ther has heard "complaints from a great many who were not themselves at all (?) implicated; parties who wished to have married (sic,) and who were prevented by the law &c." So that, according to these witnesses--and they have just as good a right to be heard as the former-the law, so far from being nugatory, is actually oppressive. Both at once it cannot be.

The Report goes on to insinuate that there can be no very strong feeling in society against these marriages, because those who contract them do not lose caste. We are assured of Lord George Hill's marriage with his sister-in-law that it was very much approved of, and that none of his friends refused to visit him on account of this kind of marriage.

Be

it so. This is saying no more than that which is loudly proclaimed by the very fact of men being able seriously and solemnly to entertain the question under consideration. But as this question is not universally entertained, and is indeed looked upon by many (the majority for all the Report shews to the contrary) with abhorence and fear, so do we find witnesses giving evidence to the effect that even this very marriage is remembered against them," and that "they are always under a disadvantage, just as everybody is who is sup posed to lie under a social blot of any kind." So that here again is inconsistency. "Those who contract such marriages lose caste," says one set of witnesses," and it is very hard and cruel upon them: the law should certainly be altered." "They do not lose caste," says another set, "and that is quite clear which way public opinion goes: the law should certainly be altered."

Part of the evidence is of an extremely painful kind, and displays in terribly distinct terms how lax the world is on all moral subjects. It is actually contended that most of the persons who desire to contract such marriages are very “respectable," when it is at the same time admitted that they are guilty of fornication, contempt of parental authority, and perjury. We are told (No. 103) of a man of wealth, who keeps his carriage, much respected, and who bears a high character as an excellent man, and a good citizen; and although he is living in open concubinage with his deceased

*The witness who gives this evidence takes upon himself to call the people who do so remember it against them "vulgar-ininded and ill-disposed persons." But unless he can give us other proof of their vulgarity and maliciousness than their abhorrence of these marriages, we are con strained to differ from him as to their characters. (Rev. J. F. Denham. No. 372.)

wife's sister, his neighbours sympathise with him." What is meant by "respectable?" By way of parallel we need only suggest a very strong appeal which was made out by one Elector, Philip of Hesse, a man of wealth,' who, (probably, kept his carriage,') and would gladly have kept two wives at once, and who had no decided aversion to concubinage avowed or concealed, and who found somebody of greater name than his neighbours' to ' sympathise with him.'*

But we must bring this article to a close. It is not our intention to carry our readers through all the evidence crowded together in the Blue Book, and to tell them how English Christians, brought up as they are in the purest and holiest domestic atmosphere of any in this world, have pointed to France and Germany, and bid us imitate them; how one witness ventures broadly to lay down that the prohibition of such marriages is against the Law of God, and how we have been told to look upon Papal dispensations, and that too in some of the worst ages of the Roman Church, as interpreting the mind of the Spirit. We may let all this pass by as something painful even to hear of.

But there is one point to which we must call the attention of people in this country. Are the British living in India aware of the effect any change of the law would have on their domestic circles? A lady engaged in England, in coming out to this country to he married to her future husband, very often brings her sister cut with her, and if not then, generally invites her to come out, when she is herself comfortably settled. The sister lives in the house, as the law stands at present, as the sister of him who is but one flesh with her own sister.† But alter the law. Let a flood of lax feeling on this point into society, and the sister becomes one who may take the place of the deceased wife. Would many wives choose to bring out their sisters on such terms? Would many sisters choose to come out on such terms? And then how is that sweet domestic intercourse which now obtains even in Indian families broken up! And how perplexing a position is the husband placed in if his wife should die! If he may marry his sister-in-law, he may not live in the same house with her while unmarried. He must either marry her, or send her back at an enormous expense, and to the serious detri

* Vide. Christian Remembrancer. Jan. 1849. p. 138-9. †The proposed change in the law involves a change of the English language. What are we to call a wife's sister, if this law is passed? A SISTER-in-law she certainly will not be.

ment of his young family. A law that should say a man may contract such a marriage, would in India be almost obliged to say a man must contract it. And when it is con

tracted the quondam aunt becomes the step-mother, her children are at once the first cousins, and half brothers and sisters of her sister's children, that is, they may intermarry, and they may not. Verily, the Scripture word "confusion" is most applicable here.

