western wilderness ? and are we so bound that we dare not raise a voice for a remnant of the mighty fallen? In these three states, as in others, a few have lifted their heads and have adopted the customs and manners of their civilized neighbours; many have good houses, barns, cattle, fenced fields, yet a drunken chief may sign, to a no less unworthy receiver, all another's earthly treasures, save the lives, for whom these alone were valued. And is there no restitution? Are the Senecas, the Onandaguas, the Creeks, with others, to be driven at the point of the bayonet into the western wilderness, to coalesce there? and be driven from thence by a standing army of 7,000 well equipped fighting men? And for this is it that every male Indian over eighteen years of age is to be furnished with a blanket and a gun? Forbid it heaven! Let not the escutcheon of our nation be defaced by so foul a blot! Let the people learn that righteousness, or as our forefathers wrote it, 'right-wiseness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.'

"Let the faithful pioneers of the cross, spending their lives in Western America, but persevere in the course which experience has proved to be the only successful one-of preaching the Gospel in the Church; carrying out all the principles of the Church AS SHE IS, without diminution or addition, and it is as morally certain that catholicity will cover the continent of North America, and the American Church Episcopal become the greatest light of Christendom within a few years, as that the foundation of God standeth sure! Happy day for America, when, from Maine to Texas-from the Atlantic to the Pacific-from every city fane, from every rural village and solitary hamlet-one altar will be raised-one Sacrifice offered thereon; when one voice of praise, the united voice of a united Church, will ascend (meet offering) in the language of one ritual; when the prayers of the apostles and their immediate successors, the venerable liturgy of the ages, will be the medium of all America's supplications. That day shall come if the Church is true to her principles."-Ecclesiastical Reminiscences of the United States, by the Rev. Edward Waylen, 1846.

LECTURE XII.

THE REVOLUTION IN CHINA, ITS BEARING UPON

MISSIONARY EFFORT.*

BY THE REV. C. F. S. MONEY, M.A.,

ASSOCIATION SECRETARY OF THE CHURCH MISSIONARY SOCIETY.

MY CHRISTIAN FRIENDS,-I can hardly do justice to the subject which I have undertaken this evening to bring before you, without referring to several other topics connected with China, each of which might in itself form the substance of a lecture. I do not think I can show you fully or satisfactorily the bearing which the present wonderful and unparalleled movement in China is likely to have upon missionary effort, without introducing the subject by some reference to the geography, the history, religion, manners, and customs of China. This, you will allow, is a subject of some vastness; and I do assure you, that independently of the great interest which attaches to the subject at the present moment, and which I am perfectly sure, wherever it is known, enlists the sympathies of English men and English women; I have felt the greatest difficulty when I have thought how I might best and in the shortest compass present this matter fully before you.

China Proper is a country of very great extent. It is situated between twenty-first and forty-first degrees of north latitude. Its length is about 1,200 miles, and its breadth is nearly as much. It is a country of very extensive plains; one plain is of a greater extent, perhaps,

*This Lecture was delivered extempore, and the Author regrets he had not time to condense and revise it as he would have wished.

course.

than almost any other of which we have heard or known, and this is watered by two great rivers, which take their rise in the country between Thibet and China, very near to one another, and then pursue each a very opposite The one is called the Hoang-Ho, or Yellow river; the other is called the Yang-Tze-Riang, or the son or child of the Ocean river. One of these rivers winds towards the north, and the other towards the south; they then bend back again, and discharge their waters into the sea within a hundred miles of each other.

This country, so vast and so little known, is also a very fertile country, one that has been long inhabited, and perhaps longer civilised than any other with which we have been acquainted. It is said to have a population estimated by some at 360,000,000, by others at 160,000,000; but the Chinese Government, curious and careful in most of its arrangements, seems to have taken, at different times, peculiar care to obtain accurate information with regard to its population; and I have here a censustable, beginning with the year 1393, and ending with the year 1812. The method adopted in order to obtain the census is this, every hundred families is placed under one head, with ten assessors, and at every house there is a board placed up, upon which, under pain of being bambooed, they are obliged to inscribe the names of all who are resident in the house. Under the old Chinese dynasty, in 1393 the population amounted to 60,545,811. Under the Tartar dynasty in 1662 there was a great decrease, and they only return 21,668,600. In 1668 it rose again, and in 1792 it amounted to 307,467,200, and in 1812 it reached 361,221,900.

