accomplishing the objects for which the Methodist Church is laboring. An opinion has prevailed to some extent, nearly throughout the history of Christianity, and has recently found. strenuous advocates in high places, both in England and in America-an opinion which places all the vitality of religion in the careful compliance with certain external and imposing conditions. That the lineage of the priesthood can be traced back in unbroken succession to the apostles, is deemed by some a more efficient chain of communication with the divine Redeemer than that a present and living faith is permitted to penetrate the veil of the mercy seat. That the sacred ordinances are administered by one on whose head thrice-consecrated hands have never been imposed, is deemed a greater impiety than that these holy duties are performed by one whose heart is polluted by infidelity, depravity, and crime. If such opinions correctly express the doctrines of the Bible, then, indeed, Methodists are justly exposed to the charge of ignorance. It is all the same that God has not spoken at all, or that he has spoken and meant nothing. But we are the antipodes to either belief. We hold the Bible to be that word which is quick and powerful, which appeals to the conscience, which discerns the thoughts and intents of the heart. We believe, that in it life and immortality are brought to light; and in commending it as a textbook to the young, we would inculcate an ardent love for its vital doctrines, and a profound reverence for it as the only and the infallible source of truth. To repose an implicit faith in the word of God, is the lesson that most needs to be impressed upon the

young.

There is, therefore, one recipient of truth within, and one source of truth without-a conscience and a Bible. The former, without the latter, is but an erring guide; the latter, without the former, is but a lifeless letter. But when both mingle their mutual light and influence, hope dawns upon the world.

A conscience and a Bible! On all the pathways of human life, so thickly crowded with dangers and with deaths, they shed a cheering illumination, they point out a highway of peace and safety. And when the gloom of the grave gathers in as if for one unending night, they lift up a veil, and disclose, as the abode of the redeemed, a realm of more enchanting loveliness than poet ever fabled the "gardens of the Hesperides, beyond the bright ocean." Philosophy, centuries agone, conceived the lofty idea of a code of morals which would elevate mankind from the degradation of vice and error. She imagined a position of dignity, to which she believed our race might be exalted, and for ages she toiled to effect

her noble object. It was a useless labor; man was degraded still. But religion descended from the skies, and with a conscience and a Bible for her instrumentalities, reached down to the deepest fallen, and raised them up to the divine privilege of coheirship, in nature and in glory, with the Son of God-an elevation to which the loftiest conceptions of philosophy had never soared.

A conscience and a Bible! The nations of Christendom have felt their life-giving power, and started up in beauty from the gloom. of spiritual night. The spell which chained the pagan world in moral and intellectual thraldrom has been dissolved; and over all the broad regions where society has exhibited only the ghastly lineaments of death, pulsations of life are seen, and there is the incipient stir of preparation for the joyful and universal jubilee of man.

When the conscience and the Bible shall have fully assumed their authority over mankind, then will the objects of a moral education, and, at the same time, the objects of the Methodist Church, be accomplished; and then may we hail all churches as coworkers with us in spreading Scriptural holiness over the earth.

Gouverneur, N. Y., May, 1842.

ART. IV.-Literature of the Arabs. By J. C. L. SIMONDE DE SISMONDI.

(Translated from the French for the Methodist Quarterly Review.)

THE West was plunged in barbarity; its population and its wealth had disappeared; its inhabitants, scattered over vast countries, were unceasingly occupied in wrestling with the vicissitudes of their lot-the invasions of barbarians, intestine wars, and feudal tyranny. Even their lives, continually menaced by famine or the sword, were preserved with difficulty; and in this state of incessant violence or fear there remained to them no leisure for mental enjoyment. Eloquence was without an object; poetry was unknown; and philosophy was interdicted as a revolt against religion. Language itself was destroyed. Barbarous and provincial dialects had supplanted that elegant Latin which had so long constituted the bond of the western nations, and preserved to them so many treasures of thought and of taste. But at this epoch a new nation, which by its conquests and its fanaticism had contributed more than any other to destroy the worship of science and letters, strengthened in its empire, in its turn cultivated the field of lite

rature. The Arabian, master of a great part of the East-of the country of the ancient Magi and the Chaldeans, whence the germs of knowledge had been spread over the earth; of fertile Egypt, long the depository of human sciences; of Asia Minor, where poetry, taste, and the fine arts had developed themselves; of burning Africa, the country of impetuous eloquence and the most subtle intellect-the Arabian seemed to unite the advantages of all the countries which had been subjected to his sway. He had obtained by arms successes which might satiate the most unmeasured ambition; the extremities of the East, with those of Africa, were under the dominion of the califs. Immense riches had been the fruit of their conquests; and a luxury without bounds had developed itself among the Arabians-formerly rude and savage, but fallen into effeminacy after subduing the happiest countries of the universe, over which voluptuousness had exercised in all time its most absolute empire. To all the enjoyments which human industry, excited by immense riches, can procure; to all that can flatter the senses and intoxicate the life, the Arabs wished to join all the pleasures of the mind, the flower of all the arts, of all the sciences, of all human knowledge-the luxury of thought and of imagination.

