abled to show that Mary, having had other children, did not in the least degree diminish the honour of having been the mother of the Saviour, so tranquillised them that one of the most violent is now one of my reading pupils.

"My field of work is wide, and the path is sown with great difficulties, but in my weakness and insufficiency I lean on the Holy Spirit of God, and through Him can do all things.

"ANTONIA MAS."

THE UNITED PRAYER MEETINGS OF 1872.

THE appointment of United Prayer Meetings in London for the third week in May has a very interesting history. The tidal wave of United Prayer began at Lodiana, in the south of the Punjaub.

Hearing of the Lord's dealings with His people in America and other places, some American missionaries in Lodiana set apart the second week in January, 1860, as a time for special supplication that God would now pour out His Spirit upon all flesh, so that the ends of the earth might see His salvation; and they were at great pains to promote a vast and universal Concert of prayer all over the world, ending with a holy Convocation on the 14th January for thanksgiving and praise.

That week of United Prayer has since become a world-wide institution, and when, in 1869, the POPE summoned from all lands his Ecumenical Council for the 8th of December, and fixed the eyes of all nations upon ROME, where he proposed, with his hundreds of priests, to reforge the chains of Christendom, the Christians of England were led to preface their new year's week of prayer with invitations (also world-wide) to a fresh Concert of prayer in the Pope's week for the readers of the Bible in Spain, in Austria, in Bohemia, and Italy, and also amongst ourselves in England; likewise, we prayed that, notwithstanding the great Council met to assert the Virgin Mary's divinity and the Pope's infallibility, the proscribed Bible might freely enter Rome itself.

In 1872 we have met to thank God that this has been accomplished, and have now sent from London a fresh invitation to the saints of all the earth to watch at the gates of heaven with us, for the opening of ALL doors of darkness that the MESSAGE FROM GOD may enter in.

We have promised to give ourselves afresh to prayer for Israel and Judah, yet to be brought home to their own land, and united in the hand of the Lord that they may together "look upon Him whom they have pierced and mourn." "For if the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles, how much more their fulness?"

Also we pray for the vast proportion of the nations of the world, yet HEATHEN, MAHOMMEDAN, and BUDDHIST. Is it not time? Among the children of the False Prophet, especially in India and Arabia, there are "Revivals" of fanatic enmity. The fetters of ages have been unloosening in Turkey, and the reaction is shown elsewhere. But the doors of Roman Catholicism in AUSTRIA, SPAIN, ITALY, and even ROME, have turned on their rusty hinges. Must not the Bible cast out the Koran and all other false books likewise ?

As these meetings were held at Whitsuntide, they would recal to all, the season of the first Pentecostal outpouring of the Holy Ghost upon the Early Church in Jerusalem; and we have joined in very earnest and solemn prayers with our fellow-Christians in all climes that His blessed influences may be afresh manifested amongst us; in each of us individually, and in all the Churches to which we belong. It is recommended that believers, who have been stirred up during the past week to pray, should continue in prayer, and watch in the same with thanksgiving; that they should pray, and watch, work, and wait for a more abundant blessing on their own souls, and on the world around them than they have ever yet known; and in order to this, it is desirable to take a comprehensive and consecutive view of the march of events, and their bearing upon one another during the last four and twenty years, especially as they have related to the unbinding of the Word of God from the fetters of Popery and Mahommedanism, in the places where for ages it has been bound.

THE EVENTS OF THE LAST TWENTY-FOUR YEARS.

It is said that Pope Pius IX. is accustomed to trace all his recent calamities and those of his Church to the political revolutions of the year 1848. The most unexpected event in that wonderful year was the edict of Charles Albert, King of SARDINIA, declaring the long persecuted VAUDOIS free subjects of Piedmont, and the Church in the Valleys a free Church. This true and earliest Church of Christ in Rome-whose is the Epistle to the Romans "went up into the wilderness to a place prepared of God," during all the centuries in which Papal superstition has prevailed upon the earth. Her pilgrim forefathers have been the parents of every reformed community in Europe. Her teachers re-crossed the Alps, the Apennines, and the Pyrenees, and planted the Gospel wherever they went. As Tisserands (weavers), "poor men of Lyons," "Waldenses," "Albigenses," Huguenots, they secretly scattered their seeds of truth; sometimes as pedlars they offered merchandise-robes and rings for purchase-and when asked "Have you any more to sell?" the answer was, "I have jewels far more precious than these, which I will give you if you do not betray me. I have a gem shining from God, so radiant that it kindles the love of God in the hearts of those who possess it." The travelling merchant then read

some chapters out of his manuscript of the Gospels, and most often he left it with the listener.

