been perfect beings, because they were liable to be deceived. If, then, God permitted them to be deceived, and knew that they would be deceived, we must be very much mistaken indeed, in regard to His Moral Perfection. To say that it was God's intention to create a perfect being, knowing that he would almost immediately become corrupted in his nature, and that all his posterity were to act in opposition to His will in consequence of corruption, and so as to render it necessary that God should devise and execute a plan to satisfy scruples of his own, and to relieve man from the consequences of what He foresaw and might easily have prevented, is to exhibit the Creator as a weak and capricious being. Such is the effect of the doctrine of corruption.

Further; we are told that God, after man had multiplied on the earth, was dissatisfied with his conduct, that he destroyed the whole race, excepting one family. If God did not foresee that His own work was to become so bad as to provoke him to destroy it, this also reduces His attributes to a low level. But having destroyed His work, it is natural to suppose that He would have improved that small portion of it that remained, so as to be satis fied with it, and not have left it to return to the same state of imperfection a second time. But the doctrine of corruption will have us to believe that God destroyed mankind, all but one family, knowing that this could have no good effect, but would leave man in a state again to provoke him by wickedness, and to force Him, as divines speak, to devise a new plan to satisfy himself. The wickedness of man has been as great since the flood, and since the appearance of Christ, as it could ever by possibility have been before it, although God has not seen fit to punish mankind again in a summary manner. We thus find, on slight examination of the circumstances, that there is no foundation in scripture for the doctrine of corruption, whether we test it by moral considerations, or by matter of fact.

But we have yet a further assurance in Holy Writ, that the doctrine is false, because it is opposed to God's own word, the law He laid down for the government of His own people. It is utterly impossible that God could have rendered Adam's posterity liable to punishment for the sins of Adam, and yet free all parents from liability for the sins of their children, and all children from punishment on account of the sins of their parents. If God acknowledged this principle at any time He must have regarded it at all times. It is written in the book of Deuteronomy, xxiv. 16, "The fathers shall not be put to death for the children; neither shall the children be put to death for their fathers; every man shall be put to death for his own sin.” This principle was clearly approved by God, when Abraham interceded for VOL. III. No. 11.-New Series.

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Sodom and Gomorrha that the innocent should not be destroyed with the guilty. Nothing can be more explicit in reference to this principle than the contents of the 18th chapter of the prophet Ezekiel. In all these enactments God exhibited His justice; in the doctrine of Corruption there is none of it.

It ought, perhaps, to be a sufficient reason for rejecting the doctrine of corruption, that the Jews, who understand their own books better than we, repudiate this doctrine.

OF CHINESE

ART. V.-FRAGMENTARY NOTICES OF

CIVILIZATION.*

"Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us."

-we

Ir we view the human species, as a whole, as one great complex individual, governed in all its parts and movements by a pervading and continuous organization, and if we regard the different forms of civilization, through which it has passed, as the successive stages of its growth, each of which occurs in its proper season, and prepares the way for those which are to follow;-it is obvious, we cannot comprehend, in any enlarged sense, the history of mankind, cannot even understand the present condition of our race in the vast theatre of God's universal Providence-a position, into which we have been brought by a series of changes, woven together in indissoluble connection, from the commencement of the world,-without going back to the contemplation of those primitive forms of social life, into which humanity shaped itself, on first emerging from barbarism, and which sheltered and cherished its latent germs of intelligence and refinement, till capable of being transplanted to a more fruitful soil and genial sky. It is, therefore, a fortunate circumstance for the philosophical enquirer, that the manners and institutions of Asia, where civilization unquestionably had its source, should have been, through thousands of years, so fixed and permanent in their character, as almost to supply the place of historical records, by setting before our eyes at the present day, the very image of that form of society, which grew up with the infancy of our race and has prolonged its continuance.

