of those souls who are most dear to Me, but whom the claims of Divine justice prevent Me from welcoming to My arms. It is in your power to hasten the conclusion of their sufferings; draw therefore the price of their ransom from the treasure of infinite merits which I have left as a legacy to the Church.

These motives ought to be enough to induce us to adopt the pious practices in use amongst the faithful, and approved by the Church for the relief of our departed brethren, especially the daily devotions of the month of November. Let us during this month offer to the justice of God, in union with Jesus Christ, our prayers, our privations, our sufferings, corporal or spiritual, our good works of whatever kind they be, in order that the merit of them, relinquished by us on behalf of the departed, may help these latter in their need, and serve to discharge, or at any rate to diminish, the amount of their debts.

Let us be merciful, and in the same measure as we show mercy will the mercy of God be one day poured out upon us. Our Lord says: "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy." Let us be generous in our mercy; let us give to the souls in Purgatory a good measure, a measure running over of compassionate assistance; and we have the promise of Jesus Himself that in the same measure the mercy of God will be one day meted out to us. Mensura qua mensi fueritis remetietur vobis-"With the same measure that you shall mete withal, it shall be measured to you again."

The Jesuit Mission to the Upper Zambesi.

THE efforts which at the present moment are in various quarters being made towards the evangelization of Africa cannot but suggest to Catholics many thoughts as to both the past and the future.

The mysterious land, this "dark Continent," which in our own day seems at last on the point of being opened up to the communion of the civilized world, is not for all its isolation and its darkness altogether a stranger to the Church of Christ, and while it has something of a Christian history already to record, it is no less true that we look hopefully for the true tale of its Christianity in the time to

come.

In looking back we need not only dwell on the fact that some of the most glorious of the earlier foundations of Christianity were upon African soil. Not only was Alexandria one of the three great Sees of the ancient Church, one of the three "Petrine" Sees which through Rome and Antioch and itself cast on the three then discovered portions of the globe the shadow of the Prince of the Apostles. But besides and beyond that, the churches of North Africa were as noteworthy as any provincial churches in the part which they played and the figure they made in the great drama of the earlier centuries. Clement and Denis of Alexandria, Origen and Tertullian, St. Cyprian of Carthage, and St. Augustine of Hippo, to mention no others, are by themselves names that suffice to consecrate the Continent. Neither can we forget the ancient and curious history of Abyssinian and Ethiopian Christianity.

But this, as we have said, is not all, and it is not upon their earlier days that we wish to dwell. In times far more recent, but still tolerably long gone by, Christianity has made its mark less deeply but more widely upon Africa. The great explorers of the Continent in the past, the Portuguese, here, as elsewhere, brought in their train the ministers of the Church, and in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, and well on in the eighteenth, they have left their traces in African story-to an extent that is too often ignored.

The fact is evinced in the first place by African Geography. It has lately been argued in the American Catholic Quarterly,* and argued with abundance of learning and of proof, that geography is essentially a Catholic science. The Church that has had committed to her the world as a heritage cannot but press on till she shall have occupied its entirety, and cannot therefore fail to enlarge our knowledge of the earth. And so we find in Africa that she has done much that has been forgotten, and forgotten precisely because worldly interests and intrigues have stepped in to hinder the continuance of her work. In brief, we find that the maps of two and three centuries ago, maps which rest upon the authority of missionaries and of those connected with missionaries, anticipate in a degree truly marvellous what are supposed to be the new discoveries of our own day. In them interior Africa is not the arid, waterless waste of the maps and geographical books of our boyhood. The celebrated Lyons globe (constructed by two Franciscans in 1702), the map of Pigafetta, constructed from the information of Edward Lopez† in 1591, and the many maps of the seventeenth century, which were based upon it, are sufficient to quote in proof of what we say. So also is the erroneous geography of

* By Mr. John Gilmary Shea.

+ Lopez was not a missionary but a merchant.

The occasion, however, of his coming to Rome, where his relation was published, was precisely to obtain from the Pope missionaries for Congo, at the instance of the Christian King of that country.

Abyssinia, which so long was accepted by Europe because the map-makers of Holland and Flanders, who then gave the law to their profession, would not listen to the corrections which Jesuit missionaries furnished, and which modern researches confirm. So again is the fact that a century and a half before Bruce, Father Paez, a Jesuit,* stood by the fountains of the Blue Nile, and that more than two centuries before Livingstone, Father Mariano, another Jesuit, wrote home particulars about Lake Nyassa.†

We are far from wishing to maintain that the results of ancient discovery were as precise and accurate as those of discoveries more recent. It would be very hard to expect them to have been so. We by no means deny that modern observations have corrected much that seems to have been mere generalization upon observation or information, any more than we can deny that observations to come will in their turn limit and correct the maps which are now produced as the result of recent travel. Still the fact remains that as attested by the maps the explorers and evangelists of Africa were aware of that fact which at the present day seems to have all the charm of novelty -the existence in mid-Africa of a system of vast lakes from which spring the various great rivers which run to the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean : that with regard to those said rivers, they placed the head of the Nile and the Zambesi not very far from the positions which we are now able to assign, and that, most astonishing of all, they lay down for the Congo a course very similar within narrower limits to that which has been disclosed by the most remarkable and successful of all recent voyagesthat of Mr. Stanley.

But we need not be at the pains of arguing this point in words of our own. It is done for us by one who must be heard with respect, for he has himself done more than most men in the matter of African discovery. Commander Cameron writes: +

* A.D. 1616. † A.D. 1624.

Across Africa, vol. ii. chap. xvi. p. 302.

"The existence in Central Africa of a wonderful system of lakes seems to have been known to the ancients, and if not verified on the spot to have been at least conjectured by the first European explorers of Africa. But in later times this system of lakes was replaced in the imagination of geographers by desert spaces. The surmises of the old Portuguese travellers and missionaries are astonishingly near the truth, and the maps of two centuries ago give a more exact idea of the interior of the Continent than do those of our own before our eyes were opened-by the discoveries of Burton and Livingstone."

This being so, we shall not be surprised to find that Catholic missions were widely spread on the African Continent. In Abyssinia from their earliest days the Jesuits had a mission for many years. The same Fathers and the Capuchins laboured on the West Coast in the Kingdom of Congo, more than one of whose sovereigns received baptism. At San Salvador, in Congo, we are informed, on the high authority of Mr. Keith Johnston, that "the Jesuit missionaries worked far and wide, spreading all kinds of cultivation and industry. . . . Their memory is revered to this day." While as to the Capuchins it will be sufficient to name Father Jerome de Montesarchio, who, after traversing the whole country (of Congo) from south-east to north-west, passed the Zaire (the Congo) and penetrated even to the cannibal country, and to the gates of Micocco, King of the N'teka and of the Anzikis; and Father Bonaventure d' Alessano who had projected at his death a journey across the dark Continent" in a direction opposite to Mr. Stanley's, intending to pass through the lands of this same Micocco to Abyssinia.* The labours of these Capuchin Fathers have obtained the tribute of record on the maps of Mr. Petermann, no partial witness, but are in no need of any record beyond that which they themselves found time to leave.

Nor was the Kingdom of Congo alone on the West

*See Etudes Theologiques for June, 1878, p. 793.