[49]. Acts, ch. xvi.
[50]. That is, westerly from the country last civilized or Christianized.
[51]. The repugnance of Christian commentators to allow any good in Mahometanism, has caused them to apply the promises of national glory made to Ishmael, to the petty chieftainship and desert supremacy of the Arab tribes during the centuries antecedent to Christ, though it is obvious that they were not then more powerful as “a nation” than they are now, and that to no period of their history but to that of the Saracenic Caliphates can the fulfilment be justly accorded.
[52]. The Hebrews consider themselves to be so named from Heber, an ancestor of Abraham (Gen. xi. 15). The descendants of Ishmael are therefore equally entitled to the name.
[53]. “The prodigious extent of the combined and unintermitting labours of these little world-architects must be witnessed in order to be adequately conceived or realized. They have built up 400 miles of barrier-reef on the shores of Caledonia; and on the north-east coast of Australia their labours extend for 1000 miles in length; averaging a quarter of a mile in breadth, and one hundred and fifty feet in depth. The geologist, in contemplating these stupendous operations, learns to appreciate the circumstances by which were deposited, in ancient times, those mountain-masses of limestone, for the most part coralline, which abound in many parts of our native island.”—Ansted’s Ancient World, p. 32.
[54]. Zoologists class the Marsupiala as the very lowest form of Mammalia, and but little removed above the cold-blooded Reptilia. They are a connecting link between those two great classes of Vertebrata. The Ornithorynchus is an animal of still lower organization. The whole fauna and flora of Australia indicate a newly-formed land, and are analogous to those of the Poilitic and New Red Sandstone ages of the Northern Hemisphere; which in like manner succeeded Coralline Limestones, and in which small islands began to be united into large islands and quasi-continents.
[55]. Leeds Mercury, Jan. 1848.
[56]. Church Missionary Report, 1848.
[57]. India.—England holds in subjection one hundred millions of heathens and idolaters. India is at once our glory and our shame. Though we have been masters there for nearly a century, little has yet been done towards the Christianizing of that mighty empire.—Appeal of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1848.
LONDON