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have left. He is stretched out upon the cross as if it were a couch; spikes, long and thick, are driven through his hands and feet; and now it is not, "and if I be lifted up," because you can discern four strong Roman soldiers applying their brawny arms to the transverse beam, and he is lifted up, and hangs suspended by his flesh. When the crowd catch the first glimpse of his naked, wounded, and bleeding body, nailed to the cross, there is a thrill of horror felt by his friends, and a very indecent expression of joy displayed by his inveterate foes. The priests and Levites walk past on this side and that, casting upon him a look of scorn, insulting his sufferings, and wagging their heads in mock imitation of his convulsive agony. Even the thieves crucified the one on the right and the other on the left hand of Jesus, regard him as an object of ridicule, and throw their scandals upon his name, and pour contempt upon his cause. Taking up the cruel reproaches of others, they also cast them in his teeth, saying, "He trusted in God; let him deliver him now, if he will have him: for he said, I am the Son of God."

The Jews were influenced by two considerations in inflicting upon Christ this uplifted death.

I. THAT HIS DEATH MIGHT BE SHAMEFUL.

Jerusalem, at the time, was full of visitors, who had come from all quarters to celebrate the Feast of the Passover, and the Jewish rulers wished that all should have an opportunity of seeing this far-famed imposter expiring on a tree. To have had him cut off in secret, would not have served their purpose. To have stoned him publicly, according to the Mosaic law, would have been a death too honourable. He must die the death of a foreigner, as altogether unworthy of being recognised, by the manner of his dissolution, as of Jewish extraction. Nay, he must be ignominiously crucified as a Roman slave, and thus be lifted up between heaven and earth, as an outcast from both. Ah! what would Mary and the other female disciples not have given, to have been allowed to cast a mantle over the naked shoulders of Jesus as he hung expiring on the cross!

II. THEY WERE DESIROUS THAT HIS DEATH SHOULD BE
PAINFUL.

This fact we can easily gather from the different parts of the narrative. They were eager for his dissolution. And it was when their anger was excited almost to madness, and when they were gnashing their teeth against him, as the wild beast does at its prey, that they raised the murderous cry, "Crucify him! crucify him!" Like the wild war-whoop of the Indian, when he lifts his tomahawk and displays his scalping-knife, this murderous cry, "Crucify him!" conveys to us an indescribable impression of the eagerness, with which they thirsted for his blood. They wished, so to speak, to drink it drop by drop; they wished that he should die by inches; they wished that every pang from the cold iron should go home to his heart; they wished that as much agony should be extracted from his frame as it could possibly yield, and therefore they pierced where the

nerves were plentiful. They also wished that the pain connected with his dying, should be as long protracted as cruel artifice could devise, and therefore they pierced him, not in the heart, but in the hands and feet, which are the seat of feeling, and far from those organs which are the seat of life.

The Jews did obtain their wish, that his life should be wrung out of his frame by severe and protracted sufferings. Nay, in a certain acceptation, though they knew it not, their eagerness for his anguish was more than satiated. His crucifixion by the hand of man was light as a feather, when compared with his inward sorrow. All their puny attempts to cover him with shame, and inflict agony upon him, were nothing, when contrasted with the deep wound from the sword of Divine justice which pierced his heart. The universal observation has obtained currency on account of its truth, that the sufferings of our Saviour's soul were the soul of his suffering. Like fiends, however, his Jewish adversaries centred all their aims in his torment; while that God, who casts the clouds beneath his feet, that he may cover this world of ours with verdure, and who causes present suffering to terminate in future good, ordained that Jesus should be lifted up, like the unseemly serpent upon the pole, that his shameful and painful death might be rendered highly influential for the healing of the nations. But, in being lifted upon the Cross, the Saviour died. A SCOTTISH PREACHER.

PROGRESS OF TRUTH IN TURKEY.

PERHAPS the next scene of interest, after China, is Turkey, where gigantic efforts have been, and are still being made, to pour floods of Gospel light upon the dense darkness of Mohammedan delusion, and the wretched superstitions of the Greek and Roman Churches. These, have, hitherto, been not so much the efforts of the Missionary as of the Colporteur. The printing press, rather than the living voice of the teacher, has been the instrument employed; but we have reason to be thankful that, under God, it has been eminently successful. The following paragraph, from the Christian Spectator, relating to this point, will be read with great interest. It will show that the Eastern world is not wholly enveloped in shades of night! Let us pray that this may be to it as the dawn of approaching day, and that God may so overrule national strife, as to make the wrath of man to praise Him.

