• OUR LORD'S NATIONALITY.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] eke.,—Our bi-monthly mail has just arrived, bringing the numbers of the Spectator for December 24th and 31st, con- taining letters from three correspondents on the subject of our Lord's nationality. The following incident, although belated, may perhaps be of interest on this subject, which, as your readers may remember, was introduced by the story of a con- versation with a French lady., Four or five soldiers of the French garrison near us were spending a Sunday afternoon with me. I happened to have been reading a book on Madagascar bY the Jesuit Fathers Suan and Colin, in which they state that the Rev. W. Ellis, the missionary, preached successively in the memorial churches of the capital that Jesus Christ was born in England. One young soldier begun to turn over the pages of this book, and came upon the passage containing the above state- ment. He asked me, with some surprise, whether it was really true that our Lord was born in England, as he had always understood Him to have been born in Egypt. In a subsequent visit another soldier, a corporal, informed me that he was no believer in Christianity, as he thought it disloyal and altogether wrong in Christ, when He had been born a Jew, to turn Christian ! One more fact, and I have done. In a monthly publication entitled Notes et Explorations, issued by the Government Press in Tananarive, it was recently stated in a laudatory article on Laborde, the former French Consul, that as a loyal son of the Church he constantly opposed Protestantism, and maintained the struggle between the Bible and the Gospel,—" la lutte entre la Bible et l'Evangile" 1—I am, Sir, &c., Madagascar, February 28th. GALLOPHILE.
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