The Press.
London, England, 1856-10-04 00:00:00

INDIA AND CHINA.

A telegraphic despatch from Trieste, 'Wednesday,
Oct. 1, states:

The steamer Bombay arrived here to-day at two p.m., in
135 hours from Alexandria, which port she left on the 23th
of September. The Indian mail was to leave Alexandria
on that day, with advices from Calcutta to the 22nd of
Auguat ; Bombay, 29th of August; Hongkong, 9th of
August ; and Shanghai, Ist of August. Preparations were
being made at Bombay for a military demonstration in the
Persian Gulf. Many parts of China are in a disastrous
state. At Canton a great loss of property and of life had
occurred from floods.

Governor Geary, of Kansas, had delivered an ad-
dress at Lecompton on the 11th instant, on assuming
office. He deprecated a continuance of the strite
and disorder in the territory, caused by the inter-
ference of other States, promised to do justice to all
without party considerations, and said he expected
obedience to the laws of the territorial legislature,
until they were repealed. A proclamation was issued
on the same day, ordering that the volunteer militia
be discharged, and commanding that all armed bodies
of men disband or at once quit the territory.
The news from California is important, as it places
ns in possession of the pleasing intelligence that the
vigilance committee of San Francisco had disbanded.
The committee, after releasing Judge Terry uncondi-
tionally, and with only the recommendation that he
resign his office as judge of the Supreme Court of the
State, consummated their labours, and formally dis-
banded on the 18th of August, celebrating the event
by a grand parade, in which between six and seven
thousand took part. The Fremont party were making
rapid strides in all parts of the State.

A SPANISH PROTESTANT gentleman, Don Anglos di
Mora, a separatist from the Church of Rome, and
a Protestant missionary, has been seized and impty
soned at Madrid by the ecclesiastical authoria ei
The committee of the Protestant Alliance have peti-
tioned Lord Clarendon to interfere. The petition
states that M. de Mora, while quietly walking in the
Prado at Madrid, was suddenly assaulted and beaten,
in the presence of some priests, and dragged away in
custody by some officers of the police to the civil
governor of Madrid. The vicar general, the chief
ecclesiastical authority in cases of heresy, claimed
him as his prisoner; be was thrown into a dungeon,
and remains at present in prison subject to be dealt
with according to the Royal decree of 1813, which by
reference to the ancient law (la ley ii., titulo xxvi.,
partida vii.) still imposes the punishment of death by
fire upon heretics.

MR. GLADSTONE AND THE SOCIETY FOR
THE PROPAGATION OF THE GOSPEL.
THE Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P., attended
the annual meeting at Liverpool, on Monday even-
ing, of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel
in Foreign Parts. The Bishop of Choster presided.
Mr. GLADSTONE eloquently recommended the ob-
jects of the society. He remarked that this period
was a crisis in the history of the society, whose
means had been increasing, but whose obligations
bad gone on increasing even faster than its means.
The society had recently suffered the sudden
withdrawal of one of the resources to which it
had been accustomed to trust. That resource
consisted of a Queen's Letter, which after all
amounted to no more than a permission, attended
with the royal sanction, to the members of the
Church to offer their freewill off!rings in all the
churches of the land on behalf of the society. He
believed that was a resource that it would have been
perfectly competent to the Church of England to
make use of, with full profit, irrespective of the
sanction of the Crown. But it was a particular form
in which the Church had been accustomed to make
her appeal to her members; and the sudden break
ing up of any form whatever, although one of no
peculiar virtue in itself, and one which might
originally have easily been dispensed • with, was
attended with a momentary inconvenience; and the
inconvenience was in the present instance something
like a loss of an average income of 10,0001. a year.
Sreaking of the operations of the society in the
colonies, the right hon. gentleman said he would not
touch upon its agency amongst the heathen, but
would rather allude to that which was more espe-
cially its characteristic work. He approved of the
system of temporary suppert to colonial commu-
nities :

There may be an impression after all that those who
quit our shores in order to find their habitations in foreign
lands—l should not say foreign, but in distant lauds—and
to continue the subjects of the British Crown in their new
character as colonists—there might be an impression tha

these men should bear for themselves the burden of pro-
viding for themselves religious ordinances. Well, now. I
think the true principle is that temporary support and aid
should be lent to them from home. I don't hesitate to go
even so far as to say that permanent support, in the shape
of money to the colonial community, with a view to the
sustentation of their own ministers and the due preparation
of the ordinances of religion, would not only not be a good,
but it would be an evil, because it would separate between
them and the true, proper, national, Christian discharge of
their duties. The function of this society is to cherish
them in their infancy. Believe me, every community has
a state of infancy and of helplessness. There are, no
doubt, belonging to the Crown great and powerful colonies
—there is not one of them that has not arisen from the
smallest beginning. Every community that has ever been
founded, since the days of our first parents, has had first
to go through a crisis of difficulty and danger. There is a
period when the State finds it necessary to make provision
for the civil wants of the early settlers. There is also a
period when assistance should be rendered them with
respect to their spiritual wants. The wise policy of the
State has been for many years to shorten the period as
much as possible—not merely out of a sense of justice to
the British people ( though justice to the British people
requires it), hut likewise because it is right that those who
in the political sphere enjoy the privileges of freemen
should bear burdens of freemen, and because in point of
fact there can be no such thing in the long run as the pri-
vileges of freemen without the burdens of freemen. The
very same thing applies to this society. If this society
were to promise permanent aid to the support of the Church
in the colonies, it would be to abandon her duty not less
to you than the colonists. It would be asking you to
bestow your alms upon an object that did not require them ;
it would be enervating and emasculating that tone of reli-
gion in the colonies, preventing the growth of a due sense
of its inestimable value—if we treated the colonists in their
Christian capacity as mere children and not as grown men,
that they permit themselves to imagine that they have so
little sense of the value of the religious ordinances that
they were willing to discharge in that respect what they
did for themselves with regard to every other temporal
blessing.