Hence the recitals of modern travellers into the East convey to us as distinct an impression of what mankind once universally were, as the accounts of ancient writers, and serve by the minute details which they furnish, to complete the fragmentary notices which the latter have bequeathed to us. A great difference exists in this respect between Oriental antiqui

These notices are extracted from a MS. Course of Lectures on the Early History of Asiatic Civilization. Some apology is due for presenting them in this form to the public. The writer himself was unwilling to let them appear, till he had had an opportunity of reducing them to a more connected and finished state. But the editor was of opinion, that at the present time they might excite some interest, and exhibit in one view information respecting China that might not be so easily accessible to every reader from another source.-J. J. T.

ties and those of the Greeks and Romans. We possess, indeed, the precious literature of the last; but when we traverse the beautiful regions which they once occupied, we find no living vestige of the manners, religion and civil polity, which flourished under their institutions ;-these have long vanished from the earth;-man's workmanship, but not man himself, survives, to tell us what they were: and the fractured altar, the mouldering temple, the broken aqueduct, the far-stretching highway faintly traced across the green-sward and the corn-fields of modern cultivation, and the vast circuit of the silent amphitheatre, alone present themselves to the eye of the observer, as the solitary witnesses of the wide diffusion of their ancient civilization. But it is far otherwise in the East. There even the ideas, the habitudes, and the pursuits of men, seem to partake of the immobility of the nature, which encircles them, and to repeat, generation after generation, the same unvarying cycle of childlike docility, and of unenquiring submission to authority.

The term by which the Chinese designate their country, signifies the centre of the world,—an idea allied to that, which led the Indians to describe their sacred hill Meru, as the pistil of the lotus, under which they symbolized the universe. Sin or Tchin was the appellation given to China by the people of western Asia, and has evidently an affinity with the name Sinæ, which seems to have been applied in a vague way by the Romans to all the nations east of the Ganges.* The Chinese were first known, as a distinct nation, to the western world, in the period of the lower Roman empire. The Seres, who are earlier mentioned as the peoplet from whom silk was imported into Europe, and who are considered by the authors of the Ancient Universal History, after Prideaux, as the Chinese,-appear to have dwelt considerably to the west of China proper. Arrian, who flourished in the age of the Antonines, A. D. 140, speaks of the Sinæ or Thine, who exported raw and manufactured silk through Bactria into the regions of the West.§ Klaproth,|| who has studied the native records of the Chinese themselves, says, that they became acquainted with the Romans, through the medium of the Parthians, who occupied for several centuries the boundary between the Roman Empire and the rich coun

* Malte Brun, Geogr. Univ. Liv. xlii. The Chinese: A General Description of China and its Inhabitants, by J. F. Davis, Esq. F.R.S. London, 1836.

†Their name occurs in Horace and Virgil. Silk was called from them, Sericum. Vol. v. fol. p. 300. n. B. Prideaux's Connection, vol. iii.

§ Davis.

Tableaux Historiques de l'Asie, p. 68 seqq.

tries of the far East, and that everything great or wonderful out of their own territory the Chinese were in the habit of attributing to the Romans.

In A.D. 166, Marcus Antoninus dispatched an embassy to them, with commercial views, which landed in Tonquin; and the intercourse thus opened appears to have lasted for a considerable time, but was at last broken off by the jealousy of the Parthians, who were anxious to prevent all direct communication between the Chinese and the Romans. The Parthians received raw silk from China, which they manufactured themselves, before it was transmitted to the West; and the monopoly of this lucrative business they were naturally desirous not to lose. The Roman fleets engaged in this eastern trade set sail from the ports of Egypt or from the Persian Gulph. From this time, though at intervals of various length, the connexion of the western world with the Chinese seems never to have been entirely interrupted.

Between A.D. 859 and 880, China was visited by two Arabian merchants, whose itineraries have been translated and published by Renaudot. In the latter half of the thirteenth century, a.d. 1250-95, the Venetian traveller, Marco Polo, spent many years in the country, and having been invested by the reigning Emperor, Kublai Khan, with an office of some trust in the southern provinces, had an excellent opportunity of becoming acquainted with its singular institutions, and with the manners and occupations of its inhabitants. Rubruquis and our own countryman, Sir John Maundeville,* also visited China, before the East was laid generally open by navigation round the Cape of Good Hope. Since that time, travellers accompanying embassies, and above all the missionaries of the Christian religion, especially the Jesuits, have contributed to increase our knowledge of the Chinese. At one period the Jesuits seemed to have a fair prospect of effecting a permanent establishment in the country, had not the views of the more rational and moderate among them been frustrated by the fanatical indiscretion of their companions. They enjoyed favour and encouragement at court; and it is to them that we are indebted for the trigonometrical survey of the country, on which the present maps of China are founded. It appears, from an ancient monument, which was dug up more than a century ago, and is now generally admitted to be authentic, that the Nestorian Christians had made a settlement in China as early as the middle of the seventh century. In Marco Polo's time, their worship was tolerated, and they had churches in the principal cities of the empire. Protestant missionaries