HOWITT'S COLONIZATION AND CHRISTIANITY, PAG. 7 TO 10 INCLUSIVE.

Daily Southern Cross, Volume 1, Issue 35, 16 December 1843, Page 4

HOWITT'S COLONIZATION AND CHRISTIANITY, PAG. 7 TO 10 INCLUSIVE.

But if such is the internal- condition of Christian Europe, what is the phasis that it presents to the rest of the world ? With the exception of our own tribes, now numerously scattered over almost every region of the earth, all are in our estimation barbarians. We pride ourselves on our superior knowledge, our superior refinement, our higher virtues, our nobler character. We talk of the heathen, the savage, and the cruel, and the wily tribes, that fill the rest of the earth ; but how is it that these tribes know us? Chiefly by the very features that we attribute exclusively to them. They know us chiefly by our crimes and our cruelty. It is we who are, and must appear to them the savages. What, indeed, are civilization and Christianity ? The refinement and ennoblement of our nature ! The habitual feeling and the habitual practice of an enlightened justice, of de-

licacy and decorum, of generosity and affection to our fellow men. There is not one of these qualities that we have not violated for ever, and on almost all occasions, towards every single tribe with which we have come in contact. We have professed, indeed, to teach Christianity to them ; but we had it not to teach, and wo have carried them instead all the curses and the horrors of a de inon race. If the reign of Satan, in fact, were come, — if he were let loose with all his legions, to plague the earth for a thousaud years, what would be the characterics of his prevalence ? Terrors and crimes ; one wide pestilence of vice and obcenity ; one fearful torrent of cruelty and wrath, deceit and oppression, vengeance and malignity ; the passions of the strong would be inflamed — the weak would cry and implore in vain ! And is not that the very reign of spurious Christianity which has lasted now for these thousand years, and that during the last three hundred, has spread with discovery round the whole earth, and made the name of Christian synonymous with fiend ? It is shocking that the divine and beneficent religion of Christ should thus have been libelled by base pretenders, and made to stink in the nostrils of all people to whom it ought, and would, have come as the opening of heaven ; but it is a fact no less awfnl than true, that the European nations, while professing Christianity, have made it odious to the heathen. They have branded it by their actions as something breathed up, full of curses and cruelties, from the infernal regions. On them lies the guilt, the stupendous guilt of having checked the gospel in its career, and brought it to a full stop in its triumphant progress through the nations. They have done this, and then wondered at their deed ! They have visited every coast in the shape of rapacious and unprincipled monsters, and then cursed the inhabitants as besotted with superstition, because they did not look on them as angels ! People have wondered at the slow progress, and in many countries, the almost hopeless labours of the missionaries ; — why should they wonder ? The missionaries had Christianity to teach — and their countrymen had been there before them, and called themselves Christians ! That was enough ; what recommendations could a religion have, to men who had seen its professors for generations in the sole characters of thieves, murderers, and oppressors? The missionaries told them, that in Christianity lay their salvation ; — they shook their heads, they had already found it their destruction ! They- told them they were come to comfort and enlighten them ; — they had already been comforted by the seizure of their lands, the violation of their ancient rights, the kidnapping of their persons ; and they had been enlightened by the midnight flames of their own dwellings'! Is there any mystery in the difficulties of the missionaries ? Is there any in the apathy of simple nations towards Christianity ? The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every people that they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught, and however reckless of mercy and of shame, in any age of the earth. Is it fit that this horrible blending of the names of Christianity and outrage should continue ? Yet it does continue, and must continue, till the genuine spirit of Christianity in this kingdom shall arouse itself, and determine that these villanies shall cease, or they who perpetrate them shall be stripped of • the honoured name of Christian ! If foul deeds are to be done, let them bo done in their own foul name ; and let robbery of lands, seizure of cattle, violence committed on the liberties or the lives of men, be branded as the deeds of devils j and not of Christians. The spirit of Chrisi tianity, in the shape of missions, and in the teaching and beneficent acts of the missionaries, is now sensibly, in many countries, undoing the evil which wolves in the sheep's clothing of the Christian name had before done. And of late another glorious symptom of the growth of this divine spirit has shown itself, in the strong feeling exhibited in this I country towards the natives of our colonies. To fan that genuine flame of love, is the object of this work. To comprehend the full extent of atrocities done in the Christian name, we must look the whole wide evil sterly in the face. We must not suffer ourselves to aim merely at the redress of this or that grievance ; but, gathering all the scattered rays of aboriginal oppression into one burning focus, and thus enabling ourselves to feel its entire force, we shall be less than Englishmen and Christians if we do not stamp the whole system of colonial usage towards the natives, with that general and indignant odium which must demolish it at once and forever.