Now, I think we have received assurances in the form
of facts that this is the wise principle upon which the
society has been acting. You have been told that in
one important diocese of Tasmania, within a couple of
years, the grant of the society will be practically abolished.

You have been told that it will be absolutely abolished in
a still more important district, the diocese of Toronto. As
I have said, it is not for me to give information which I
scantily possess, but it may be worth mentioning to you
that, not only has the principle of subscribing for the sup-
port of the parochial clergy made great way in the colonies,
but we have seen within the last two years the principle of
support for the episcopal heads of the Church likewise re-
cognised as a burden the colonies ought to take upon them-
selves ; and, unless I am much mistaken, there are at this
moment contemplated—if they are not gradually advancing
towards maturity—two funds in Upper Canada, raised
solely from colonial resources, with a view to the founda-
tion of two bishoprics in that colony. I might also venture
to say what has been done by the Bishop of New Zealand.
Unless I am greatly mistaken, that admirable man, as pru-
dent and practical in his measures as he is fervent in his
zeal and unbounded in his sacrifices to God, from the very
first moment when he went to take the charge of that mis-
sionary church has been contemplating and preparing for
the time when it would have to depend only upon its own
resources ; and, by the prudent acquisition of land, he has
been forming a fund the object of which is, after a limited
period, to relieve this society of all pecuniary charge to the
Church of New Zealand. So I trust you will feel that the
object for which you are now asked to contribute is a just,
a prudent, and a reasonable object. Ido not say that our
case would be hard if we threw our alma away, for alms
given in piety and faith, even though the object be one not
to require them, are far better spent, I fear, than large
portions of the expenditure of this great Christian country.
Still, it is not for the society to proceed upon that principle.
It is her duty to satisfy every one of the thorough reason•
ableness, the justice, the prudence, and the foresight with
which she acts; and you will agree with me she does what
is just and fair to the people of England who support, and,
what is most for the interest of the settlers in the colonies,
whose spiritual nurse she has been for so many generations,
when she adopts the rule which is adopted in the State,
because it is in regard to its own sphere—namely, that
during the petiod of the first difficulties and pressure the
liberal offerings of the people of England should be given
to prevent the want of religious ordinances ; but, after the
difficulties of the first stage of colonial life are surmounted,
she consents, not for our sakes but for their own, that they
should take upon themselves the burden of supporting
their own colonial ministry.

One of the principal duties of the society had refe-
rence to the care of emigrants. Nnw, the great work
of emigration was one of the marked characteristics
of the nineteenth century, and it was plain the func-
tion of colonising the earth belonged to England :

Is it not the truth that within the last two centuries
Europe has made as it were a great spring outwards?
Various countries attempted to appropriate large portions
of the fertile, but up to that time unoccupied, spaces of the
earth. We were not the first in the field ; there were other
countries that then had either greater power or greater
opportunities ; Spain and Portugal, in particular, appro-
priated to themselves vast regions beyond the ocean.
France likewise was, at least, our rival in that respect. We
were in the race, but we were by no means the foremost
in it. It has, however, continued; and how do these
matters now stand? What has Portugal now to do with
the colonisation of the world? What has Spain to do at
this time with the colonisation of the world ? What has
Germany or Italy to do with the colonisation of the world ?
What has that great, powerful, civilised, and enlightened
people, the French nation, our present neighbours and I
hope to continue our friends—what has that great nation
to do at this moment with the colonisation of the world ?
Undoubtedly she occupies a foremost place in the ranks
of civilisation—undoubtedly she has important duties to
discharge in reference to her own people, and in reference
to Europe; but it is plain from experience that colonising
is not the function which it has pleased Providence to
commit either to that great country or to any other among
the leading and most powerful European nations. And
yet has colonisation stopped? It. has stopped in the States
which were founded from those sources. They appear to
carry within them no principle of vigour and elasticity.
But when you look to those which have sprung from the
loins of England, how marked is the difference.
What were to be the future results of this colonisa-
tion ?
- -

Is it enough that you multiply the inhabitants of this
earth ? Is it enough that you provide them with the meat
which perishes ? Is it enough that you add wider and
wider spaces to our dominions? Is it enough that you
exult in thinking how many races of men there are that
speak your language, that obey your laws, that own alle-
giance to your sovereign, or that, in the essential particu-
lars of social and human life, recal perpetually the origin
from which they sprung? Is this enough, or is it not? It
was beautifully said by a writer of great imagination, that
if you reared up men with cultivated tastes, with the know-
ledge and the habits of civilisation, with the means of
indulging these tastes, and of surrounding themselves with
the comforts of life, and if at the same time they remained
ignorant of that guidance which leads them heavenward,
you were only preparing a more costly banquet to satiate
the appetite of death. And that is true. These empires,
it is reasonable to believe, will exist—these cities will be
reared, they will be in the closest relations with you, and
the network of your commerce reaches over the whole
earth. You know yourselves how incessantly both are
extended, and their relations are increasing ; but shall
these people be people rejoicing above all things in the
knowledge of the living God ?

That was a question the society could answer :
It is the function of this society—it is her peculiar pri-
vilege, that she manages to be peculiarly wanted at that
season of weakness and of infancy to which I have already
endeavoured to call your attention. It is her business to
prevent a fatal interval during which the sound of the name