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dous discovery will yet be made there, are now continually given in the scientific circles of Europe. Four distinct expeditions, under the patronage respectively of the governments of, or public bodies in, Russia, Germany, France, and Great Britain, are at present engaged in the work of exploration. Our own Ledyard, the Connecticut boy, left his bones upon the border of Africa more than sixty years ago, but no one from the land of his birth has since followed him. Had his life been spared, as there was an intense energy, a self-dependence, a faculty of living and laboring by his own resources, in his nature, which more than supplied his lack of scientific helps and official patronage, he would never have left his task unfinished. In no part of the world, scarcely excepting the Arctic regions, are the hardships and perils to which the traveller is subjected more severe than in Africa. Swift streams, with rocky beds and frequent falls of water, and parched deserts, alternate with each other. The filthiness of the native tribes surpasses even the loathsomeness of the Esquimaux. Treachery and violence ever hang over the adventurer. Probably not till a numerous body of Europeans engage together in the enterprise, fitted with all the appliances which modern skill can devise against the perils of the wilderness, the water, the climate, and the worst barbarisms of humanity, can we look for any successful effort to penetrate into the heart of Africa.

Equal incredulity and amusement have recently been excited by the report that M. du Couret had described, before the French Academy of Sciences, a tribe of negroes in Central Africa, as furnishing a connecting link between men and monkeys. They have not been sufficiently accustomed to a sitting posture to wear off the tail which marks their brute affinity. This still projects some three or four inches. Their long arms, their pendulous ears, and large jaws, furnish other resemblances to a monkey, while their use of language is regarded as the chief sign of their relationship to humanity.

Our first thought on reading this report was that it was a mere squib, such as is played off annually at the expense of scientific men. We doubted whether any true naturalist would have ventured on such a statement, lest some of his hearers should be apt to imagine that he furnished in himself a more striking bond of union between the human and the simian races than the creature which he described. We believe, however, that the report is true, though we cannot but discredit the alleged fact. We can only add, that, if such a discovery is a type of what the exploration of Africa is to reveal, we should prefer to leave it to ignorance and night. We have strange creatures enough around us now, whose exclusively human origin seems undeniable, without going even to any part of the Old World after them.

Mr. Carlyle on Negro Slavery. An intense excitement has been created among the admirers of Mr. Thomas Carlyle, on account of an article from his pen in the December number of Fraser's Magazine, in which he proposes the restoration of negro slavery in the British West Indies. The ground of reason which Mr. Carlyle offers for this astounding proposition is, that "Quashee" is now unwilling "to sweat at the sugar-cane planting," because he can live in indolence upon "pumpkins." He thinks "Quashee" should not be allowed to remain content with "pumpkindom," but should be made to work. Some of the writer's most

zealous friends, who have sustained him through as foul abuses against the Queen's English as he now advocates the visiting upon some of her subjects, attempt to apologize for his most grotesquely worded and most outrageous essay, by affirming that it is ironical. Ironical it is, in the literal meaning of the word. Punch proposes that the slaveholders should erect a black statue, holding a pumpkin, in honor of Mr. Carlyle. The January number of Fraser's Magazine contains a most admirable reply to its previous paper. Father Matthew and Mr. Carlyle have both lived a year too long for their fame with their most devoted)

1

admirers.

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A Jewish Newspaper in New York. There has recently appeared in New York, under the title of "The Asmonean," a weekly paper, edited and to be sustained by the Israelites, and designed to answer for them the purposes which the various Christian denominations have in view in their papers. The title is that of the once famous family to which Mariamne, the wife of Herod the Great, belonged, and which also gave the name to a distinguished dynasty among the Jews, though its glory sank into the dark shadows of disgrace and crime. The Jews have of late years increased in New York and in the Western States, large numbers of them having very recently emigrated from the northern parts of Europe. It is pleasant to observe that the increase of their numbers among us does not increase their exclusiveness, or dispose them to contract their social relations more and more within their own race. On the contrary, the Israelites appear to be fast wearing away their most cherished pecu liarities, and it is but fair to say that the change is to be ascribed, in large measure, to the better treatment, and more Christian treatment, which they have received from those who bear the name of the Prophet of Nazareth. Nor do the numerous synagogues which within a quarter of a century have been erected in the United States, and the establishment of a Jewish paper in New York, conflict with our assertion of the enlargement of liberality and the decrease of exclusiveness among the Jews. The free interchange of social relations more than counterbalances the tendency of their peculiar institutions. The editor of the Asmonean takes especial pains to vindicate his ancient communion of the faithful from the charges of intolerance, bigotry, pride of race, and from the love of being isolated as a people. He denies most emphatically that the opinions which Christians have for ages entertained of the Jews, as being morose, narrow, unsocial, and exclusive, as wishing to stand aloof from what interests other people, and as scorning the faiths of all others, have any foundation in truth. He ascribes to the Jews the largest charity. He says that they regard all religions as Divine that are sincerely believed, and that have a manifestly good influence, that they share all human sympathies, and are in the fullest sense brethren of the whole human race, the friends of true liberty, the lovers of every thing that is good. The paper asserts that the Jewish capitalists in England would have nothing to do with making up the loan advertised for by Nicholas, for helping the purposes of his Russian tyranny. The Jews left that bait to be swallowed for five per cent, by the Barings and other Christians.