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"The results of the press are most interestingly stated in Mr. Dwight's recent work on Christianity in Turkey. During the last eighteen years Christian publications have found their way to almost every nook and corner of the land, and they are at this moment more widely circulated and better received than before. The missionaries state, that the constant presentation of Scripture truth, both in conversation, in the pulpit, and from the press, has not been powerless in the Armenian commonalty. One error after another has given place to the truth. Thousands who still remain in the Greek Church are

intellectually convinced that evangelical Protestantism is true, and some of them no doubt have heartily embraced the doctrine their intellects approve. Some belonging to this class are active reformers, who are constantly employed in circulating the Scriptures and other publications from the press, and making known the truth as it is in Jesus.'

This intelligence must needs be deeply interesting to that numerous class of readers who regard the Musselman conquest of the East as the darkest passage in history, and the stereotyped character of the conquering race, as an exception to all its lessons. The great truth developed in nearly all the annals of Conquest is, that the more eminently enlightened people, although subjugated, hardly ever fail to exert a refining influence on their Conquerors. Thus, when in the valley of the Nile, the minds of the Egyptian and the Greek were brought into contact, the superiority of the more civilized race was manifested, in the transformation of Alexandria into a second Athens. It was so, in the intercourse between the Roman and the Greek. The Satirist of those times was wont to speak of Rome as "a Greek city." Rome, haughty and imperious as she was, proved unequal in the conflict with this kind of influence. The people of Corinth might be vanquished in hostile encounter by Mummius; Athens might be taken by Sylla; but even that arrogant individual was struck with reverence at the porticos where the philosophic followers of Socrates and Plato had so often disputed, and the conqueror's reverence for Grecian greatness moved him to spare the Grecian city. Besides an illustrious Roman, not less ardently attached to his country than the most patriotic of his times, regarded the devotement of his last days to the study of the Greek Classics as no blot on his fame. When the iron power of Rome failed, and the barbarians of the North rushed upon Southern Europe with the shock of an avalanche, sweeping away the most prized monuments of ancient Civilization, there was found in the conquered race, an element of moral power which Gothic barbarism was not able to resist. Accordingly, we see, that while the physical force of the barbarian was more than a match for the military skill of the Roman, the Roman exerted a moral influence, by which the barbarian conqueror was brought to espouse the religion of the subject-race.

But in the Turkish conquest, all the precedents of History were set at nought. The Turks, of all the barbarians who have made incursions on the civilized world, have reaped least advantage from Civilization. Not, indeed, that we accuse them of inaction from the time their conquest was completed. On the contrary, they have often displayed a prodigious measure of activity, but it was activity wholly at variance with the rights and interests of the subject-race, and which has inscribed on the page of Turkish history the most atrocious deeds to be found in the annals of mankind. Shall we cite a fact or two? Then the exclusive and domineering faith of the false prophet has been known to deluge the streets of Adrianople and Smyrna with the blood of the Greeks. In the massacre of Scio, 80,000 human beings were slaughtered in cold blood. During the entire period of the

struggle for Greek Independence, not fewer than 100,000 individuals perished on the altar of Musselman fanaticism: the victims of which may indeed be traced everywhere, from "the banks of the Danube to the cataracts of the Nile."

movement.

Nor have the followers of the Prophet succeeded better in preserving the Monuments of Grecian Art, than in governing the Greek people. Their skill, in this respect, has been sufficiently indicated by the fact of their having built the bas-reliefs of Halicarnassus into the walls of a fort, and worked up the relics of the Parthenon, in the erection of Cow-pens and Pig-sties. In fact, the march of Civilization in the Turkish Empire, has, until lately, if not still, been a retrograde They could turn St. Sophia into a Mosque; but so far as being imbued with the spirit of progress goes, the Civilization of the East has proved utterly useless to rulers of this stolid race. The lessons of Science have been wasted on these "brains of lead." The Arts have had no charms for this half barbarian and half fanatic race. As to the religious element in the Civilization of the Greeks, little was to be expected from that. The Musselman faith could not possibly have remained in the ascendant in Turkey, if the doctrine of "the Cross" had not been rendered powerless by the numerous folds of error in which it was enveloped. In a pitched battle, the pure, and unadulterated "truth as it is in Jesus," must have had an easy triumph over the falsehoods uttered in the name of the Prophet. It is well, then, to remember, that the Mahommedan delusion has not triumphed over "the Cross," but over a system of Superstition on which the Eastern Church, of the Greek communion, has bestowed the venerated name of "the Cross."

