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large quantities of your Indian gods are the genuine workmanship of our own Christian manufacturers and that large "assortments" of these divine deformities are regularly made up for exportation. What a comment on idolatry! Gods made by the Infidel, and sold to the devout for worship! But we, I think, are the worse of the two. We send out missionaries to reclaim the heathen from superstition, and then (that the missionaries, I presume, may never lack employment), we manufacture deities for the said heathen of the most approved pattern and the very best materials. If there are 66 firms that thus deal in bronze, metallic and otherwise, and drive a gainful trade in gods, one would like to have a peep at some of their invoices. How droll they would read! Fancy some of the items; or imagine advertisements running thus: "To the devout; a bargain! A miscellaneous assortment of gods of various sorts and sizes, - the lot to be disposed of cheap." A splendid Brahma, best bronze, warranted to stand all weathers." "A Vishnoo, a little cracked in the head, and a flaw in the nose; a proportionate reduction made." "A Seeva, gilt-lacquered, an extraordinary bargain." "A lot of damaged gods, warranted none the worse for worship, at a very low figure. N.B. The above worthy of the attention of any one about to form his god-establishment, or fit for a present to a Temple or Pantheon." "Messrs. Muck and Co., agents for a celebrated English god manufacturer, being about to quit the god business, beg to call the attention of their devout customers to their unrivalled stock of Deities, now selling off at extremely low prices." -Perhaps it would be wise for our god-manufacturing smiths to issue a catalogue and advertise thus: "Messrs. Smith and Co., by special permission, god-makers to the Deities of India, beg to call the attention of the enlightened public of that religious continent, to their catalogue of spick-and-span new divinities, of the most approved patterns and finished workmanship, at the extraordinarily low prices affixed. Messrs. S. and Co. venture to say that their gods will be found quite equal to any of the native manufacture, and fully as attentive to the prayers of their worshippers. Any gentleman or lady wishing to furnish a house with a proper as

sortment, will be met on the most liberal terms. Wholesale god buyers allowed a handsome discount."

It is hard to imagine that condition of the human intellect which can reconcile it to Idolatry at all; it is quite as hard to imagine how its votaries can accept gods manufactured by those who laugh at all such trumpery! The gods themselves, it seems, graciously favour "free trade," and insist on no monopoly for their worshippers. Not only their devotees, but their enemies, may create these accommodating deities in all their perfections. But perhaps the thing hardest of all to conceive, is the moral condition, not of the heathen, but of those so-called Christians, who, professing to laugh at and abhor all such idolatry, can pander to it for a little gain; and while praying each Sunday that God would be pleased to "confound all idols," can do their best to perpetuate them for a miserable 10 per cent.

But it is not a solitary blot on our superior civilisation. A few missionaries go to teach Savages purity of morals, and thousands of profligates go along with them, who by rapacity, cunning, and cruelty, make the white man stink in the nostrils of a whole archipelago, and do in a year what an age of missionary instruction and effort can hardly repair. Surely our boasted European civilisation has been a strangely inconsistent thing: a "fountain" that sends forth "sweet waters and bitter." A solitary Howard, once in many ages, consecrated his life to the captive and the broken-hearted; and, contemporaneously, thousands of slave-traders bought and sold their living cargoes, at the price of sorrows millions of millions of times greater than ten thousand Howards ever soothed. A single Bartholomew Las Casas devotes himself to the championship of the poor Indians; and Cortez and Pizarro, and a score of rapacious adventurers more, teach them that superior science means only superior wickedness. We boast of carrying to the savage the arts of life, and too often destroy life itself by other arts. The early settlers of America, says Knickerbocker, taught the natives the use of many admirable medicines, and in order that they might not be blind to their obligations, nor think they had received things nothing worth, imported at the

same time the diseases for which they had furnished the infallible specifics!

Sometimes, when I think of such things, I am almost ready to ask whether our civilisation has hitherto been a curse or a blessing to the world at large. To suppose the former, however, would be a false conclusion, I have no doubt. But as to those who abuse it, like our god-makers, one would think they were a sort of Manichæans, and worshipped indifferently the good and evil principles by turns now gave Ormuzd a lift, and now Arimanes. Civilisation is, doubtless, a good thing and tends to good; but not simply as civilisation. It must be penetrated and animated by virtue and religion. It is a nonsensical notion of many in the present day, that civilisation, superior knowledge, and science, must do much, of themselves, to regenerate the world. day's experience in private life-where we so often see great knowledge wielded by as great wickedness, and still more the page of history, ought to convince us that, like commerce, poetry, eloquence, the press, -Civilisation (of which these indeed are but some of the forms) is in itself nearly indifferent to moral good and evil; more naturally (as everything else worth having), the ally of goodness, provided something else first produces that goodness; but not necessarily. In itself it has no direct tendency to create virtue, and is as capable of being employed for the devil as for God.

