fore their eyes. What portion of our pol-wealth of a Baring, and the position of a icy, our legislation, or our administration non-commissioned officer in an aristocratic is it which the House of Peers revises regiment, is likely to be of nearly the same now? From The Spectator, March 7th. HINDOO CONSERVATISM. THE Viceroy of India has been amusing himself of late by ordering the great AngloIndians to report whether, in their judgment, the soil likes the ploughshare. One would have thought it advisable to ask one or two of the clods, but that was not Sir J. Lawrence's opinion. The great AngloIndians, in an elaborate Blue-Book, have replied that the soil ought to like the ploughshare, for there are the crops, pleasant to see and good to eat, but they have a suspicion that the soil, being naturally untractable, does not like it. We must say that, the patent facts being considered, this solemn inquiry into the comparative popularity of British and Native rule strikes us as just a little ridiculous. Everybody knows, who knows anything at all on the subject, that there is not a district of India, except, perhaps, the Sonthal Pergunnahs, where we dare take a plebiscitum; that if we withdraw the foreign garrison we must follow it to our ships; that when in 1857 it was accidentally reduced, North India sprang in one glad bound, as of a panther with its chain cut, at our throats; and in the presence of those three admitted facts, what is the use of chattering about popularity? If our rule in India has no better moral base than popularity, the sooner we are out of it the better; for that base will support nothing, not even a theory as fictitious as itself. The Viceroy's question and his agents' replies might have been useful had they enlightened us in any degree as to our duty, or even as to native opinion about our duty; but they have not, that we can see, done that; and as the replies were not entrusted to natives, and as we should have remained in India if they had all been hostile, there seems to us some trace of cynicism in the demand for them. The only result the Reports can produce is a slight addition to a self-complacency already quite sufficient, and a slight addition to the disaffection of the small class of intellectual natives. "No floggee and preachee too, massa," said the negro; and a native with the pedigree of a Seymour, the history of a Stanley, the opinion. We question if the reports will even enlighten Parliament as to the main cause of our unpopularity, though several of the writers see it clearly enough, or as to the inutility of wasting in a hunt after a will-of-the-wisp called loyalty, power all of which we need to enable us to do our duty. That cause is the radical, and, as it seems to us, the hopeless incompatibility between the Western and the Hindoo conception of government, its objects and its duties, an incompatibility as great in degree and in kind as between a sincere Ultramontane and a sincere Red. The Western man, Englishman or German, Frenchman or New Englander, Conservative or Liberal, governs or tries to govern under the dominion of one ineradicable idea, that there is an ideal towards which societies and individuals ought to press, which Governments ought as far as they can to secure, towards which, whether they like it or not, slowly or rapidly, the populations ought to advance. Every day ought to be a little better than the last, every new law a little wiser than the old, every fresh work a little more perfect than the one it supersedes. The ideal differs in different places, among different classes, between different men; but outside the Papal States, and on certain points even within those States, the cardinal idea of all legislation and all the higher political action is advance. The Hindoo, on the other hand, governs or tries to govern under the pressure of the belief that the Hindoo system of society is a divinely appointed organization, which it is his business to preserve intact, which is the worse for change, be the change never so apparently wise or feasible. The results of that organization, good or bad, oppressive or kindly, fatal to thought or vivifying to thought, matter nothing whatever to the question. That organiza tion is, was, and ever ought to be. tive will abuse Brahminism as a Neapolitan will abuse the priesthood, but then he allows that God appointed Brahmins. It is all, to his mind, part of a whole. If a particular custom is unjust, what is its injustice, says the Hindoo, compared with the injustice of starving the good and fattening the bad?and Heaven does that every day. If a particular custom is oppressive, the custom of dying when one expected to live is oppressive too, and God ordained that. All that is, provided it is Hindoo, is equally divine,privilege and freedom, equality and serfage, A na - law and anarchy, kindness and oppression, | more he offends. He wants not to maintain the smallest detail of daily life, the highest a divine order, but to improve a human work of rulers, everything is part of an or- one- - to make means fit ends, to act on der so great and so marvellous that comment on its results is either superfluous or impertinent. What does it all matter, says the Ultramontane, if Heaven opens to us after all? What does it all matter, says the Hindoo, when it is all illusion, and we, if we exist at all, are the breath of the Creator, who in the twinkling of an eye will inspire us again? What is the use of that ancient officer? says the Resident. What is the use of a comet? Why that grinding tax? Why the drought? Wherefore should