CURRENT LITERATURE.
The Church and the Churches of Southern India. By J. A. Lobley, M.A. (Daighton and Bell, Bell and Daldy.)—This was "the Maitland Prize Essay for 1870." Those prizes are certainly doing their work well, if they call forth such very creditable performances as the one be- fore us. There is, as is well known, in Malabar a native church, the foundation of which is ascribed by tradition to St. Thomas, and which is unquestionably of great antiquity. With this community the aggres-
sive Christianity of the West has come into contact, a contact not always friendly. The Church of Rome in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- turies and the Church Missionary Society in our own day aimed, each after a fashion of its own, at bringing the "Syrian Church of Malabar" to an order of doctrine and discipline which seemed to it more in har- mony with the truth. In both instances a temporary success has been achieved ; in both the native Church, which, like other communities of Eastern Christendom, is singularly immovablo and averse to change, has thrown off the foreign element. Mr. Lobley's account of those transac- tions (his account of the latter is very brief), written as it is with great care, and in a most laudable spirit of fair dealing, is highly instruc- tive. We cannot too highly commend the practical conclusion to which
ho comes, that our missionaries should do their best without active in- terference or proselytism to raise the tone of the native Church, hoping that it will one day be able to do good work in Christianizing the neigh- bouring population,—able to do it better than Ivo, with our Western notions, can ever expect to do.
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