earth, and are
continually attempting to reinstate by medicine, what they have ruined
by excess. But soup is pleasant physic, and they boil these birds'
nests into soup, in full reliance on the miracle.

The Englishmen tasted some of this soup, among the luxuries of the
Sultan's table, and highly approved of it; but its merits depended on
many capital ingredients, the birds' nests merely acting as a sort of
connective, an isinglass to the whole. It is probable that their whole
virtue is in the fashion.

In looking at the future, through all the mists which beset the vision
of man, it seems scarcely possible to doubt that these regions are
intended for a vast and vigorous change. It may not be a European
change. Society may not be cast into the furnace, as it has been by
those struggles, wars, and revolutions, which were essential to the
working of the iron temperament of Europe. But Providence, if we may
so speak without irreverence, evidently delights in the variety,
multitude, and novelty of its highest expedients. If no two great
portions of the physical world are like in form, climate, product, and
even in the colouring of their skies, why are we to insist on
uniformity in government, in human feeling, or in those national
impulses which shape society? The throne, the constitution, and the
laws of England, noble advances as they are to the perfection of the
social system, may be unfit for the man sitting under his palm tree
within the tropics, the navigator in the summer seas of the Indian
Ocean, or even for the rude vigour and roving enterprise of Australia.
But we have no fears of the failure of that glorious and beneficent
Cycle, by which happiness seems revolving, by whatever slow degree,
through every race of mankind. There is but one thing which is
indispensable among all, and that one thing is, the only nation on
earth qualified to give Christianity; and we, with no presumptuous
glance, but with no hesitating belief, regard the almost boundless
colonial empire of England as conferred upon our island for the
express purpose of spreading pure religion through the various regions
of the globe. With all our sense of the caution necessary in
struggling against the rude prejudices of the barbarian, and with no
inferior sense of the caution necessary in the admixture of human
conceptions, with the will of Him who "walketh in clouds;" with all
our regret for the extravagance of enthusiasm, and all our conviction
o