WE would not base any argument for or against the Roman Church on this book. It happens to be the last book we have read on the question between Romanism and Protestantism, and it suits our purpose in this article as a text, because that is the question which we propose, in one or two views, to discuss; but though we may place confidence in the general fairness with which these Conversations are reported, we know that the Romanist would never admit that the Jesuit doctors had answered so poorly. We can believe it, not only because the reporter seems to be an honest and conscientious man, but for another reason; and that is, that the poorest defenders of an opinion are always those, who, like the Jesuits in Rome, live in a community where it is never called in question. We were once in a debating club, where the question for the evening was, Which is best, a republican or a monarchical government? It was

difficult for a time to find any body to espouse the unpopular cause of monarchy. At length, however, two or three debaters were induced to take that side in the mock

Mornings among the Jesuits at Rome; being Notes of Conversations held with certain Jesuits on the Subject of Religion in the City of Rome. By the REV. M. HOBART SEYMOUR, M. A. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1849. pp. 237.

VOL. XLVIII. 4TH S. VOL. XIII. NO. III.

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encounter of wits. But, to the surprise of the company, it was found that they had a great deal to say for themselves; while, still more to every body's surprise, our good and undoubted republican cause labored under the most pitiable lack of arguments in its defence; its advocates had nothing to say. The truth was, that, having never heard it questioned, they had never thought of marshalling the arguments in support of it. And so it may have been with the good Jesuit fathers in Rome.

The claims of the Roman Church, however, whether well or ill defended, are unusually pressed upon our attention at present, partly by some remarkable conversions to that Church in England and among ourselves, and partly by a newly awakened zeal and hope in Romanism to recover its lost ground; and we propose in this article to offer some thoughts on the subject, on the one hand catholic and charitable, and on the other, plain and practical.

The controversy has called up in some quarters a good deal of the old bitterness; it has called up, too, some of the old Protestant reasonings which we think erroneous; and therefore we begin with protesting on some points against our Protestantism. We protest against the assumption among Protestants, that the Roman Church is altogether corrupt and Antichristian, and is not to be recognized as belonging to the Body of Christ.

That she avows principles which are contrary to Christianity we believe, and we take the same liberty to maintain our opinion, that she takes to support a similar charge against

us.

We believe that her position and spirit are hostile to human progress and improvement, to human liberty, to the lawful Christian liberty; but assumptions of power and authority have not spent all their force within Catholic limits. The past is ever flowing into the present, and the present into the future. The Reformation set up barriers; but the great tide has flowed into her inclosure through a thousand breaches. Any sect that claims to be the only Church of Christ; any sect that proclaims itself, by "a divinely protected descent" from the Apostles, to be the only inheritor of lawful spiritual authority and grace; any sect that by its creed or spirit coerces and enslaves the human mind, so that it dares not or does not freely inquire for truth and wisdom, is, in that respect, not Protestant, but Papal. What did the Reforma

1850.] The Excision of the Roman Church.

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tion demand? Liberty; liberty, political, individual, spir itual. What was Luther's grand offence? That he re fused obedience to power; that he called in question the decisions of the Roman See; that he demanded liberty to read, to think, to act for himself. This is the ground which Protestants have always taken against the Church of Rome; but we fear that they are but ill entitled, on this account, to cast her out of the pale of Christian charity.

It is proper in this connection to take notice of certain passages of Scripture which are commonly supposed to lay upon Romanism the sentence of complete excision from the Christian Church. They are found in Paul's Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, the second chapter, and in his First Epistle to Timothy, the fourth chapter. The first passage referred to seems to describe an Antichristian spirit of pride and domination, already betraying itself and yet to be more fully revealed, called "the man of sin," and represented as "lording it over God's heritage" and over human governments. Eminent commentators differ upon this passage, one* referring it to Gnosticism, another † to Caligula, another ‡ to the revolt of the Jews and the destruction of Jerusalem. But even if, according to the common opinion, the Papal domination were the thing predicted by Paul, and if the specifi cation in First Timothy, fourth chapter, as "forbidding to marry and commanding to abstain from meats," were to be applied in the same manner, it does not follow that the body of Roman Catholics is to be considered as cut off from the Christian Church.

What sort of excision, in fact, would this be? It is an excision which would cut off the whole Church, root and branch, for centuries; which would have left nothing on earth that could be called Christianity for several hundred years; for certainly the Roman Church was the only Church, the only form of Christianity, that existed from the fourth century to the time of the Reformation. The true Church, which, according to Christ's prediction, was to stand impregnable, so that the gates of hell should not prevail against it, according to this supposition, was dead and extinct for more than a thousand years.

Indeed, the language in question could not have been