is almost sure to return himself as a "Wesleyan," when he understands that he is free in this respect to choose. In England, which still yields the majority of recruits, as we have reason to believe, the Independents and Baptists habitually consort with Presbyterians, or, rather, the Presbyterians with them; and it is therefore most certainly true that the Dissenters, as we are told in "Blackwood," prefer Presbyterian services. It is also true that when a regiment is quartered where there is not a Presbyterian congregation at hand, the Dissenters and Presbyterians in its ranks desire to be marched to the nearest Dissenting chapel, where the minister acts as a vice-presbyter, receives head-money as if he were a Presbyterian, and the form of worship is 30 similar that all parties are pleased with the arrangement. It is con. sequently idle to talk of "minute" and unintelligible differences which split up Dissenting sects; such differences are not in practice perceived, and, therefore, cannot be complained of; it is not true that inconvenience has arisen in the service on any such account; and, as for appointing chaplains for them all, the thought can hardly have entered into the mind of any commanding officer or adjutant, who in such matters takes his daily experience as the foundation whereon to rest his judgment. The census of religious worship shows in summary the following classification and proportions. The grand aggregate of nearly eleven millions is represented by 100, and stands thus: Presbyterians in England do not nearly amount to one per cent. of the worshippers; and for the reasons above stated we put them into the same class with the minor denominations of Dissenters, who all agree in antagonism to the Church of England, and only by so doing can we make the scale of Dissent outweigh the scale of Methodism. In the Orderly-offices of the army we find them associated in the parties marched to Divine service; so that, with rare exceptions, the denominatim "Presbyterian" covers and includes "Dissenter," while "Wesleyan" includes Methodists in general. This done, the following is the practical result of percentages, as concerns recruits from England and Wales, if we base our estimate on the old, but now imperfect, census of religious worship in 1851: Church of England............................................ 48.56 Wesleyans 25.21 22.18 4 But we have ascertained, during many years' close personal inquiry, in camps and garrisons, that there are few soldiers indeed who have not been Sunday-scholars. If, then, the Sunday-schools of England and Wales be taken as an infant population, it is from that population that the Protestant portion of the army is almost entirely recruited; and, in view of ascertaining what relative interest we Wesleyans have in the Sunday-school population of England, we turn to the census of Sunday-schools, taken at the same time, and find as follows: Looking at these numbers, and making all reasonable allowance for the predominance of Romanism in Ireland, and of Presbyterianism in Scotland, which cannot, however, be said of Canada and the elder colonies which now help to replenish our army, and where Methodism is numerically strong, one wonders at the coolness with which the writer, with the peculiar party whom he represents, while depreciating Dissent, utterly ignores the existence of Methodism in this branch of the Queen's service. But not only the indirect evidence of a census, the actual returns, which one who certainly possesses abundant means of information must have heard of, ought to have guarded him against prejudicing his own cause by a representation so manifestly unfair. He should have known that the Secretary of State for War received from the last Wesleyan Conference the usual note of the appropriation of ministers to the exclusive service of Wesleyans in the army, who do the full work of chaplains, and whose appointment to Aldershot, London, Chatham, Sheerness, Shorncliffe, Portsmouth, Parkhurst, Dublin, the Curragh Camp, the Mauritius, Lucknow, and Barrackpore, were sanctioned by the Secretary of State for War, communicated to the Commander-in-Chief, and by His Royal Highness notified to the general officers commanding on those stations,-except, indeed, that the Indian appointments were communicated to the Indian Office, and thence to the Governor-General of India. A writer who knows so much about the army in Ireland could not possibly be ignorant of the presence of Wesleyan chaplains in Dublin and the Curragh Camp; and while criticizing the present arrangements in this part of military service, it is very remarkable that he found nothing to say respecting this fact. We must therefore follow him to the close of his paper, and notice his proposal for the future management of religion in the army and navy. 66 Instead of a chaplain-general he would have a bishop "with canonical jurisdiction over all naval and military persons, and in all naval and military stations, so long as they are used for naval and military purposes." The chaplains would be his peculiars; that is to say, subject to him irrespectively of the bishops within whose dioceses the stations lie. He would have the practice of the British army and navy harmonized with that of continental states; and although he does not clearly intimate that such an agreement would ever facilitate an interchange of religious services between British and French or Italian battalions, in the event of a campaign like that of the Crimea, yet the tendency of his proposal is obviously in that direction. Roman Catholic and Presbyterian chaplains, according to his plan, would continue to officiate; but there would be no room for what is now called "the Fourth Class" in regimental returns; and the Wesleyan chaplains, now acting under the highest sanction on the principal military stations, would of course have to retire; or, if they did not retire, they would be placed under the "canonical jurisdiction" of the military bishop "over all persons," -a personage having authority co-ordinate with that of the Secretary of State for War. To him, not to Her Majesty's minister, all complaints would go. "The crown," indeed, by such an arrangement, can at any time, for proper cause shown, cancel the commission of a chaplain, as of any other officer. The bishop alone is the judge, through his proper court, as to the soundness of the doctrine preached, and the general decorum of life and manners of the preacher." War Office, Horse Guards, and Admiralty would no more be troubled with complaints from chaplains or from officers; but the bishop, in the plentitude of his canonical jurisdiction over all persons, Anglican, Roman, Presbyterian, Wesleyan, would, with an oriental singleness of authority, keep them all in order; and this power, dominant within both branches of the united service, both in peace and war, would be only so far dependent on the Queen, as Bishop somebody and the Field Marshal commanding in chief, or the Secretary of State, might happen to agree. There would be, in effect, three powers: the spiritual in the bishop, the civil in the