JAVA 
129 
presents offerings that he may obtain beautiful children, 
to Solomon for honour and rank, to Moses for bravery, 
to Jesus for learning. The ritual of his religion—and 
his whole round of life is part of his religion—is intricate 
almost beyond conception, and at the same time rigid and 
precise. Everything must be done by rule and rubric ; 
the unwritten law handed down from father to son admits 
of no curtailment or modification. Each individual class 
of offering must be prepared in its own peculiar way; 
the rice, for example—which is one of the chief sacri¬ 
ficial substances—must now be white, now red, now 
hard, now soft.” 1 
The state of education in Java is far from being 
creditable to so cultured a people as the owners of the 
land. While in the Philippines we find a church in 
almost every village, and nearly 2000 schools which 
afford instruction to about 200,000 children, the Dutch 
have until lately studiously set their faces against both 
the education and the Christianising of the natives. 
Java at the present day has under 11,000 Christian 
natives. Everything which tended to lessen the distance 
between the two races was discouraged. The island was 
to be farmed by the Government, and was looked upon 
as private property. Nothing which could in any way 
become a source of difficulties and complications was to 
be permitted, however right or desirable it might be. 
The island was terra clausa , and the missionary was con¬ 
sidered to have hardly more claim to enter it than the 
settler. Even as late as the second or third decade of 
this century the New Testament was considered a revolu¬ 
tionary work, and Herr Bruckner, who translated it, had 
his edition destroyed by Government. All this, of course, 
is past, but so also is the opportunity for the moral and 
1 Mr. H. A. Webster in Encyc , Brit. 
K 