Every

You will say, perhaps, like an old Indian as you are, that in India, whatever injuries abused civilisation may have caused, these have been largely overbalanced by the benefits of its legitimate influence, and in this I quite agree. Nay-in that country, even our worst oppressions have been tolerable compared with those inflicted by the native governments. But, though I doubt not you can prove it quite a paradise, pray make haste and come home, and bring Kate with you. I wish you could have, for only six months, the latter half of the modest demand of that contented East Indian official who said that all he desired was summed up in the old English lamentation "Alas and alack a-day!"

Yours ever,

My dear Evans,
R. E. H. G.

LETTER XX.

To

London, Nov. 8, 1841.

My dear Friend,

I heartily congratulate you on the adjustment of your family differences. Jeremy Taylor says that the "returns of kindness are sweet," and never was a truer word. The sensations of "reconciliation" are indeed delicious; and it is well, perhaps, that people do not fully appreciate the luxury, or they would be ready to quarrel for the pleasure of making it up again!

I hope that will not be the case between you and your long estranged brother. Pomponius Atticus says, in the funeral oration for his mother, that he had never been reconciled to her never having quarrelled with her all his days; may you and your brother, in that sense, die "unreconciled,". never having

quarrelled again!

I can imagine the expansion of heart with which you met after so long an alienation. I dare say each of you protested, in exuberance of candour (as is customary on such occasions), that he alone was to blame, and that the other had been a paragon of all that was excellent and virtuous! I have been sometimes amused at the extreme reaction of humility and self-oblivion which on these occasions is apt to transform our repentant selves into devils, and our opponents into angels. Heaven forgive us! I fear that Truth in these cases has to pardon something to Charity. "I can't think," says one, "how I could be such a fool as to lose my temper, my dear friend," when perhaps he would have been an angel if he had kept it. "It was my fault mine entirely," says the other, with as little regard to truth. "Nay, don't say so, says the first, bent on proving himself a villain, and "refusing to be comforted," if you attempt to show that he is not one. In vain; each, in that mood of gushing tenderness, refuses to extenuate aught" in himself, or to "set down aught" against the other"in malice."

F

I remember once seeing two friends so vehemently protesting, in the ardour of returning love after a bitter quarrel, — each that the other was not in the wrong, that I almost began to fear lest they should quarrel again because neither would believe the other to be such a rascal as each proclaimed himself!

Ah! well a day! It is beautiful it is comical; and for the rarity of the thing one may pardon it, since it is so seldom that in this way the heart gets the better of the head.

In other ways, heaven knows, it has more questionable advantages; in a thousand cases, it wheedles the poor head out of all its brains, as easily as a wife gets on the blind side of her husband.

I have often thought there is something very beautiful in the consolation which, in the moment of reconciliation, Joseph addresses to those rapscallions, his brothers. "Now therefore," said he, "be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that ye sold me hither for God did send me before you to preserve life." Kind heart! Apart from the fact that his soul "yearned over" his brothers, and that, therefore, he spoke as he felt, this would have been a most unconscionable apology for them.

"Oh! fie," I imagine some austere infidel saying, such a stickler for a precise morality, when he looks into the Bible, and so lax when he examines any other book, "do not say a word in excuse; the prevarication of the Patriarch is quite awful. To think that he should thus have trifled with Truth, and 'nail't wi' Scripture!"" But begging your pardon, dear Mr. Infidel, it was no trifling with truth at all. Poor Joseph spoke as he felt; it were well if you always did. Overwhelmed with adoration at the thought of the all-controlling Wisdom which had thus suddenly brought good out of evil, yearning with affection for his brethren, and feeling, to agony, their agony of shame and repentance, he spoke out of the fulness of his heart, and I dare say, hardly "wist" what he said; as, indeed, is exquisitely indicated in that beautifully natural, yet utterly irrelevant question which precedes," Doth my father yet live?"-a fact of which he could have no doubts after his preceding interviews. And so, instead of an instance of lying, Mr. Infidel, you have what the Bible is