the King punish the plundered and let the plunderer go free? Wherefore should the cholera strike the good magistrate and let the sons of Eli pass unscathed? The other day the Supreme Court of Bombay decreed, quite rightly, that a dumb man could not inherit his father's estate, though perfectly sane and competent, and the Standard, reporting the case, is, very naturally, quite hurt. Certainly, to rob a man because the Almighty has afflicted him seems slightly unjust to Englishmen, unless, indeed, the sufferer is a negro; but the Hindoo calmly remarks that God has already robbed him of something more valuable than cash-the faculty of speech. Is he to be better than his Maker? True Ultramontanes only smile when infidels prove that Rome is badly governed. Very likely; but so is the world, and God made that, and governs that; why should not anarchy reign in Rome if He wills it, as He wills other things much more painful? Or how is the superiority of order to anarchy an argument for disobeying Him? Every Hindoo in his natural state is an Ultramontane, desires, -as he thinks, out of obedience, but, at all events, desires, - a stationary society, in which change shall be imperceptible or impossible, in which every man shall be content to be as he was made, in which all men shall inherit the knowledge of all duties. Grant him this, and he will submit to oppressions much heavier than any the English inflict, or he suspects them of inflicting. This and that oppression may be bad, but it is trivial compared with what he has endured. Several of the Viceroy's correspondents talk of our taxation being felt by the peasant as a cause of unpopularity. His own Zemindar will take his skin, and yet not be hated hard. His own immobile society is what the Hindoo asks, and this, and this alone, the Western man cannot concede. He cannot help disintegrating it, and the better his innovation the principles which, be the results what they may, seem to him moral. The Hindoo thinks morality in this sense nonsense, as the Jews did when they murdered Canaanitish children, and as the Record does now. If God ordered Suttees, what is the use of talking trash about the inhumanity of roasting girls alive? They have to be roasted, as they would have if they tumbled into a fire, which blind faculty of torture nature or its Maker imparted to the flame. The Western man cannot move without interfering with all that. He must make all equal before the law, which is absurd, Brahmins having come out of the Creator's mouth and Sudras from His toe ; — he must stop infanticide, he must allow widows to marry, he must drive on physical improvements under which Hindoo society quivers like a Bengalee rice-field under a train. And he must do it all with a will, with a will so keen that the Hindoo, most eritical of mortals, a slave Hazlitt, with every faculty of observation sharpened by perennial fear, sees at once that his ruler, so far from sympathizing with him, is at heart anxious to pull savagely the opposite way. We despair of explaining the intensity of his distrust to average Englishmen, because we despair of making them realize the intensity of any emotion in the brooding Oriental mind; but let them imagine a monastery with a Red Abbot, a group of Parisian journalists under a régime of priests, Englishmen under a Papist Premier, the Record discussing a Ritualist Bishop's sermons, and they may gain some faint idea of its power, of the "preternatural suspicion" with which the very air is electric. Stamps! Well, cheap postage is good, and these are cheap; but stamps! Are these dogs, perchance, destroying Hindooism at once, by making us put our tongues to their accursed gum? Railways! Well, we get to Benares easily, but is not the heavenly merit of our journey thereby barred? Telegraphs! Well, these barbarians are clever on points; but swift secret orders, are they not sure to be against us? Education! That is good, for we may get rupees; but is not the object to destroy our faith? Female education! Well, our women are silly, but the ruler is only wanting to destroy our life, to make our women willing to go abroad, and talk to men, and choose husbands, as the barbarians themselves do, to the destruction of all decency, order, and paternal au thority! The popularity of rulers so circumstanced and so regarded needs no analysis. And it is all so true, and must remain so true. Every act of the governing class, good or bad, does, as the Hindoo suspects, disintegrate his stationary society, does prevent it from being stationary any more, does forbid him to feel quite certain that it ought to be stationary any more, does create in him the ferment Colenso's figures create in a country parson, — an angry worry, under which he would burn Dr. Colenso, but under which, nevertheless, he will never again have the power wholly to believe in the numeration of Leviticus. And it is because the Englishman in India, willing or unwilling, wise or foolish, moral or immoral, cannot help thus disintegrating a bad or rather undeveloped society, cannot help pulverizing the clods, cannot help breaking the soil in which, till it is broken, no seed can germinate, that he has a moral right to be there, not because the wind which we call "opinion" as it passes by fans him approvingly. He must plough, or he could not eat, could not live; and he does, in his stolid way, plough on faster and straighter than any other living man would do, breaking, or, so to speak, vivifying the soil for the seed which is to come, sometimes, in a half-hearted, timorous way, dropping a little seed