THE EAST.
The English government has directed the seizure of another large Indian territory, part of the Nizam's dominions, to enforce the payment of a large sum of money with interest. It is thought that the Nizam can and will pay at the last moment; but if not, it is not probable that his sway over his own dominions will hereafter be more than nominal. At Gobindpore on the 14th of June, seventy prisoners were chained together in a hut for safe keeping. During the night, the hut took fire and all but five perished.
The news from China represents the insurrection in the southern provinces as one of magnitude and great political importance. It is said that one of the leaders has assumed to himself the title of sovereign, and that the insurgents, numbering a hundred thousand, menace the city of Canton. The Chinese journals take very different views of the character of this disturbance, some considering it as merely the work of a few desperadoes, seeking only pillage, and others attributing to it the highest political consequence. The emperor is said to be considerably alarmed, and has sent against them his choicest troops.
The London Spectator thinks it highly probable that the malcontents are masters of all the provinces south of the Yellow River, and have seized upon the great entrepot of Canton. This, it adds, would be a revolution; for Pekin, which derives its supplies of provisions by the great canal from those southern provinces, would be starved into submission; and the principal seat of foreign commerce would fall into the hands of a party more bigotedly hostile to intercourse with foreigners than even the Celestial Government. Nor is such a revolution either impossible or improbable. Our knowledge of Chinese history is dim and obscure; yet enough appears to show that the Mantchoo authority has never been so firmly established to the south as to the north of the Yellow River—that the purely Chinese element of society has always preponderated in the southern provinces. In Siam, too, changes of policy appear to be impending. The king who refused to treat with Sir James Brooke is dead; and a contested succession has been temporarily avoided by the simultaneous nomination of a king and a vice-king. The new king has always been remarkable for his disposition to cultivate the acquaintance and friendship of foreigners, and he is said to understand and even to write English. The institutions of the Chinese and Hindu-Chinese nations are thus shaken and sapped at the very time when the traders of Europe and America are making more vigorous and continuous efforts than at any former period to obtain a footing in them.
Twenty-three British seamen belonging to the ship Larpent, were wrecked over a year ago upon the coast of the Chinese island of Formosa. They were immediately set upon by the savage inhabitants, and all but three butchered in cold blood. These three were taken into servitude, and after about eight months' captivity made their escape in a boat to an American brig which happened to be passing.
[Editor's Table.]
In the extreme western portion of the North American continent, and of the North American National Confederacy, there are now to be found, growing side by side, two of the most singular phenomena of the age. We allude to the new social and political organization, constituting the State of California, and the new theocracy, as it is assumed to be, of the Mormon Commonwealth or Church—the one the most decidedly secular of all known modern enterprises, the other the only example of the rise of a new religion, and of a distinctly new religious people in the 19th century. Mormonism, it is true, has some decidedly secular elements. In this respect it easily assimilates itself to the gross spirit of worldly enterprise by which it is surrounded, and even finds itself at home in the midst of the most turbulent scenes. But this is far from accounting for its wonderful success. It is also true, on the other hand, that the present age has been marked by the division and subdivision of religious denominations. Yet still, none of these come up to that idea or pretension of Mormonism, which seems now to have presented itself in the world for the first time since the days of Mohammed. Although, therefore, acknowledging Christianity and the Old Scriptures, just as Mohammed did, it is distinctly a new religion. It claims a new revelation, and a new prophet. It has a new law, a new spiritual polity, and a new mission. Instead of being merely a new interpretation of an old theology, it professes to have renewed the long-suspended intercourse with Heaven and the supernatural. Instead of presenting a new dispensation growing out of an old ecclesiastical history, to which it assumes to impart a new life, it has actually created a past history of its own, which, though severed from the main current of our common traditional Christianity, connects it back, through passages never before suspected or explored, with the early Jewish revelation—or that original fountain from which the Gospel and Mohammedanism may be said to have derived, the one its reality and its purity, the other the materials for its fanatical perversions.
Whatever may be the truth in respect to the real origin and authorship of the book of Mormon, there can be no doubt of its wonderful adaptedness to the purposes to which it has been applied. We can not agree with those who would deny to the work either genius or talent. The Koran bears with it that prestige of antiquity which always insures some degree of respect. It is written in a dead, and what is now regarded a learned language. It has its Oriental imagery, together with frequent allusions to what most interests us in Oriental romance. Above all, it has had its centuries of scholiasts and commentators, extracting the aroma as well as the dust of its assumed divinity. In short, there is about it a show of learning and "venerable antiquity," and yet, we do not hesitate to say it, Joe Smith, or whoever was its author, has made a book superior to that of the Arabian prophet; deeper in its philosophy, purer in its morality, and far more original. There are, doubtless, many faults both of style and language; but centuries hence may convert these into precious archaisms, and give to the bad Anglo-Saxon of the Mormon book all the interest which ages of scholiasts have imparted to what was once the irregular Arabic of the rude tribes of the desert.
It may startle some to be told, that Mormonism has actually pressed itself more upon the attention of the world than Christianity had done at the same age. We carry back into the early days of the Gospel's progress the clear light and outline of its later history. We can hardly realize that even for a century, or more, after its first promulgation, it was an object of little interest to the world, and that when it first began to demand a passing paragraph from the historian, it was only as an "execrabilis superstitio," creating a disturbance barely visible on the surface of society. Of course there is no intention, by any such remark, to make any comparison between the intrinsic merits of the two systems. A true believer in Jesus, and of "the truth as it is in Jesus," will never suffer himself to be disturbed by any parallel, real or seeming, between Christ and Socrates, or Christ and Mohammed, or Confucius, or the founder of any new religion, or of any pretended social reform, either in ancient or modern times. He can have no nervous fear of confounding the immeasurable difference between any such pretension and "that name which is above every other name." The strength and success of the counterfeit only adds lustre and assurance to the original. Neither does the great idea of a revelation suffer any detraction by being associated in thought with such attempts. The Koran only confirms the Gospel. It never would have been what it is without it. The false prophet never would have arisen had it not been for the true. All religious imposture and fanaticism may thus be regarded as involuntary witnesses to an absolute truth, of which they are but the frenzied caricatures. The grossest delusions only show, by their very extravagance, the indestructibleness of the religious principle in the human soul, and how it clings and ever must cling to the idea of some Divine revelation, some lifting of the vail, as the etymology of the word imports, which hangs so densely over man and nature.