membership, is possessed by every Church.

Authority to decide questions of learning or of fact in the past, there is none anywhere; and further it may be added that such matters of fact and of learning are not and cannot be religion, though for a time men may think they are.

Authority to ascertain dogma-that is, to give a divinely inspired and final decision on a speculative question, not as a condition of membership, but as an absolute truth-there is none, and has been none. The diffused illumination of the Christian world cannot be so focussed. The growth of pious thought cannot be anticipated. But there is a power resident in the Christian world

as a whole to decide right at last. Misconceptions of God do not last for

ever.

Authority on questions of right and wrong-absolute there is none, approximate there is, in the growing consensus of the total Christian society, and especially of those who have the gift of holiness and the graces of the Spirit. This absolutely adds to the known ethical and spiritual truths of the world.

Such seem to me to be the facts. Thus God sees fit to educate His Church. It is vain to wish it were otherwise, to dream that it is otherwise. We must look at the facts.

J. M. WILSON.

"ME not much Engelsk. Money this, and grub this. Other thing, so!"

I had engaged a man to guide me over the hills to the old seat of ecclesiastical rule in the Faroe Islands, and the above speech was in answer to my inquiry about his linguistic capacity. He was a little man with much eyebrow, a short beard that curled in the front as decidedly as a fish-hook, and a nose somewhat suspiciously rubicund. On the strength of his engagement by "the Englishman as walking companion for a certain number of hours, he had assumed a dignity of manner that made him look ridiculously conceited, and had, moreover, put on his best clothes, and washed himself at an unusual hour of the day. They had told me that his English was quite phenomenally good, and that I should be as much at home with him as with my own brother. But, for the former, I found he had little more Vocabulary than the words above-mentioned, which he pronounced diabolically while, for the rest, I felt not very fraternally towards him at first sight. He illustrated his utterance by producing a five-pre copper coin; by opening his mouth and pointing down his throat with one of his thumbs; and by jerking his head like one habituated to dram-drinking. Still, I had no right to think evil of my friend, Olaus Jackson, merely because he seemed to have bibulous propensities; and, without more delay than was exacted by the need to take a ceremonious farewell of some Thorshavn acquaintance who thought my projected walk only another proof that all Englishmen were conundrums, Olaus and I set forth, he leading, with his head very high, and holding his alpenstock as gracefully as if he had been born a beadle instead of a Faroe man.

A word about my man's dress, which was the characteristic Faroe costume. On his head (to begin at the top) he wore a red and black striped turban, about a foot in height, which fell to his left ear. His body was swathed in a copious brown woollen tunic, too large for him, yet padded with underclothing so as to make him look almost formidably robust. Faroe pantaloons of blue cloth covered his legs to the knees, where they were attached by four or five gay gilt buttons. His calves were shown in all their symmetry by the brown hose which ended in his moccasins of untanned cowskin tied round the ankles by strings of white wool. Lastly, to protect his precious throat, Olaus wore a woollen scarf of red, green and blue, which, having circumvented that part of him an indefinite number of times, stuffed the rest of its long length within his tunic, where it helped to swell the magnitude of his chest.

Truly, he was a majestic object compared with those others of his compatriots who, not being so fortunate as to know English, had no chance of such an engagement as his, and were therefore compelled to crawl along the rugged track out of the town, in their dirtiest rags, bent double by the loads of peat upon their backs. But Olaus was too wise in his generation to risk conversation with me in the presence of his neighbours; he strutted ahead, and quickened his pace whenever I came within six feet of him.

Thus we proceeded through Thorshavn, an attraction for all eyes. As we climbed the rude rock stairs, stained black with the ooze of much drainage matter, little children with bronzed cheeks, flaxen hair and Saxon blue eyes clasped each other's hands, and stood aside on the tips of

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their wooden sabots, while they whispered among themselves Engelskmand!" Housewives threw their brooms into a corner, or left the rolls of bygbred to grill by themselves, and flew to the window or door to see us pass; the word had gone along the street that we were coming half a minute ago.

One old crone, whose ninety years were opposed to hurry, but not to the curious instincts of her nature, had herself supported to the glass, behind which her yellow face, with its sunken black eyes, gleamed at me like something spectral, not human. Artisans, straddled across the skeleton beams of a house half built, stopped their hammering and stared, until I was near enough for a display of courtesy; then off came their caps, and a civil "God dag" whispered from the roof. Ladies, clattering down to the stream, laden to their noses with clothes for the wash, dropped their burdens to the ground and sat upon them, that they might see us at their ease, and, with the freedom of their sex, commented glibly on my peculiarities, and audibly. School-boys conning their lessons as they trotted to the royal school, shut their books and gaped, until we had passed, when they shouted. In brief, we had the honour of causing a five-minutes' ferment of excitement in those parts of Thorshavn which we traversed. No English gentleman had visited the place for a couple of years, and I was a recent arrival. Conspicuousness is odious to a man of sensibility and sense; I was therefore delighted when the last "God dag" was exchanged, the last house of the town was left behind, and there was nothing more animate in front than Olaus and the brown mountain tops, their sides strewn chaotically with countless white boulders, among which the white sheep browsed almost unperceived. As for Olaus, no sooner were we out of the town than he seemed to shrink; and in a little while he had sobered his pace until he was abreast with me. Then, with a squint of hu

mility, as if in apology for his late exhibition of pride, he informed me, in an irregular mosaic of three languages. that he was not very well, but that he hoped to get something to eat at the conclusion of our walk.