himself. Very often the work is very roughly, hastily, unfeelingly done, done too much as if our simile were not merely a simile, but a fact; and the sowing is almost invariably a muddle, a stupid effort to avoid the trouble of improving the native seed by scattering the English variety, which will not grow; but still the work is done, and its doing is the ploughman's justification. But to expect sentiment clods to like the process is either cynicism or hypocrisy. To take a single and well known instance. It suited Englishmen, in their half-conscious readiness to do any work visibly wanting to be done, to start female education in India. In a stately, unconscious way, Lord Dalhousie, the strongest man who ever guided the plough in India, turned the resistless machine into that furrow, and on it went, and is going on now. Nothing so cruel was, we believe, ever done by philanthropic man. The storm of wrath and jealousy, of wounded pride, of outraged feeling, of half maddened honour, which swept over India, would have frightened any human being who perceived it, and was one of the many main causes of the Mutiny. The Hindoos felt as so many Murphys or Whalleys would have felt if all their daughters had been ordered to convents, as Englishmen felt when they believed their wives might be outraged by sepoys; but still the ploughshare, totally, or almost totally, unconconscious, swept on, the soil was broken up, and in ten years a new idea was born in the Hindoo mind, the idea that if men are to be educated their mothers must be cultivated before them, an idea which has already produced, and will produce, higher results than any one we have yet introduced. The new generation are educating their own women, and in places doing it very thoroughly, too. No instrument not irresistibly strong, yet unconscious, blind, could have turned up that particular furrow; but it is turned up, and what matters the unconscious cruelty of the vivifying process? It was right to drive on, and it is of right that in India we have to think, of our duty to God, and not of the praise of ignorant men. But to deny that female education will first disintegrate and then destroy Hindoo society, or to demand that those who hold that society divine shall think such a revolution, introduced by foreigners for no perceptible end, a praiseworthy reform, is an unworthy mockery; or is at best only that kind of cruel love which tells a child, as it flogs him, that he will one day see how richly he has profited by the smart of the birch buds. He may, we hope he will; but while under the discipline, he will hate the disciplinarian, who is not only so strong, but thinks himself, — and as the sufferer dimly and angrily perceives, truly thinks himself, so infinitely the wiser of the two. Erom The Saturday Review. THE MURATORIAN CANON.* ment which goes by the name of the "MuTHE importance of the curious docuratorian fragment," in connexion with the evidence of the Canon of the New Testament, is well known. It is referred to in all inquiries about the subject, and it has been frequently published. And, as was to be expected in the case of a text of such interest, these republications have not been stances to have been checked by repeated mere reprints; they profess in several ininspection and comparison of the manu *Canon Muratorianus. Edited, with Notes and Facsimile, by S. P. Tregelles, LL.D. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1867. script on the part of competent judges. | was all that was needed, attracted the The fragment is not a long one, nor in an attention of Dr. Tregelles, and made him inaccessible library; and since Muratori desirous to make out with his own eyes, first published it in 1740, it has frequently come under the eyes of scholars. It was collated by Dr. Nott, whose work was used by Dr. Routh in the last edition of the Reliquiae sacra: it was collated again by Professor F. Wieseler in 1847, and independently in the same year by M. Hertz, whose readings were published by Bunsen in his Analecta Ante-nicæna. Besides these collations, the text had been critically dealt with, and attempts at restoration made by various eminent scholars - Routh, Credner, Hilgenfeld, Bunsen, and Mr. Westcott whose conjectures and emendations implied a thorough knowledge of what the manuscript did contain, or else suggested, if there could be any doubt, the propriety of the most accurate and minute investigation of it. Any one would have thought that with such a document, so short, so interesting, and so repeatedly canvassed, there could be nothing more to do as regards the absolute exactness of the critical reproduction of its contents. It might be difficult to ascertain its authorship or its date, or to interpret its meaning; but it might be supposed that every one would be agreed about its words, and the outward characteristics of its form and writing. It is almost one of the curiosities of literature that, so far from this being the case, matters open to the decision, not of criticism, but of the eye, have been differently stated by scholars who have had the manuscript before them. "The fragment begins in the middle of a page, after a considerable space," says Professor F. Wieseler, who made a collation of it: in fact, it begins without any space at the top of a page, as the continuation of a page that has been lost. "The text of our MS.," said Credner in 1847, is corrupt beyond measure, owing to the boundless ignorance of the copyist." "The MS.," says Professor Volkmar, the editor of Credner's work, "is so little a corrupt one, that it