Secretary of State, and the military in the officer commanding in chief. That is to say, three powers instead of two; which two, some persons have thought, and still think, are one too many. Religious liberty, the glory of our empire, could not subsist in the united service under such a scheme. It would be going back," as the writer himself says, to the state of things which existed before 1842; or, to speak more truly, to the state of things before 1838, when every man was required to be of the "King's religion," whether of the English, the Scotch, or the Irish variety; but the Dissenter who opposed them all, and the Wesleyan who troubled not himself about any of them, would again be "not recognised." Thus all that was done for the establishment of religious liberty under the wise administration of such men as Lord Herbert of Lea, and Sir George Cornewall Lewis, to say nothing of others in the same office, would be undone at a stroke; religion in the army would be made what it was before the time of Lord Hill; and, if the British Parliament would suffer it, harmonized with what it is under the Sultan and the Czar. Such a dream will certainly not be realized. THE LAST OF THE BOEOTHICKS, OR ABORIGINES OF NEWFOUNDLAND. NEWFOUNDLAND, one of the oldest colonies under the British Crown, was re-discovered by John and Sebastian Cabot on the 24th of June, 1497. During their visit to the island, they had some intercourse with the natives, called "Red Indians," who were dressed in skins. The Boeothicks, like most barbarous tribes, believed in the existence of a Creator, though they had most absurd notions of religion. They held that they had been created by the Great Spirit out of arrows, and that after death they would go to a distant country, and begin another state of existence. When first discovered, these red men, with their bows and arrows and spears, hunted the deer in the woods, and glided in peace and security over the lakes of Newfoundland in their canoes; but when Europeans settled in the country, the French and English furriers commenced a cruel and exterminating war against them, remorselessly hunting and shooting them down like wolves, until of all this once noble race not a trace is left behind. In the year 1819, a party of furriers met two men and a woman on the ice on Red Indian Lake. The female was secured alive, but her husband and his companion were shot. Her husband was described as a noble-looking man, six feet in height. The woman thus captured was afterwards taken to St. John's, the capital of the island, where she remained nearly a year, and received great kindness from the inhabit. ants. The Colonial Government, hoping to make her the medium of communication with the tribe, sent her back in the following winter with presents for her people; but she died on board the vessel. The body was wrapped in linen, placed in a coffin, and left on the margin of a pond which was known to be frequented by the Red Indians, where it was soon found by them and carried away. "Mary March " (so called because captured in the month of March) was about fifty years of age, with hair much like that of an European, black eyes, a brown complexion; was active and of a docile disposition. Nothing more was heard of the Red Indians until the winter of 1823, when a party of them was seen on the ice in New Bay by some furriers, who immediately shot a man and a woman who, impelled by hunger, were approaching them. Three other women afterwards gave themselves up, being in a starving condition, two of whom were never satisfactorily accounted for: the third was taken to the capital. Shanandithet, the one taken to St. John's, lived six years there, and then died in the hospital of a pulmonary disease. In 1827, a "Boeothick Society" was originated by benevolent persons residing in St. John's, having for its object the civilization of the aborigines, and an expedition was fitted out under the management of W. E. Cormack, Esq.; but it was too late, the red men had all perished. The party forming the expedition consisted of Mr. Cormack and three Indians whom he had procured from other tribes; namely, an intelligent man of the Abenakie tribe from Canada, an elderly mountaineer from Labrador, and a young Micmac, a native of Newfoundland. On the 31st of October, 1828, they entered the country at the mouth of the river Exploits; and, passing through an almost uninterrupted forest for eight days, they reached Hall's Bay. Thence they pursued their way to Notre-Dame Bay, at the north-east part of the island, and well known to have been the summer residence of the Indians. At the east end of Badger Bay, at a portage known by the name of the "Indian Path," they met with traces of the aborigines,-a canoerest, a spear-shaft eight feet long, and fragments of their skindresses. Near New Bay, they found the remains of one of their villages. The vestiges of eight or ten manateeks, or wigwams, each intended to contain from six to eighteen people, were in close proximity. They also found the remains of a number of summer wigwams. Each winter wigwam had near it a small square-mouthed pit, dug about four feet into the earth, to preserve stores in. Some of those pits were lined with birch-rind. The remains of a vapour-bath were also disCovered. The Boeothicks raised steam for the purpose of a bath by pouring water on large stones. These were made hot by burning a quantity of wood around them; and, the ashes having been removed, a hemispherical framework closely covered with skins was fixed over them. The patient then crept in under the skins, taking with him a birch-rind bucket of water, and a small bark dish, and was thus enabled to keep up the volume of steam at pleasure. After traversing those regions of woods and hills for many days, Mr. Cormack and his party arrived at an extensive sheet of water, called Red Indian Lake: it was only to learn that the tribe was no longer in existence. There were everywhere indications that this had been, at one time, the central and undisturbed rendezvous of the red men, but that, after being tormented so long by ruthless parties of Europeans, they had at last abandoned it in despair. Mr. Cormack and his party spent several days in surveying the melancholy remains of a cruelly extirpated people. One difference, among others, between the wigwams of the aborigines of Newfoundland and any other American Indians, is, that in the former were small hollows, like nests, dug in the earth around the fireplace, one for each person to sit in. These hollows were so close together, and also so near to the fire-place, and to the sides of the wigwam, that it would seem these Indians had slept in a sitting position. One wooden building, constructed for drying and smoking venison, was found in good order, with a small log-house in a dilapidated condition, which had been used as a store-house. The wreck of a large handsome birch-rind canoe, about twenty feet in length, was found among the bushes near the beach. Their wooden repositories for the dead were in the most perfect state of preservation, and were VOL. XIV.-FLETH SERIES, 2 G |