The Press. — London, England, 1857-03-14 00:00:00

25G adoration. Slavery prevails extensively throughout Sinai, but in its mildest form. Their jurisprudence shows great mental culti vation and subtlety. . . .------ - The First lung is favourable to the extension of commerce in his dominions. Peter Plymley could not have better illustrated the advantages of commerce than did his Majesty in a few pithy sentences : He illustrated his views by the following allegoiy:— Two men start from the jungle loaded with the coarse articles it produces—the fibres of the hemp, for txample : they move onwards, and come to a place where there is more valuable material, as cotton. The foolish and un improveable man persists in carrying his coarse and un profitable burden of hemp ; his wiser campanion exchanges his hemp for the finer and more valuable material. They still move on, and conic to a silk district. The fool sticks to his hemp, the wise barters his cotton for silk : and thus they reach the end of their journey, one exhausted with carrying an almost worthless and heavy load, the other having brought with ease a profitable and valuable in vestment. The people are passionately attached to music, and in this art the people of Laos, an extensive province of Siam, seem to have attained great proficiency. The author admits the evils of the opium traffic, but supposes that they are fewer when it is legalised than when it is prohibited, as in the latter case, through the impossibility of suppression, it becomes practically illimit able : The use of opium has greatly extended in Siam during the last thirty years. Its consumption among the Siamese has been prohibited b - j a severe edict of the King, im posing heavy fines and degrading punishments on those who indulge in so pernicious a practice. It is farmed by a Chinese of great opulence, who has been raised to the rank of nobility; and the annual importation is now about twelve hundred chests, most of which is smoked by the Chinese settlers. The fatal consequences of the habitual use of this drug is a frequent subject of representation from the Siamese priests, and the Catholic and Protestant missionaries; but to prevent its introduction and its consumption would seem to be beyond the powers of legislation, and perhaps the legislation of its import is a lesser evil than to allow an unlawful and irrepressible trade to extend itself, as it has done in China, where the native cultivation of the poppy must be allowed to afford strong evidence that the repeated injunctions against the dealers in and smokers of opium are not to be attributed wholly to a desire to prevent its use. The strong argu ment against the abolition of the opium farm is, that it is better that the trade should be under than beyond the control of the Government. The chapters on the natural history of Siam are engaging. The elephant is invaluable for transport an d travelling : Without the aid of the elephant, it would scarcely be possible to traverse the woods and jungles of Siam. He makes his way as he goes, crushing with his trunk all that resists his progress ; over deep morasses or sloughs lie drags himself on his knees and belly. When he has to cross a stream, he ascertains the depth by his proboscis, advances slowly, and when lie is out of his depth he swims, breathing through his trunk, which is visible when the whole of his body is submersed. He descends into ravines impassable by man, and by the aid of his trunk ascends steep mountains. His ordinary pace is about four to five miles an hour, and he will journey day and night if pro. perly fed. When weary, he strikes the ground with his trunk, making a sound resembling a horn, which announces to his driver that lie desires repose. In Siam the howdah is a great roofed basket, in which the traveller, with the aid of his cushions, comfortably ensconces himself. The motion is disagreeable at first, but ceases to be so after a little practice. The homage paid to white'elephants when they are caught is a singular feature in the customs of so intelligent a people as the Siamese. Royal honours are paid to these rare beasts ; they are waited on by bands of attendants, and are served with vessels of gold and silver. From the representations of this work, the Siamese appear to rank among the most intel ligent and amiable of all the Eastern races. No. thing could possibly be more gratifying than the reception given to the Embassy. Let us hope that a commercial intercourse so happily begun may be amicably continued, and that the consul who is permitted to reside in the capital may keep his mind clear from all thoughts of aggression, and from a too par ticular reference to the precedents established by the special embassy sent by Louis XIV. two hundred years ago. The Gospel of St. John. A Series of Dis courses. By Frederick Denison Maurice, M.A. Cambridge : Macmillan and Co. Truss discourses of Mr. Maurice contain so many passages of great value and excellence -t we regret to fiud them marred by so THE PRESS. many peculiarities of matter and manner which it is impossible not to condemn. In many parts of his work Mr. Maurice appears to have before him the cavils and objections of a peculiar class of hearers—to be writing, in fact, for sceptics, rather than believers in the creed to which he himself belongs, and either to be afraid of speaking out, or else anxious to make strange admissions. The tendency of his sermons is to unsettle men's faith in the received interpretations of Scripture, without supplying anything better in their place—we might say, anything intelligible. For, whether it be the fault of his audience or himself, his language is constantly drifting into wellnigh fathomless obscurity. He has on the present occasion selected that Gospel in which the great truths of Christianity are especially revealed ; yet he shrinks from grappling with or expounding them. His language on the Atonement we are sure will be found most unsatisfactory. We fix our minds earnestly on the mist of words, hoping against hope that they willfat length assume a definite meaning, as nebulae resolve themselves into stars before the stead fast gaze of the astronomer. But our patience is in vain; and soon we begin to suspect that the vagueness was not unintentional. When Mr. Maurice has said of these words, " Behold " the Lamb of God, which taketh away the " sins of the world," that " this wonderful " sentence has exercised more power over " eightaen centuries than perhaps any which " was ever spoken or written," ho seems to think he has paid his tribute to the impor tance of the sub,ject, and that he may leave who will to decipher it for himself. Is this the office of a Christian priest? Mr. Maurice maintains that the first five verses of the Gospel of St. John could only have been written by the " most earnest of Jews " and the most simple of Christian apostles "; and to make this good he asserts that St. John at Ephesus "was essentially a Jew," and that he still preserved in that city the