kins and Clifton Johnson, the author, also made a clever speech; an address was given by the principal of Westfield Normal school where "Aunt Betsey's" good courage and love of knowledge led her to become a student at the age of forty. The Normal school was then considered new-fangled. But "Aunt Betsey" had attended the public school at its first opening in North Hadley. This was her first regular school career. The next year she began school teaching and followed her profession with great success and honor for thirty years till 1881. There was an interval of a few years when she was married. After her husband's death she resumed school teaching. She taught largely in North Hadley, and also in Hadley Centre, Haydenville, Leverett, Dockanum and Plainville. For many years she lived in her home village, taught her school and cared for her old parents. Her family was a large one and numbered one hundred cousins, many of whose children went to school to her. Little toddlers were sent to school at an early age in order that they might say in later years that they had been under Aunt "Betsey."

The orthodoxy of New England has been popularly considered to be a fixed quantity. The sporadic declaration of advanced opinions from time to time has had but limite welcome from the recognized leaders, and it has been a frequent remark that in the reception and adoption of new thought and belief the pews have been in advance of the pulpit. That this has been apparent rather than real appears from the revelations of opinion and belief published by The Congregationalist in the number of March 8th, celebrating its ninetieth anniversary.

It asks of seven representatives of the Baptist, Congregational, Episcopalian, Methodist and Presbyterian churches the question-"The Religion of the Next Ninety Years-What Will it Be and Do?" The answers are most significant in their unanimity in practical surrender of a theory of dogmas on which great stress was formerly laid, and insistence on the authority of enlightened reason and established science in interpreting the Bible. Thus Rev. Dr. Frank W. Gunsaulus says: "After all readjustments are made in the study of the Bible and its higher appreciation according to the truer views of to-day, that to-morrow marks the new era for a civilization when the child's heart hears and answers the child's Savior." Professor Henry S. Nash, D. D., says: "The Old Testament is disclosing itself to us in its true character. It is the book of the nation. We are ceasing to take it as

a body of infallible teaching in the field of doctrine or of inerrant prediction of future events." And later: "We no longer speak without effort about predestination in the theological sense. Something more terrible than the foreordination of souls to damnation is confronting us. Can we contemplate, without sinking of heart, the possibility of social conditions which doom and damn little children to misery and hopelessness?"

Rev. James R. Day, D. D., says: "The working creed will be the thir teenth chapter of second Corinthians, which has its climax in the heart of Christ with which it closes. 'Now abideth faith, hope. love, but the greatest of these is love.' Professor William N. Clarke, D. D., says: "Much of the present unrest is due to the seeking after reality, with its abandonment of the unreal; and the eyes of hope are turned to the day when religion shall be understood to consist in a genuine life, in the realities that are eternal." Rev. Charles E. Jefferson's thought is: "Since the Reformation era Protestantism has been handicapped by an intenable doctrine of Holy Scripture, which has produced in each generation a host of skeptics and filled the heart of many a saint with perplexity and misgivings. By the scholarship of the last ninety years the power of that conception has been forever broken, and clergymen hereafter instead of squandering time on questions incidental will be free to attend to the one thing essential-God's revelation of Himself in Christ." Rev. Dr. George A. Gordon says: "The worship of the Bible. the subjection of the conscience to it is, for the educated man. no longer possible. In the best sense of that uncertain and perilous adjective the Bible has become a natural book. It has ceased to be the Lord of conscience; it has taken its place as the supreme servant of the conscience." Rev. Dr. Robert F. Coyle closes the symposium with this thought: "The regeneration of the individual will be sought with increasing earn estness, not simply, however, that his soul may be saved and that he may go to heaven, but quite as much that he may save and serve society and produce a little more of heaven on earth." And Rev. Dr. A. E. Dunning, the editor of The Congregationalist, in summarizing this symposium says of the seven men quoted, they "speak in this number in words as divinely prophetic as those of the Old Testament." also says: "There is a voice of authority not limited to any past period nor confined to any one book. It is a living voice to living persons." Those of us who are not very old can recall a time when this group of sentiments could not be uttered in the ears of orthodox New England witho raising a storm of protest and innumera

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heresy trials, and there would not be disclosed in the community a sufficient number of supporters to establish a respectable schism. This publication emphasizes the record of a progress in religious thought which has been so quiet as to attract but little attention. It will do much to crystalize this evolution of thought, and it should operate as a powerful incentive toward a more general eagerness to learn and appropriate the new forms of truth which mark the opening of this new century.

The Congo Reform Association has issued the following address to the people of Massachusetts. Governor Guild, who has headed a petition to the President and Congress, asking for an investigation of the atrocities in the Congo, is a vice president of the Congo Reform Association. and has united in the preparation of this address.

TO THE PEOPLE OF MASSACHUSETTS :—

The Governor of the Commonwealth, the Lieutenant Governor, every member of the Governor's Council, the President and every member of the Senate, the Speaker of the House and an overwhelming majority of its members have signed a strong petition, urging the attention of the President and Congress to the terrible condition of affairs now prevalent in the Congo valley. There can be no mistake about the conditions, the official report of the Commission, whose appointment forced from King Leopold, admits that the people of that unhappy country are chained to the soil like serfs and forced to turn in rubber to the agents of the king and his concessionary companies. The theory of law under which the king acts is that the entire land and even the wild products of the forest are the king's property, and that those who gather them may be proceeded against as "poachers"

was

to use the language of the report-and those receiving them may be proceeded against as "receivers of stolen goods." It is a matter of official record, supplemented by the evidence of photographs, that the unhappy natives who do not collect the exorbitant amount of rubber demanded of them are hunted like animals by organized bands of savages in the royal employment. Women are outraged. Men, women and children are tortured, mutilated and massacred. The first country to acknowledge the flag of the Congo State, now controlled by the King of Belgium, was the United

States. It seems to us that the United States, therefore, should be the first country to resent the awful conditions under which this once fertile district is becoming not only barren of produce but of population. All citizens of Massachusetts, who desire to support the Governor in his appeal for an investigation by the State Department, are invited to send to the Congo Reform Association, Room 710, Tremont Temple, Boston, where copies of the petition headed by Governor Guild may be obtained for circulation. G. Stanley Hall, President; Hugh P. McCormick, secretary, Congo Reform Association.

The traffic in india-rubber is as nearly a monopoly as any great commercial enterprise can be, but there is a shadow of hope that relief is coming from an unexpected source. A Colorado farmer had a valuble ram, which died of indigestion. An autopsy disclosed a mass in the animal's stomach which chemists have decided was practically india-rubber. Then the farmer gathered samples of all the vegetation to which the animal had access, and their analysis revealed one plant from which excellent rubber can be secured. are uncounted acres of the weed already growing, and an unlimited area open to its cultivation. Capitalists have already begun to exploit the discovery and Colorado rubber promises to speedily compete with the gum of Brazil and the Congo Free State.

There

The recently revived agitation of the question of the propriety of shortening the sufferings of incurables by the taking of life has brought out a counter movement which seems to be a preposterous interference with the right of individual opinion and candid discussion. A New York assemblyman has introduced a bill in the legislature which provides that any person who by word of mouth or by written or printed circulars, documents, articles. etc., advocates or teaches the propriety of putting to death persons afflicted with incurable mental or physical diseases shall be guilty of a felony. The proposition is farcical and if enacted it would do more to popularize the idea it proposed to suppress than anything its advocates could accomplish. Free thought and free speech are too firmly established here to tolerate such a limitation.