To restore Manuscripts become Illegible from Time. — Moisten the writing gently with a decoction of gall-nuts, in which a little yinegar has been infused.

Order, a Faculty op the Mind. — You may observe that there is in man a love of order or arrangement commencing at the very dawn of reason : indeed, even when tho intellectual powers have scarcely awoke, the child begins to select and arrange such material objects as happen to be within its reach, He places bodies together which are of the same form, and collects into one place objects of the same colour or of the same size. This faculty seems intended for the wisest purposes, and though observed throughout tho animal creation, yet it is bestowed on man in a pre-eminent degree. It is this faculty which, when his intellect has advanced to maturity, enables him to divide, methodise, and classify the various objects around him; whilst it is also one of the most important of our mental powers in transacting what is usually called " the business of life.". It is, indeed, of such importance in the operations of mind that phrenologists have attributed to it a particular organ. Long Measure. — Paper used to be sold by the sheet, the quire, or the ream ; but, in "the march of improvement" stationery will not remain stationary, and so it is now sold by measure. The following order was received from a pottery firm the other day. The writer, it will be observed, gives his orders with as much indifference as though they were not at all extraordinary :—"Gentlemen — Please to send us ten miles of your best printing tissue paper, in length ; six miles to be 30 inches broad, and four miles to be 22 inches broad, to be wrapped on wooden rollers, according to the plan given. The object of having the paper of such great length is, that it may be printed on engraved cylinders, in the same way as calicoes, &c." Electricity. — Saussure and his companion, while ascending the Alps, were caught amidst thunder -clouds : they fouud their bodies filled with electricity, and every part of them so saturated with it, that spontaneous sparks were omitted with a crackling noise, and the same painful sensations which are felt by those electrified by art: Hot Weather. — "In 1750," Walpole says, "we had eight of the hottest days that ever were felt ; they say, some degrees beyond the hottest in the East Indies, and that the Thames was more so than the hot wells at Bristol. The guards died on their posts at Versailles ; and here a Captain Halyburton went mad with the excess of it." Ignorant Naivete. — An old officer had lost an eye in the wars, and supplied it with a glass one, which he always took out when he went to bed. Being at an inn, he took out his eye and gave it to the simple wench who attended, desiring her to lay it on the table. The maid afterwards still waiting and staring, "What doest wait for?" said the officer. "Only for the other eye, sir." A Threat Explained. — "Your unchristian virulence against me," said a Hugonot who had been persecuted for preaching, " shall cost hundreds of people their lives." This menace brought the author into trouble; he was cited before a court of justice, and was charged with harbouring the"most bloody designs against his fellow subjects. "I am innocent," said he, "of all you lay to my account. My only meaning was, that 1 intended (since I could not act as a minister) ■ to practice as a physician." Russian Ladies. —In Moscow it is the fashion for young ladies, even of the first , respectability, to light a pipe, put it to their lips, and present it to a gentleman. To Prevent Beer from becoming Acetous. — Suspend a knob of marble by a piece of tape from the bung-hole to near the bot- ; torn of the barrel, upon which, being pure carbonate of lime, the acid quality of the j beer acts on its incipient formation ; it consequently becomes neutralized, and thus is kept from being hard or sour. In an experiment made, the marble was considerably eaten away, except where the tape encircled [ it, and the beer remained sound and fresh to the last drop. Origin of the name of Muslin. — The city of Mosul, formerly the capital of Mesopotamia, stands upon the right or western bank of the Tigris, opposite to the site of ancient Ninevah. " All those cloths of gold and silk which we, the Venetians, (says Marco Polo,) call muslins, are of the manu- j facture of Mosul. " It is not improbable that the city of Mosul being at that time one of the greatest entrepots of the eastern commerce, may have given the appellation to various productions of the loom conveyed from thence to the Mediterranean. Promise " in fdturo." — A President of the parliament of Paris, presenting an address ) to the Duke of Burgundy, then an infant, said, ! ',' We come, prince, to offer you our respects ; our children will give you their services." How many amusing and ridiculous scenes j should we witness in this world, if each pair ; of men that secretly laugh at each other, werff v to laugh at each other aloud. — Innes. \