In this new career their conquests were no less rapid than they had been in that of arms: the empire which they here founded was no less vast; it was elevated with a celerity no less surprising, to a grandeur no less gigantic; but doubtless it was based upon foundations equally feeble, and its duration was equally brief. The flight of Mohammed from Mecca to Medina, which is called the Hegira, corresponds to the year 622 of the Christian era; the supposed conflagration of the Alexandrian library by Amrou, a general of the calif Omar, corresponds to the year 641, the epoch of the greatest barbarity of the Saracens; and this wanton outrage, however doubtful it may be, has left an indelible impression of their contempt for letters. A century had hardly elapsed from the period to which the execution of this barbarous act is assigned, when the passionate love of the arts, of science, and of poetry was seated, in 750, on the throne of the califs, in the family of the Abbassides. In Greek literature the age of Pericles had been prepared by nearly eight centuries of progressive culture since the Trojan war, (from B. C. 1209 to B. C. 431.) In the Latin, the age of Augustus was also eight centuries removed from the foundation of Rome. In the French, the age of Louis XIV. was distant twelve centuries from that of Clovis; but in the rapid growth of the Arabians, the age of Al-Mamoun, the father of letters, and the

Augustus of Bagdad, was not one hundred and fifty years from the first origin of the monarchy.

All the literature of the Arabs bears traces of this rapid growth; and in that of modern Europe, formed in the school of the Arabs, and enriched by them, we still catch glimpses of the ancient vestiges of a too prompt development, of a first intoxication of spirit, which had bewildered the imagination and the taste of the people of the East.

We purpose to present to the reader but a slight notice of Arabian literature; sufficient merely to show its spirit, and the influence it has exercised over the people of Europe; to enable us to comprehend in what manner the Oriental style, borrowed from this literature by the Spaniards and the Provençals, has infused itself into all the Romanshe languages Could we plunge deeper into Arabian literature; could we unroll to the eyes of our readers those brilliant fictions which made of Asia a fairy land; could we cause them to taste the charms of that inspired poetry, which, expressing the most impetuous passions, employed for its language the boldest and most ingenious figures, and communicated to the soul a thrilling influence, of which our own more timid poets have scarce a conception, we should doubtless find, in a taste so new and so different, ample recompense for the faults that would strike us. But we cannot flatter ourselves with making upon the mind of another a deeper impression of the beauties of a foreign language than we have ourselves felt. To move others, it is necessary to be moved; and to inspire confidence, we must judge from our own sentiments. I have no knowledge of the Arabic, or of any of the languages of the East; and it is therefore to extracts, rather than to translations, that I shall be obliged to confine myself.

Ali, the fourth calif in succession from Mohammed, was the first in the Arabian empire who granted protection to literature; his rival and successor, Moaviah, the first of the Ommiades, (A. D. 661-680,) was still more eminently its patron. He called to his court the men most distinguished in the sciences; he surrounded himself with poets and as he had already subjected to his empire several Grecian isles and provinces, the sciences of the Greeks began, under him, to exercise their first influence over the Arabs.

After the extinction of the dynasty of the Ommiades, that of the Abbassides afforded yet greater protection to letters. Al-Manzor, or Mansour, the second of these princes, (A. D. 754–775,) invited to reside with him a Greek physician, George Backtischwah, who first gave to the Arabs translations of the Greek writers on medicine. Backtischwah, or Bocht Jesu, was descended from those Chris

tians in the Greek empire who were persecuted for their attachment to the dogmas of the Nestorians, and who had sought safety and peace among the Persians, and founded, in the eleventh century, the famous medical school at Gondisapor. Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople from A. D. 429 to 431, who separated too widely, in the opinion of the orthodox, the two persons as well as the two natures in Christ, had manifested a persecuting zeal, of which he was in his turn a victim. Thousands of Nestorians, his disciples, after the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, had perished by fire and the sword. In their turn they massacred in Persia, about A. D. 500, from seven to eight thousand of their orthodox adversaries, the Monophysites; but, after these first reprisals, they devoted themselves to the sciences with more ardor, and, at the same time, with more charity, than the other Christian churches, and preserved the Greek learning in the Syriac language, at the time when superstition had overshadowed it in the empire of the East. From their school of Gondisapor there issued a crowd of learned Nestorians and Jews, who, obtaining credit by their medical science, transported to the Orientals all the rich inheritance of Greek knowledge.

The celebrated Aroun-al-Raschid, who reigned from A. D. 786 to A. D. 809, acquired a brilliant fame for the protection which he granted to letters; and the historian Elmacin asserts, that he never undertook a journey without taking at least one hundred learned men in his suite. To Aroun the Arabs are indebted for their rapid progress in science and letters; for he made it a rule to himself never to build a mosque without attaching to it a school. His successors imitated him, and in a short time the sciences cultivated in the capital were borne to the utmost extremities of the empire of the califs. Wherever the believers assembled themselves to worship God, they found in his temple the occasion of rendering to him the noblest homage permitted to the creaturethat of cultivating the faculties with which the Creator has endowed him. Aroun was sufficiently superior to the fanaticism which formerly animated his sect, not to despise the knowledge acquired in another religion. The chief of his schools, and the great director of education in his empire, was Jean Ebn Messua, a Nestorian Christian of Damas.

But the true protector and father of Arabian literature was AlMamoun, (Mohammed-Aben-Amer,) the seventh Abbassidan calif, and son of Aroun-al-Raschid. While the father was yet living, in a voyage to Khorasan, Al-Mamoun chose to accompany him the men most celebrated for their knowledge among the Greeks,