On the Western side of the American continent, we own over nine hundred miles of Pacific coast, only needing the Railroad that is to connect it with the Mississippi Valley. On the Eastern coast of Asia, about the same time, Russia obtained the valley of the Amour or Saghalien, and made her appearance on the coast of the ocean ;-Russia and America, the two greatest nations of the world, standing one over against the other, on the West and the East of the greatest waters of the world.

Asia is the mother of the human race. From her bosom all have come. The mingled Shemite and Hamitic races, which cover Africa; the swarming Mongols, the Arian, or Japhetic races, all arise from her. From the Indian Caucasus is the centre of dispersion for them all. Pamer, the table-land from which they came, is called, by the Tartars to this day, the roof of the world. All those arts we used to read of in our boyhood as invented by our European ancestors, all, in the germ or perfected, came from Asia. Through Spanish Arabs or Greek caravan-merchants, or European Crusaders, through many a channel, the East conferred its arts and sciences upon Europe. And then, one man, forsooth! invented Gunpowder; another, the Mariner's Compass; another, Algebra; another, the Art of Printing; another, the use of Mercurial Medicines; another, Artesian wells,—and Europe sang triumphantly the genius of her sons. And finally, the literature of the East was opened to the eyes of Europeans, and lo! China and Hindustan had known all these things for thousands of years!

But when we come to the matter of History and Religion, the Asiatic influence is stranger still. Our own history is very obscure, nay, unknown, for thousands of years. Who were the leaders of the Celts, the first historic race of Europe from Hindu Koosh? Is Oden the chief of the Teutonic races who came with his Asæ from Asgard, a leader of men, a heathen God, or merely an abstraction? And the Greek leaders that passed from the European Caucasus, onward along the Euxine, until they reached Asia Minor, and the land of Hellas-who were they, and what is their history? In fact, it is only from the science of modern Philology, only from the comparative

anatomy of languages, that we know our own origin. The Arian races came from one common centre in Asia. This we know. And in two thousand years, more or less, they were in Europe, first the Celts, then the Hellenes, next the Teutons, and lastly the Sclavons. The history of the Hellenic race begins with Herodotus, four hundred and fifty years before Christ; of the Celts and Teutons, in the days of Marius and Cæsar; and of the Sclavons, long after the fall of the Roman Empire. Our ancestral history, between these two limits of their rise in Asia and their settlement in Europe, is hid in mist and gloom, We discern, faintly, figures of hosts, and heroic marching from the East, Westward towards Europe, emigration-flood after emigration-flood. And then we find them there. Then their history and their European training begins.

Now let us again go backward towards Asiatic story. Our own ancestral history, as we have seen, is wholly forgotten,never to be known. But Shinar, Nineveh, and Babylon, are household words, known and familiar to our childhood. And most strangely, in our own day, the Ninevitish and Assyrian Records are disentombed, and the very sculpture-portraits of the Chaldean conquerors are shown us. The records of their palaces stand undisputed before our eyes. And the Asiatic history of the Bible and Herodotus are confirmed by annals stored until now in the earth. Egypt, with its Pharaohs, is most familiar to our own ears from childhood. Cyrus, also, and Darius, are to us better known, more certainly historic characters, than Hengist and Horsa. In fact, on the rocks of Behustan, in Media, two hundred feet above the level, are to be seen the graven records of the great king Darius himself. They are copied, read, and interpreted by Rawlinson in this nineteenth century for the first time.

Here is Abraham, comthree generations after

But let us think more closely still. ing from Ur of the Chaldees, two or Nimrod. From him there is a clear stream of historic narrative, onward, till the Hebrew annals flow into the current of the Greek and the Roman History. It is perfectly familiar to our childhood, the continuous history of that Shemite race, with whom we have nothing common in blood or in descent,

our own history being utterly unknown for more than two thousand years! Strange that the records of an Asiatic tribe and nation, which never reached above six or eight millions of people, should be the central current of all history, the only stream that reaches, unbroken, ever traceable from the Flood, down to the present time.

But, to carry on this train of thought, when we come to look at the matter of Religion, more fully still the influence of Asia is manifested. We enter a Church to perform our devotions, the ground plan of that Church is framed in Nave and Chancel, after the plan which Moses saw upon Mount Sinai, and after which the Tabernacle, and the Temple of Solomon, were built, the Nave representing the Holy Place, and the Chancel, the Holy of Holies! And this is true, not by mere guess-work, but by a sure historic and written tradition. Again, our Church Service, in its two parts, follows the Synagogue and the Temple-Service; our three-fold Ministry, the Mosaic hierarchy, of High-priest, Priests, and Levites. The Psalms we chant were chanted by Israel, some in the Wilderness, some in the Temple, and some by the waters of Babylon. Their music is a tradition from the Hebrew ritual. The very prayers we utter, our Liturgic Service, all are traditions from the East. Look again at our Scriptures. Job, the Idumean Prince; Moses, born by the ancient Nile; Samuel, and Solomon, and Isaiah, from Jerusalem; Daniel, from Persia, by the river Ulai; and Jeremiah, from Babylon,-all these form and frame our ideas from our childhood.