This must suffice. Thoughtful minds will weigh the subject well, and will reject the lately proposed laxity as an abomination in the sight of God. But they will take their stand only upon the Law of God, that pure Law which is laid down in the eighteenth chapter of Leviticus, and which no statute can alter or set aside. And if they examine the law of nature and the law of nations, the facts of history and the statistics of social life, it will be only as a Commentary upon that law, and as an interpretation and illustration of it, and as no way invalidating it, though adverse facts and laws be quoted against it. Nor will they forget to pray Almighty God that He would preserve the laws of Holy Matrimony in that purity which, by His appointment, they had "in the beginning."

S. M.

SUDDEN SUNRISE IN THE EAST.

I saw the Sunrise from a cupola;
First, like a prophecy of after-thought
Upon the forehead of a little child,"
The faint light lay upon the Eastern sky.
This for a moment-then the couriers
And crimson-liveried lackeys of the morn,
Small clouds, shone in procession royally;
Lucifer fell pallid,-as of a swoon,
And Luna, like a wicked witch at cock-crow
Shrunk down the West, and died into the void.
And then He came, swiftly and busily,
King Sol, the Day-God with a full white face,
And bounded on his immemorial path!
And so with travelling tents of fleecy mists,
Riders and spearmen of the radial beams,
And songs of triumph from the highest birds,
The Western caravan set bravely forth.

MORCOTT.

V.

STRICTURES ON MR. WENGER'S APOLOGY FOR THE BENGALI NEW TESTAMENT OF 1847.

Nequidquam sapiens sapit qui sibi ipsi prodesse non quiret.

ENNIUS.

Some weeks ago we were favoured by an unknown hand with a copy of a Pamphlet printed at the Baptist Mission Press, Calcutta. It is entitled "On the Faithfulness or Unfaithfulness of the Bengálí version of the New Testament," and bears the signature of "J. Wenger." We have since been informed that it is a reprint of an article that appeared in the "Calcutta Christian Observer," and that it was occasioned by the circulation, among the Missionaries of the Church of England labouring in Bengal, of a paper of which we here subjoin a reprint verbatim.

REV. SIR,

I am directed by the Church of England Missionary Conference, to invite your attention to the following Report of a Sub-Committee appointed by the Conference, to consider the errors in the last edition of the Bible Society's Bengálí Version of the New Testament, (published in 1847,) and to request that you will kindly give your best consideration to the points discussed in the Report, and make any observations which your experience in the use of the present Version may suggest, with a view to the whole matter being laid before the Bishop of the Diocese.

Report of the Sub-Committee, appointed to draw up in form a statement of the results come to at the first and second Special Meetings of the Church of England Missionary Conference, on the subject of the unfaithfulness of the last edition of the Bible Society's Bengálí Version of the New Testament.

Agreeably to the Resolution passed at the second Special Meeting of the Church of England Missionary Conference, your Sub-Committee met on Thursday, the 6th September, and again on the Wednesday following September 12th, and beg to present the result of their deliberations.

After careful examination of the Minutes of the former proceedings, and review of the several texts then examined, your Sub-Committee came to the conclusion, that the first two of the three following counts of complaint

against the first edition of the Bible Society's Bengálí Version of the New Testament, which had chiefly engaged the attention of the Special Meetings, may be maintained.

I. Instances of translation so unfaithful as to either destroy or weaken the force of passages generally regarded as of high importance for the establishment of certain Christian Doctrines, ex. gr. :

(1.) The eternal generation of the Son, is excluded from Hebrews i. 5, by such a rendering as restricts the words of the Psalmist to the Resurrection of our Lord from the dead.

The same doctrine is lost in Coloss. i. 15, by the rendering of wtóin Hebrews i. 6, by the rendering of the same term

Toxos by

by the word

and in St. John i. 14, 18, iii. 16, 18, and 1 St.

John iv. 9, by the translation of povyeving also by f.

(2) In the following passages a common adjective is substituted for the name Christ, as the title of our Lord's Office.

St. John vi. 69.
St. John xi. 27.

St. John xx. 31.

St. Matth. xvi. 16.

St. Matth. xxvi. 63.

(3.) The doctrine of Baptism as a Sacrament, consisting, according to the doctrine of our Church, of an outward visible sign and inward spiritual grace, is interfered with by the rendering of the following passages:

(5.) The unnecessary insertion (sometimes to the serious detriment of the sense of the passage) of the suffixes रूप and

सरूप.