In France the Waldensian name and faith thus planted, existed for hundreds of years, and through centuries of torture and slaughter; its converts basing always on the Bible their opposition to Roman error. Their doctrines were conveyed from France into England, when the English were masters of Guienne, and were uttered in the thunders of our own Wickliffe against the same Papal tyranny. Our Lollards were so called from a Waldensian pastor. Their manuscript Romaunt version, " correctly copied with the hand at a date beyond all memory," was in the dialect understood and spoken by many disjointed portions of the Roman empire after the disuse of Latin. The Vaudois can say, whoever gave it them, that this version in the vulgar tongue "has never been taken from them." Before they had the Scriptures in the Romaunt, they must have had them in the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Their valleys lie on the high road between Italy and France. "So soon as the Primitive Church began to be wasted by persecutions, the remote corners of Northern Italy were sought as an asylum, for the ten Pagan persecutions (which were all under Roman Emperors-Nero, Domitian, Trajan, Marcus-Antoninus, Severus, Maximin, Decius, Valerian, Aurelian, Dioclesian)—extending from A.D. 56 to A.D. 303—had scattered the Christians" abroad everywhere preaching the Word." Even Paul himself, as Saul, had thus contributed, before his being called of God, to the planting of the Church of Christ *.

There is a tradition extant that Paul visited those Alpine Valleys in his journey from Rome to Spain; also that two legions of the Roman army were exiled there, having too many Christians in them to remain in Rome. There is also a record that in A.D. 290 the Vaudois Valleys had a martyr in the village of St. Legond, between Luzerna and San Martino, while in A.D. 314, they offered their first protest against the arrogance of Sylvester, a Roman bishop. Their history numbers thirty-six persecutions.

But to revert to their Romaunt version of the Scriptures. They circulated it by their barbes and colporteurs for centuries before the Scriptures were translated into our own or any other European tongues, except the Gothic, for the Goths, by Ulphilas, in the fourth century, and the Sclavonic, by the founders of the Moravian Church in the ninth. The ancient Vaudois Church in her resurrection is furnishing many of the ministers who will carry the Gospel through Italy-is working side by side with those who may be called her grandchildren in spiritual descent,

* It is worthy of note that Josephus, book xviii. ch. iii., in recording the banishment of the Jews from Rome by Tiberius, says that "the consuls listed 4,000 men out of them, and sent them to the island of Sardinia." The territory of Sardinia is now divided naturally into four parts,—the island, about the size of Palestine; the inland plain, encircled by its crescent of mountains; the maritime states of Nice and Genoa; and the mountain district of Savoy.

to scatter the darkness of ages-and from the day that Sardinia set her free-perhaps unwitting that she was the priceless pearl in its crown, that mountain tribe began to take place amid the Congress of European powers-and event after event, disastrous to other people, has combined to create a free Italy. "The thirst of France for military glory, brought the arms of France to Magenta and Solferino. It was the Germanic struggle for empire between Austria and Prussia that released Venice, and the duel between the Teuton and the Gaul that opened the gates of Rome."

The Lord has brought to nought all the prayers to the Virgin, and all the pomp of St. Peter's-and Victor Emmanuel, the son of Charles Albert, has displaced the Pope, and rules all Italy. Cavour did not do this, France did not do it, England had no hand in it, Italy herself only blundered and failed; but, by the reaction of the great European convulsion, God gave freedom to the Italian people, and answered the petitions in our Concert of prayer. Hundreds of thousands of copies of the Scriptures have been sold and circulated since the opening of Italy in 1859, though up to the 20th September, 1870, it needed a rich man to buy a Bible in the city of Rome, and Popery has yet its iron grasp upon the common people through its tens of thousands of priests,-still we can now fight Popery in Italy with an open Bible, "the only weapon she has ever feared."