rather belongs to the most correct." The whole piece, thought Thiersch in 1845, is of so strange a character that he threw out a suggestion whether it was not all a hoax, a "sportive mystification of the editor Muratori," to caricature, we suppose, the barbarous copyist of the ninth century. It is not surprising that, with discrepancies like these on matters which are obvious to the eye, there should be variation in the collations of the text. All this odd difference of apparent accuracy in a matter where verbal accuracy and once for all, what were the rights of by the most careful corrector may be seen | petraone could have been copied severally in the omission of an important word, pro- from a legible original: " probably the fectionem, in Dr. Tregelles's edition of the transposition of the r was the familiar form text (p. 39, line 7). to the scribe, as it is a common form in Italian books. But the German soon found out that the Muratorian fragment had a much greater interest than that of being a signal example of incapacity in middle age scribes to write from dictation. It turned out to contain a list in order of the books of the New Testament; it very soon appeared that it was the first list of the kind known to exist, and that it was a list belonging to the middle of the second century. Hence the attention bestowed upon it attention evidenced by the long list of works quoted by Dr. Tregelles, from 1740 to 1866, in which it has been subjected again and again to the criticism of keen and able writers; and hence the strangeness of the circumstances which have led to Dr. Tregelles's publication, that, with so many scholars interested in it and busying themselves about it, the text had never been thoroughly and satisfactorily scrutinized till he, and also Mr. Westcott, went to Milan to verify and correct the reports about it with their own eyes. The "Muratorian Canon " is curious in several respects. It is a scrap of about eighty lines, without beginning or end, written, according to competent judges, in the eighth or ninth century. It was published by Muratori in the Antiquitates Italica, not so much for its own sake as for the purpose of exemplifying the incredible ignorance and blunders of the scribes of that dark age. He found in the Ambrosian Library at Milan a Latin manuscript on parchment, written in capitals, which had come from the famous monastery of Columbanus at Bobbio. It professed in its title to contain works of St. Chrysostom; but it contained nothing of the sort. It was a commonplace book, or more properly a scrap-book, full of miscellaneous theological extracts and pieces; allegorical explanations from Eucherius of Lyons, bits of homilies, memoranda about this or that apostle, and a number of creeds and expositions of faith. Among these extracts, which have no arrangement, was a fragment, of which the beginning appears to We may feel pretty safe that we have have been torn out of the volume, about now all that an inspection of the pages the writings of the apostles. Muratori was themselves of the volume could tell us. unable to assign it to any known writer, But what the "Muratorian Canon" itself though from internal evidence he guessed is, remains still open to a good deal of questhat it might be a fragment of the Roman tion. Its structure is of the strangest. It Presbyter Caius. But, at any rate, it begins and ends abruptly; but this is probaclaimed to be very early; for the writer bly because a leaf is lost, and the scribe had speaks of the "Shepherd" of Hermas hav- written as much as he wanted, or got puzing been written "nuperrime temporibus zled among names of which he knew nothnostris" in the city of Rome, Pius, the bro- ing. But whether it is to be taken as ther of Hermas, being then Bishop of statement complete in itself, or an extract, the Roman see-i.c. in the middle of or a string of separate extracts, and wheththe second century. Muratori saw that it er these extracts are from a continuous par was a new and curious piece; but his agraph, or imply the form of a dialogue; special reason for printing it was to show and, again, whether it was originally comwhat work the barbarian transcribers made posed in Latin, or bears evidence of being a of Latin orthography and grammar. "Vi-translation from the Greek are still quesdistin', quot vulnera frustulo huic antiqui- tions. One thing seems clear, that the tatis inflixerit librariorum incuria et igno- copyist of the eighth century, however ignorantia"? And certainly the "sordes et rant and careless he may have been himerrores are of a remarkable kind. Con- self, had a very puzzling original to trancords set at nought, letters interchanged, scribe. And there can scarcely be a doubt, inflexions twisted into strange shapes, con- we think, that much of the puzzling Latin structions hopelessly dislocated, astound a arose from its being originally a translation reader accustomed to the regularity of our from the Greek; as Dr. Tregelles says, a printed books. It may be noticed that a very "rough and rustic one," whatever the number of these blunders anticipate some Greek may have been. It is too much to of the Italian forms which have now be- argue that it could not be Latin, "because come fixed; such as the interchange of u and it is not African, and there is no evidence o (decipolis, secondum), and the dropping of the existence of Christian Latin literaof the finial m. "It is scarcely likely," says ture out of Africa till about the close of the Mr. Westcott, "that interpretatione and inter- second century"; for though Greek may a |