The falling off in the population returns is to be ascribed to two or three different causes. One was, the imposition by the Tartars of a Capitation-tax, and the consequent unwillingness of the people to make an accurate return, in order to avoid taxation. Another was,

that the Tartar dynasty did not at once establish its authority all over the country. But after awhile we find the population returns very rapidly increasing and reaching the amount already stated. Until 1812, it was increasing at the rate of something like three per cent.,

and then there is a very remarkable stop; and what do you suppose we are to attribute this stop to? It seems that the chief cause of the decrease is to be attributed to the introduction of opium. The increase after this went on at the rate of only one per cent. But even at that rate of increase, if these returns be correct -and it is the opinion of Dr. Medhurst, that they may be taken to be so that would give at this moment a population to China of no less than 505,710,660 souls.

Now, having mentioned the subject of opium, it is not right that I should leave it without for one moment referring to the responsibility which this country has to bear in regard to the introduction of opium into China. One Minister after another and one Government after another in China has endeavoured to put a stop to the introduction of that drug, and to the mischievous and poisonous effects of it upon the population of the country; and it is very sad to think that England has had anything to do with the introduction of that poison, the effects of which, in destroying the mind and the body, and corrupting the character, are far greater, perhaps, than the evil effects of the slave trade itself. I have here a description, in a little book published some years ago by Lord Jocelyn, of a visit which he paid when in China to one of the opium shops. "One of the objects," he says, "at this place that I had the curiosity to visit was the opium-smoker in his heaven-the idiot-smile and deathlike stupor of the opium-debauchee has something far more awful to the gaze than the bestiality of the drunkard. The rooms where they sit and smoke are surrounded by wooden couches, with places for the head to rest upon, and generally a side-room is devoted to gambling. The pipe is a reed of about an inch in diameter, and the aperture in the bowl for the admission of the opium is not larger than a pin's head. On a beginner one or two pipes will have an effect, but an old stager will continue smoking for hours. A few days of this fearful luxury, when taken to excess, will give a pallid and haggard look to the face, and a few months, or even weeks, will change the strong and healthy man into little better than an idiot-skeleton. The pain they suffer when deprived

of the drug after long habit, no language can explain, and it is only when to a certain degree under its influence, that other faculties are alive. In the houses devoted to their ruin, these infatuated people may be seen at nine o'clock in the evening in all the different stages. Some entering half-distracted, to feed the craving appetite which they had been obliged to subdue during the day; others laughing and taking wildly, under the effects of a first pipe; whilst the couches around are filled with their different occupants, who lie languid with an idiot-smile upon their countenance, too much under the influence of the drug to care for passing events, and fast merging to the wished-for consummation. The last scene in this tragic play is generally a room in the rear of the building, a species of dead-house, where lie stretched those who have passed into the state of bliss the opium-smoker madly seeks, an emblem of the long sleep to which he is blindly hurrying."

The missionary is often besieged by these poor creatures, in all stages of this disease from opium smoking—the young, the middle-aged, and the old, with haggard look and lack-lustre eye-entreating him that he would give them some medicine to save them from this disease. The present Bishop of Victoria, when he was at Ningpo, some years ago, gives an account of some men coming after him, and entreating him to give them some medicine, to cure them of the effects of this opium smoking.†

My Christian friends, there is only one medicine that can cure a disease like that. Habit may indeed grow into a second nature; it may fasten itself upon the soul with a clutch that shall never be relaxed; it may bend down and bind with iron chains the soul which, alas! cannot of itself escape from this awful, this fearful slavery to sin. But there is a remedy; there is a power capable of meeting the suffering of those who are given over to this or similar evils. The danger and the weakness of all who give way to repeated temptation, arises from their bringing themselves, through their own evil deeds, into a

*Lord Jocelyn's "Six Months in China."

"China." By the Rev. G. Smith, pp. 214, 431-442.