charac teristics of his childhood and his education ; and if ho were not a Jew, he seems to say, he should believe these verses to have proceeded from some one else. But Mr. Alford, in his Commentary, has sufficiently proved that the term and idea of the Aoy6c, as the creative, declarative, conjunctive word of God, and as a distinct person called the Word was really made fel. St. John in the Old Testament, the wisdom of Solomon, and the writings of Philo. Gnostic and other views had now begun to appear which necessitated its earnest exposi tion. Why then should we seek for any other account of these verses than in the ordinary belief that St. John was divinely prompted to write as he did in order to counteract those heresies? It is painful to see a man like Mr. Maurice so unwilling to ascribe any effect to the Divine agency when by any shift he can avoid it. Has not St. John been always repre sented by the emblem of the eagle, as being endowed with greater insight into divine things than the other Apostles? And are we now to be told that, so far from this, he would not have written this Gospel if he had risen out of the influences of his early Jewish feel ings and education ? Was the effect of the Pentecostal gift so imperfect that St. John was still left to draw upon the stores of his Jewish teachers? Such modes of explaining fancied difficulties are monstrous. We now come to Mr. Maurice's remarks upon the Miracles. He would like to see the present English version of the Bible revised in order to translate eni r ui'm " signs" instead of "miracles." And what is his reason? Does he seriously mean to say that when people use the word " miracle " in the Bible they think that "to produce astonishment is " the immediate objeet of him who works it ?" (p. 57.) Really Mr. Maurice must have a very oddly-constituted class of minds to teach, or entertain very unworthy opinions of his hearers. Indeed, it seems one peculiarity of his mind to attribute very monstrous opinions to everybody but himself, and at times to deny them common sense. Vide especially p. 180, 239, and 245. To recur to the point, Mr. Maurice must have read Mr. Trench's able " Notes on the Miracles." That book would tell him that miracles are taught by the Church to fulfil two ends. First, to bo the supernatural SATURDAY, Icredentials of a messenger from Heaven ; and, secondly, to serve as a mode of teaching. In order to fulfil the first end of a miracle it must be the exercise of a power above the ordinary laws of nature. We know as well as Mr. Maurice can teach us that to produce a field of wheat from a few grains of corn, or the juice lot' the grape from a small plant, are miracles of wisdom, goodness, and power. But, besides this, the Bible expressly asserts that the miracles of Christ denoted the presence of that Higher Power which made all things, and the assertion of his power over them. Christ himself appealed to these works as evidences of his divine mission. And to understand such miracles as the turning of water into wine rather as evidence of his humanity than of his divinity seems both contradictory to our Saviour's own words and conducive to no useful purpose among men. In his remarks upon the miracle of Christ walking on the waves we do not understand what Mr. Maurice means by saying it was not " a violation of the laws of nature." Does he mean laws of nature such as we ourselves are conversant with? Words have long been used in certain received significations, and no man, whatever his position in literature, is entitled to handle them in this fantastic fashion. That it was a sign of something else which is not regulated by laws known to us no Christian would deny. But Christ as a human being walking over the water as if it were dry land was a violation of the laws of nature, unless our language and ideas are all to be turned topsyturvey. Why cannot Mr. Maurice say what he means in simple, straightforward English? Such bewildering phrases may titillate tl►e exhausted curiosity of languid se,epties ; but it is idle to suppose they will stir up religion in the hearts of earnest men. There is furthermore a tone of bitterness discernible in these discourses which had been better away. At p. 189 he speaks of res• cuing something from "the fangs of contro versialists ;" in another place, p. 238, of the " dark and malignant orthodoxy," which does not rwree with himself on the subject of future punishment. We know not to what particular controversialists Mr. Maurice may be alluding, but he shows us that his own fangs are not deficient in sharpness. He loves to sneer at doctors, divines, and saints, but he forgets that all this sort of thing must inevitably recoil on himself. Is not lie too a " controversialist "? Is rot he too a " divine"? If he would only permit us, we have that respect for Mr. Maurice's private life that we would even ask if he too merits not the still nobler appella tion ? Before concluding our notice we must direct the attention of our readers to certain passages of great beauty and power, in which Mr. Maurice shows himself in his best colours, natural, eloquent, and pathetic. Such as at p. 107, the voice of Christ still speaking and heard in the Church ; at p. 132-3, the true character of a Christian's reward ; and at p. 111 and 4"i2, speculations upon angels, which remind us very much of a beautiful sermon of New man's on St. Michael's-day entitled " The Powers of Nature." At p. 162, the woman of Samaria ; and at p. 319, the recognition of friends in a future world founded on the story of Lazarus. The latter we subjoin : I cannot read this story without feeling that, among those things in heaven and earth that are so to be restored, the sympathies and affections of the family are some of the chief. 1 know not why St. John should have dwelt so much upon the sorrow of the sisters of Lazarus, and upon Christ's feeling for them, if he had not meant us to un derstand this. Martha, I suppose, thought before she came to Jesus, that her brother would ascend some time or other on angels wings into a place somewhere above the stars ; but that all the threads which, from their child hood upwards, had been winding round them and binding them to each other, should be broken; that the associa tions of home should cease for ever. lam sure she learnt a different lesson after she had seen her brother again, and had understood the declaration, " I am the resurrection and the life." Then she will have known that if, in the resurrec tion, " they neither man, nor are given in marriage,"—ff no fresh ties are formed like those which bind us together on earth,—yet that the old relationships, the old affections, are to have a new and higher life. What is sown in cor ruption is raised in incorruption ; what is sown in weak ness is raised in strength ; m hat is sown a natural relation ship is raised a spiritual. lint in this ease, as in every other, the change does not alter the substance of that which has boon, only brings it forth in its might and purity.