little Slavonic island, which threatens so often to be absorbed by the sea of Germanism around it. May the Cechs only be true to the glorious traditions of their ancestors, and they will pass triumphantly through the ordeal. Much may be hoped from a people that has made such a vigorous stand for its nationality.”
Our hopes are founded on the old struggles of its martyrs and confessors, as well as on recent assertions of nationality, and they are not confined to the comparatively small territory of Bohemia. With the Bohemians again in the ranks of Evangelical Protestantism a new