THE SILENCE OF THE BIBLE.

Having only room for the one subject of Rome in this number, we pass from the beginning of the twenty-four years under review, to their close, and we shall see that Rome has much to fear from the very silence of the Bible on the subject of Peter's Pontificate. A discussion has taken place in the February of this year, 1872, of a most memorable character in Rome, on a point of vital consequence to all believers in St. Peter's supposed successors. In the City "where for ages enquiry has never dared to grapple with authority," an order was issued from the Vatican itself to accept a public challenge from the evangelicals, who undertook to prove that St. Peter never was in Rome at all. The order was, of course obeyed, and signed by six priests, who stipulated for suitable Presidency on both sides, and rules for fair play and good order. On each side were three disputants and two Presidents; for the Roman Catholics, Prince Chigi, brother of the Nuncio to Paris, and the celebrated advocate De Tosti; and for the Protestants, Rev. H. J. Piggott and Dr. Herman Philip.

Had the tickets of admission been for thousands of listeners all would have been taken. The disputants on the Romish side were Canon Fabiani, a great scholar and archæologist, Signor Cipolla, and Signor Guidi. Their opponents were Sciarelli, a Neapolitan, Ribetti, a Vaudois pastor, and Gavazzi, an ex-monk, and a Roman. The discussion was conducted throughout in the spirit of courtesy, and was reported by the press throughout all Italy; while the Pope found it needful to appoint three holy days in St.

Peter's to offer reparation for the horrible denial of the presence and death of the patron saint in Rome; whereat thousands once more kissed the toe of the statue. Since the discussion, however, there has been a solemn inauguration in Rome of AN ITALIAN BIBLE SOCIETY, again attended by a vast crowd of the people.

We will attempt a slight summary of the arguments on both sides in the discussion concerning St. Peter.*

The thesis to be contested was that of Signor SCIARELLI, Evangelical minister, who had offered to give a public lecture, in which he would show by arguments drawn from the Bible and the holy Fathers, that St. Peter was never in Rome.

Signor Sciarelli first summed up all that Catholic theologians understood on the contrary side. "They say that St. Peter came to Rome in the second year of Claudius, that is, 42 A.D.; that here he held the Pontificate for twenty-five years; and here he was martyred in the year 66, in the reign of the Emperor Nero."

He then proceeded to prove to the contrary, quoting Scripture from the version of Martini, best admitted by the Romanists.

"The conversion of St. Paul," said he, "is agreed by Roman Catholics to have taken place in 39 A.D." In Galatians i. 15, 18, Paul says, that three years after his conversion he went to Jerusalem to see Peter. Peter, therefore, in the forty-second year of the Christian era had not yet come to Rome.

But perhaps he came directly after Paul's visit. Let us see.

In Acts ix. 31, 34, we find that after this voyage of Paul to Jerusalem, Peter began to go about visiting all the saints; and thus he came to Lydda, eight leagues distant from Jerusalem.

But perhaps he came to Rome after his stay in Lydda. observe.

Let us

In Acts ix. 36–43, it is written that at the death of Dorcas,—forasmuch as Lydda was nigh to Joppa,—and the disciples had heard that Peter was there, they sent to him to come to them; and after the miracle he wrought in her restoration to life, "He abode many days in Joppa with one Simon a tanner."

Perhaps he came to Rome after departing from Joppa. Let us see. In Acts x. it is narrated that St. Peter was called from Joppa to Cesarea by Cornelius to interpret his vision, and then after the conversion and baptism of Cornelius (Acts xi. 2), "He went up to Jerusalem, and they of the circumcision contended with him."

Now, why is it asserted that in this year 42 A.D., St. Peter also came to Rome? The book of the Acts which defines all the above journeys is quite silent concerning Rome—and Antonio Pagi, the Franciscan friar, affirms

*The discussion will be found at length in an "Authentic Report of it," translated by Rev. Wm. Arthur, A.M., Author of “Italy in Transition,” at the Wesleyan Conference Office, 2, Castle-street, City-road, and 66, Paternoster-row.