After three or four centuries of conflict, we behold the Greek and Turkish races in the same position, with respect to each other, as at the period of the Ottoman conquest; but, in the interval, Turkey has become to European Statesmen, the great diplomatic difficulty, just as Ireland has long been the great Administrative difficulty of Statesmen, on this side the Channel. What Catholicism has done for the latter, the Moslem and the Greek Church have done for the former, and their forms of religion are equally the Curse of both. Hence, we cannot resist the conviction that the regeneration of Turkey must be sought, from henceforth, at the hands of our Missionary Societies, and not at those of the Greek and Latin Churches. Holding these views, we are devoutly grateful to Almighty God, that Turkey is becoming on a large scale the scene of Protestant Missionary effort. We rejoice that to its vast provinces in Europe and Asia-twice as extensive as Great Britain and France both-Missionaries have been sent from "the New World," a region of the Globe whose existence was unknown at the time of the Turkish Conquest. These agents are destined, we doubt not, to be followed by others from both England and America, now that we have an open door of access to the millions who occupy what survives, or squat amid the ruins of what once was Tyre and Sidon, Antioch and Jerusalem, Damascus and Bagdad, Babylon and Palmyra. In ancient times, these regions of Classic story were to Western Europe more distant than Australia

now is from this country. To the common people, they were the land of Romance. Rumour made the East, with its great metropolis, a region of unexampled splendour. The metropolis, in particular, with its gilded domes-its magnificent cupolas-its fairy-like minarets -its groves of elegant trees, with all their variety of form and hue, were thought of, as the creations of an enchantment. The discovery of the Mariner's Compass has, to borrow a galvanic allusion, completed the circuit, and brought the East into our own system. The application of Steam as a motive power to sea-going vessels, has still more facilitated our intercourse with the people of the East, and contributed to the extension of our acquaintance with their peculiar institutions, their manners, and their customs. And, after the lapse of centuries, we are constrained to acknowledge a substantial truthfulness in the rumours concerning the far-famed city of the illustrious Constantine. Alas! that it has become the head-quarters of the Moslem; that the moral condition of the people should contrast, so unfavourably, with the charms of climate and of scenery; that it should be the pest land of a prophet who has left none of the credentials of a prophet behind him; of a superstition whose most splendid triumphs are cemented with blood, and of a people whose social development is stunted by polygamy, and whose highest aspirations are limited to a Paradise of sense and of sensuality.

Our readers will be right glad to find, that every item of information concerning this people, is being turned to good account, and that Christian philanthropy is now busily employed in subordinating all the appliances of a higher Civilization, and a purer Faith, to overthrow the barbarism of the Turk and the superstition of the Greek, as well as to repay a debt of gratitude, many centuries old, which the Western owes to the Eastern world. From the East sprang both our Civilization and our Religion. The West has also been enriched for ages by its commerce with the East. It is fitting, therefore, that Western nations should now repay this debt in a spiritual currency: that the Missionaries and Colporteurs of the West should essay the rekindling of those lamps which once shed their radiance on the Mediterranean, and the opening up of a new Commerce in the Eastern world, the staple of which shall be the wisdom that is "more precious than rubies."

THE GREAT MORAL REVOLUTION IN THE
CELESTIAL EMPIRE.

ONE of the most extraordinary revolutions of this, or of any age, is now going on among the three hundred millions of Buddhists, scattered abroad throughout the immense territory of the Chinese empire. Every scrap of intelligence, on this subject, must be of interest to our readers. We make no apology, therefore, for having culled the fol lowing particulars from a recent communication of the Rev. Mr. Medhurst to the Secretary of the London Missionary Society.

As to their worship, Mr. Medhurst tells us, that the insurgents wor

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