And when the Saviour comes, when God the Word is incarnate for the salvation of man, he is born in Asia, of the Shemite race, a son of Abraham and of David.

A language is prepared for the final revelation of the truth, the ultimate manifestation in Him of all the eternal verities of Heaven; a language unequaled in power of expression, in lucidity, in beauty, capable of expressing, with equal clearness, the sublimest ideas, and the subtlest distinctions of thought. A nation, too, is made ready, for hundreds of antecedent years, to subdue the savage world of Europe and West Asia into one empire, to organize them into one dominion, ruled by

laws and obedient to discipline, so that a way should be made for the progress of the Gospel. And lo! outside the wide Greek World, which reached from Bactria, on the East, (Balkh in Bokhara in modern times,) to Olbia, on the Boristhenes, on the West, outside this wide Greek world of commerce, literature, and democratic ideas, the men who were to use that language in propagation of Christianity were born. All the books of the New Testament were to be written in Greek; for two hundred years, all the literature of Christianity was to be in Greek. And, of the writers of the New Testament, not one was, by birth, a Greek! Our Saviour and His Apostles, and His Evangelists, all were Shemites, speaking the Aramean or Syriac tongue!

And none of them were of the Roman race ;-none spoke Latin as their vernacular. That race, its powers, its peculiarities of talent and temper, was to be a most influential agent of the Gospel; yet there seems actually to have been no Latin Christian literature, until it was imported from North Africa, three to four centuries after Christ! Cyprian and Tertullian, of Carthage, and Augustine, of Hippo,-these were the Fathers of Roman Christianity! No Celt, no Greek, no Roman, no Teuton, no Slavon, was one of the originators and publishers of the Gospel. It was, essentially, Shemite and Asiatic. The Indo-Germanic races in Europe adopted it, propagated it with fervent zeal, were seized upon and possessed by it. But it arose not among them. No Shemite race in Asia holds it now, some minute fragments excepted; no Indo-Germanic people that inhabit that great Continent or its islands. No Mongol or Turanic nation in Asia profess it. Christianity, in the land of its birth, among the people with whom it originated, is almost non-existent.

Asia is eight thousand miles wide, from East to West; five thousand miles in length, from North to South. It is the native land of the human race. It even now contains seven hundred and fifty, of the twelve hundred millions of people that inhabit the globe. It is also the native land of Christianity, and Christianity, as we have said, is almost non-existent in it. And this is the nineteenth century after Christ!

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But the question may be asked, fairly, "was Asia ever Christianized in any way ?" Was it not the fact, that Christianity did not succeed there, from the first, but at once transferred itself to the European races, as most suited to their temper and feelings? adapted to the culture and the character of Greeks and Romans, rather than of Asiatics? Was it not this, that it never penetrated into Asia, rather than that it perished from the Asiatic continent? With the intense selffeeling of the European races, we are apt to think that it was so, that the Greek and Latin races alone were Christianized, and that Asia but slightly received the Christian Faith, or, at least, that the European settlers only of the Asiatic regions were Christianized.

It will startle our readers to understand, that this was not the case; that until the Seventh Century, there was a huge Eastern Christianity, estimated fairly at seven to ten times the size of the coëval Christianity of Europe, Roman and Greek together; that it was not simply the religion of settlers, of European blood in Asia, but of the purely Shemite race; that it had passed onward, as a Missionary Church, and had, most probably, reached Hindustan, and China, and the Islands of the Indian Seas.

Now, the first thing to look at, in this inquiry, is the matter of population. At the present time, West Asia is far from populous. Turkey, in Asia, embracing, we may say, the best portion of the former Roman Empire in the East, has hardly twenty to the square mile, in a country which, under a settled Christian government of any kind, would easily sustain a population of two hundred to the square mile; one hundred and sixty millions, where there are twelve or fifteen. East Asia now swarms with inhabitants. China, for instance, has from one hundred, to five hundred, to the square mile. The reverse was formerly the case. West Asia, under the Roman Empire, down at least to the first Mohammedan Conquest, was crowded with inhabitants; was studded with huge cities, whose population we know to have been enormous, was manufacturing, and agricultural, and commercial, to a great extent, from the Bosphorus to the Caspian Sea, from the Mediterranean, east