The weather at the outset was not bad for Faroe. There was cloud on the hills, but the blue spaces aloft, and their blue counterparts on the sea to our left, were augury of good. Naalsc Island, four miles away, lying straight some seven or eight miles, and rising to a peak of twelve or thirteen hundred feet, was clearly defined, and the white church of its one town shone like a snowball in the distance. The sea too was quiet, though breathed over by a north-easterly wind just strong enough to admonish the clouds on the hills that they had better go up higher. But, ere we had walked a mile along the road, which runs out from the town perhaps twice as far, a sudden change came about. The wind shifted to the rainy quarter, to the south-west. In ten minutes Naalsoe disappeared from sight. The fog on the hills descended and surrounded us. And Olaus and I

were soon treading dismally over wet bogs, through the soaked and soaking heather, and rained on by the clouds into whose very hearts we were methodically attempting to climb. Nowhere is weather more fickle than in the Faroes. And it is not every one who can console himself, in the midst of a Faroe fog, with the reflection that it is a salubrious if unwelcome visita

tion.

Not a soul lives between Thorshavn and Kirkeboe, though the distance is some six English miles. In the first place it is an inland route, and there is no inland habitation throughout the Faroes. All the people are born, as it were, face to face with the sea. And the nature of the country, sown as it is almost everywhere with innumer able boulders, offers little inducement to farmers. If the sheep and small horses, which are turned loose hereabouts to take care of themselves, can find herbage enough to sustain them,

this is as much as can be expected from the interior. While, secondly, our track was mountainous from beginning to end. From one terrace of shingle and hard rock-the uniformity of which was broken by occasional tufts of vivid green, whence clear spring water gushed towards the valleys we passed to another similar terrace, and thence across miniature desert plateaux of inexpressible bleakness and aridity; until we had gone from the east of the island to the west, and could see, far down, when the fog lifted, the dull, lead-coloured sea between Stromo and the islets of Hestoe and Kolter. A little later, and the black rocks of these isles were visible; their bases rose straight from the water, but their summits, hidden in the clouds, were as high as the imagination pleased to make them.

It was an all but soundless walk. True, Olaus, thanks to his cold, was frequently obliged to clear his throat, and he made plenty of noise in the exertion. But the echoes of his efforts, exaggerated and bandied from rock to rock, soon died away, and left the stillness yet more still. Now and again an oyster-catcher would rise with a scream, and his scarlet and white plumage flash brightly through the dim atmosphere about us. But no other birds were about that day. The fog seemed to have sent all living things to sleep, save only Olaus and myself. Yet, though the air was about half as thick as that of London in November, there was a subtle element of exhilaration about it which made the walk quite enjoyable and enlivening. I chanced to have my small five-chambered revolver with me—a most useless weapon in Faroe by the by, where murder is an unknown term. This I was tempted suddenly to fire, after a rather long spell of complete silence. The next moment Olaus was by my side, clutching at the thing, and peering open-mouthed down its barrel, careless of the fact that one of his fingers in his excitement was pressing the trigger of the yet loaded pistol; and it was only after much trouble

that I persuaded him to let me put him out of reach of danger.

"Had I brought it to shoot him with?" Olaus inquired, in heated Danish, his red nose fiery with perturbation and anxiety. And I could only soothe him into complete tranquillity by surrendering the revolver to him and bidding him use it himself at anything he pleased, except myself. But henceforward, until we were close to the green patch of cultivated ground between the perpendicular rocks of the mainland and the sea itself, which represented the old church town of Kirkeboe, I was questioned about "the little gun," whose fellow he had never yet seen; its cost, its maker, the number of men I had killed with it, the degree of its fatality, my object in bringing it to Faroe, &c. The report seemed to have a most stimulating effect upon the man's intellect, for, in quaint enough Danish, he began to tell a tale about the only man of his acquaintance who had ever meditated a deed of violence.

"There was one man, and he was one very angry man, and he get in a passion one day and swear he kill somebody. He go to his home, and first thing he see is his woman at the quern-she a meek thing with no spirit; and he run at her, and without one word he knock her down flat, and she lie without moving, her nose upstanding to the roof. Then this one

man shocked with himself, to think how near he was to being a slayer of his wife. No man has yet killed his wife in Faroe, and he so near being the first! And all his anger go out of him like the wind from a bladder when you untie the string. And he bethink himself how to keep himself from being so wicked. He run to the cupboard and pour brandy down his woman's throat. And then when, after a time, she breathe freely and open an eye, this one man run off, and down to the rocks, and throw himself, all in one instant, into the sea, where he drown. He not kill his woman after that."

Master Olaus' tale may stand on the