lords of the creation, however, are no better disposed to regard life as any sacred trust; they die, we are told, apparently as unconcerned as blue-bottle flies, and sometimes to the music of saw and hammer implementing their coffins in contiguous apartments. Moreover, we are furnished with anecdotes of relatives, near and dear, haggling with doctors about price of pills and drugs, urging upon the sick the propriety of saving cash as better kept for handsome burial furniture. Further we are told that they are with extreme readiness induced to commit suicide, preferring speedy death to life in suffering.

Then again, accounts are given of mendicant wretches swarming, falling down and fainting half dead by the wayside, nay even dying ere they reach the place whence they expected help, and their rotting carcases by the wayside and in fields are passed without much notice, as too common a spectacle for remark. These wretched beings are the victims of such pleasantly deadly vices as gambling, drunkenness, and debauchery of the beastly type that Sodom and her sister cities wallowed in.

In Abbé Huc's journal, there is an anecdote of one wretch massacreing his infant daughter in order that by careful inspection of the way in which the poor little creature's blood flowed along the cleaver of decapitation, he may augur prospect of future chance of male offspring; a vigorous constitution being marked, in their physiological science, by certain niceties in the flow of the blood; feeble constitutions being supposed, by these savans, to be good for nothing but begetting of dreaded female incumbrances.

This is the empire that Voltaire brought into court, to furnish evidence of the blessings of civilization, such a civilization!-but not more than Christian Europe and Yankee land will come to in future ages, unless the religion of mankind be turned from vocalizing profession to active worship, performed in obedience to the great law of mutual concession and sympathizing self-sacrifice, which constitutes the true basis of sociological science.

To return, however, to the significance of certain Chinese

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royal titles. It appears from these, that there once existed a mighty nation at the head of civilization, in ages so remote that their historical monuments have been submerged and lost in the deluge of the Noachian waters of oblivion. And it appears also, that the sovereign of this great empire was styled "King of kings, and Lord of lords," in addition to other titles proclaiming and establishing his authority to rule and govern, in the two-fold form of instruction and executive administration of these laws, the nations of the world. That this emperor's power was superior to that of every monarch upon earth, for he was magister in the imperium super imperium that was in those times (and still continues to be) so much wanted for pacific settlement of constantly recurring national contentions, and for the equitable adjustment of rival and conflicting interests.

The singular titles and prerogatives traditionally claimed by the Emperor of China, asserted to be the adopted son of the Most High God and the representative on earth of heavenly power, having a celestial mission from Deity for the education and government of all mankind, cannot be taken for gratuitous and arrogant assumption of an ardent but badly regulated imagination, because they are actually traditional landmarks of momentous events. They are, so to speak, the links of a long lost and broken chain of facts, belonging to the buried history of a mysterious and terrible tragedy, and they afford a clue to a drama of singular significance, and serve as indices to guide recently awakened European interest to bygone events, thus rescued from the everlasting darkness of oblivion by what may be termed floating pieces of a fearful wreck. The hopes and aspirations of humanity for regenerated, social, and political science, are inextricably interwoven with this occult history, for to this fall of the adopted or anointed children of the eternal Father, the great God of heaven and earth, are connected the sorrows and sufferings of nations overburdened with the heavy load that crude philosophies and false sacerdotal systems impose upon their weary shoulders. Thus it is to the east that we must turn to prosecute our search for the buried

chronicles of the fall of the first witnesses of Deity upon earth, who abandoned their mission to solve the great enigma of the universe for succeeding generations, and by accepting the bitter fruit of effete superstitions became perverts to the morbid consciousness of absolute evil in the universe.

But the orient is no longer the head, the brain, or active intellect of this planet. To Europe now belongs the mission to pioneer humanity in the march of progress, and this movement, whenever it commences, will be eastwards until it reaches the chosen country made sacred for the growth of true philosophical and social religion, and whence will radiate the beams of that effulgent light for which the nations upon earth have so long looked. For many ages all the lines of prophetic light have been directed towards Palestine as the stage whereon will be acted the closing scene of this planet's struggle, and the final desperate conflict between ancient serpent sacerdotalism and the newly born power of regenerated social life.

Abbé Huc conjectures that the doctrines of Buddha, or the man god, were introduced officially into China in the first century of the Christian era.

But Buddhism was flourishing in the full meridian splendour of its sunlight in other Asiatic countries, many centuries before what is called Christianity was preached, and the votaries of this system numbered some hundreds of millions of the human race.

The belief in an evil principle contending for sovereignty in nature with a good principle is of world-wide acceptation, and appears to have inoculated the theology of Judaism and Christianism with traditional rites and ceremonies from Asia.

It is recorded of a certain zealous Jesuit, that, on his way, with a stock of morals and miracles, to the far east, he encountered something in Thibet that almost deprived him of his wits. He saw there what induced him to say, after careful inspection, was a very creditable imitation, by the devil, of the Roman Catholic religion. He was amazed to find the trinity in unity of Deity, together with the whole

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paraphernalia of the European ritual, including even the cardinal's scarlet hat and hosiery. The priests of Boodh had shaven crowns, wore mitres, told beads, burnt incense, held matins, vespers, and chaunted prayers, preached celibacy, and kept nunneries of vestal virgins. They performed penance, gave dispensations and absolution, blessed and cursed in the regular orthodox fashion. The portraits of departed saints in their temples had the catholic glory round their polled heads. Their theology was not very different from Europeanism, except perhaps that hell fire was not arranged upon the same plan. It required a careful sorting up every seven thousand years, and the miserable inmates turning over to be grilled on the other side. On the whole, however, the thing was a very double of the holy mother church the Jesuit had left, and he could not but express his admiration of Satan's abilities in producing so good an imitation. He little suspected, worthy man, that his own church was but Europeanized and Buddhised - Brahminism. Could he have pierced into the history of the past, he would have seen rash converts rushing from Syria eastwards, and returning with the traditions and trumpery of Asia to clothe what they called the religion of Christ. If the Jesuit could have seen this, he would have been able to understand why it was that Paul was not permitted to journey eastward from Syria, and he would further have comprehended how this Orientalism had even in Paul's time commenced to undermine, and subsequently to take the citadel of decaying faith, substituting that ritualism of false philosophy and lying legends that went by the name of Christianity.

This substitute of conventional belief, and mere profession of faith, for the active obedience of true religion of duty, degenerated, as it always has done and will do, into the church ritualism of visible symbols and standards of metaphysical tenets, ceremonial etiquette, kotouing, and repeating prayers, songs, howls, bell ringing, man millinery, harlequinism, and downright jugglery, and Jack Pudding antics; mistaking the shadow for the substance, and white-washing the outside of the human carcase which is left within a cage

for foul and unclean thoughts, a living sepulchre of death, full of uncleanness, insanity, and decay.

What might perhaps have staggered the Jesuit more than anything else, if he had studied this Oriental scheme of theism, would have been one reputed origin of Boodh's first incarnation in the human form. The Indo-Chinese account is a caricature, as follows:-The divine nature entered the womb of Maha-yo-diva, the Queen, or wife of Soho-den, King of Magadhi, in the north of Hindostan. As soon as the prophet was born, he walked about, with one hand lifted up to heaven, proclaiming his divine origin, and then we may suppose, settled down to his titty: however that may be, the infant thrived upon something, and became a child; his childhood not devoted to marbles, kites, and treacle toffee, but passed in theological study! so that his learning surpassed the oldest and profoundest sages. At seventeen he married, but not content with one wife, must have two concubines to bother him, and as might have been expected, three years of this domestic arrangement was enough for him, so he ran away from his family at twenty, forsaking the world, and retired to continue his sacred studies under masters, who were four of the most celebrated D.D.'s of that age.

Ten years elapsed, and when thirty he has gained the knowledge of the entire universe, and to make an awfully long winded story short, (students must refer to originals,) he became the god Buddha.

When seventy years of age, he sickened, and fearing dissolution, (which we respectfully submit is out of all character for a Deity,) he sent for his disciples, who numbered it appears some scores of thousands, and unfolded the mystery of his doctrine. Which when unfolded, was really a curiosity in its way, and quite on a par with the god's temporary abode on earth, but seems rather like labour in vain, to have spent so many years, and exhausted the brains of four doctors of divinity to arrive at. The mystery was just

this:

"The grand principle of all things is emptiness and