THE REVEREND HENRY FORMBY'S VISIT TO THE EAST.

THE route of Mr. FORMBY, and the localities he visited, though less common than those of many tourists, are not very new. A descent of the Danube—a visit to Constantinople—a trip by steam from that capital through the Levant to Jaffa—Alexandria, Cairo, an ascent of the Nile, and a desert journey to Suez—are things so common nowadays as to entitle no one to publish a book from having seen them. A pilgrimage to Mount Sinai, a visit to the country of Edom and the city of Petra, as well as a following of the route of the Israelites from Egypt to the Land of Promise, are much less hacknied ; but several writers of late years have traversed this route also, and given elaborate descriptions of it to the world.

It is not, however, as travels, but as a peculiar commentary on what the author saw and sought to see in travels, that A Visit to the East derives its character. Mr. FORNIBY is an Anglican divine, apparently of the Oxford school. With zeal and prejudices that might have sublimated into fanatical bigotry had the times been favourable, Mr. FORMBY possesses much frankness of manner, kindness of disposition, and, strange to say it, expansion ef mind. A Puseyite (we infer) of the straitest sect, he is Catholic in every thing else. He can cast aside the prepossessions in favour of modes of life and forms of behaviour, which early habit imprints upon every one, more especially upon Englishmen, and judge liberally of the manners and customs of Oriental life. Nay, his Puseyism is itself a cause of his liberality. He sees more to admire in conscientious Mahometanisrn, or even in Paganism, than in the cold, rational, world-complying spirit, half profession half indifference, which characterizes the mass of people in Germany and England: he brings the same spirit to a comparison of civilization with what we are pleased to call semi-barbarism ; and, striking the balance between Oriental submission, parsimony, patience, and European luxuries, ap- pliances to carnal comfort, and endless anxiety of mind, he rather concludes in favour of the Bedouin. Nor in these discussions is there any thing weak or fanatical in mode. The perception is keen and critical, the style and arguments are close and cogent. Grant the premises Mr. FORMBY assumes in his religious views, and his con- clusions are sound ; and though we may not come to the same end as regards his social speculations, yet his disquisitions lead to the conclusion that happiness is equally distributed; that the absence of wants is equal to possessing the means of supplying them, and better a good deal than the wants by themselves.

It is a mind of this stamp, occupied in looking into the spirit of manners and the influence of religion, rather than at outward forms that catch the eye, which gives its character to the Visit to the East, and induces the author's selection of a new class of topics. In addition to this, however, Mr. FORMBY is a good traveller, and his book a good book of travels,. so far as travels are the theme. He is acquainted with the works of previous authors, and avoids repeating what they have already told; he is a student, and has been trained by study to rate commonplaces at their worth, though met with in a strange land and for the first time. But, better than all this, he has a quick and observing eye for those properties of things which give to them their specific character, and considerable power in describing them to others. His pencil, no doubt, assists his pen in bringing the mosque and heavenward-shooting minaret before the eye, and exhibiting the difference between the Egyptian and Constantinopolitan styles; but his sketches on the banks of the Nile, with many other landscapes and many incidents of the way, are as fresh as if the originals had not been put upon paper by scores of previous writers. Something like the following is seen by travellers from Cairo to Suez as if they saw it not.

AN ARAB ENCAMPMENT.

At last we were safely mounted, and slowly advanced about a couple of miles beyond the last of the tombs of the Caliphs—noble, striking monuments of the heyday of the Mabometan faith ; and then we came to a halt, where we found our tent ready pitched, and were soon introduced to the new life we were about to lead. The scene we had now to observe was scarcely less than a specimen from another world. About two or three hundred Arabs, from the peninsula of Mount Sinai, were seated in different small groups, with their wives and children ; their entire household stuff, the sacks and other furniture of the camels, disposed by each little party around the spot they bad chosen. They were collected in little societies round a smouldering fire of withered roots and scanty bushes picked up from the desert ; and some in each little as- sembly were pounding coffee, or preparing the simple evening meal of porridge made of coarse flour, or getting ready cakes of thick paste, to be baked under the ashes. Not a single person appeared to have a tent: and their only pro- tection at night consisted in such scanty shelter as their little stock of bag- gage, piled up in the form of a wall against the wind, could give ; scarce more than one or two possessing a sort of cloak, which is not unlike a Scotch shep- herd's plaid. As we saw them seated round their fires, and close by them their camels, for whom they seemed to have a true friendship, quietly eating their evening provender, it was impossible to abstain from the reflection, these seen are perfectly happy in the way of their forefmhers : they scorn the bond- age of a house; they are close to a town where every luxury of Oriental life overflows; and yet they have scarce a wish even to know it. If they do come into the town in the daytime, they never stay all night in it. They must have business which makes it necessary to enter, or otherwise they avoid it ; and when they do come, it is always as a Bedouin. Now, with Europeans it is a very common ambition to bedeck themselves with Oriental finery the se- cond day of their arrival ; and from time to time strange metamorphoses, to which Ovid alone could do justice, are the result. Red trousers, a yellow waistcoat, a blue jacket, and scarlet belt, with cap and sabre, ornament the newly-fledged Oriental tyro. But a Bedouin has a better self-respect : be aims at no borrowed grandeur ; he is never other than a Bedouin—the un- tamed and untameable son of Ishmael, with his leathern belt for his knives, his stumpy sword, his shawl-turban, and, on high occasions, his red gown.

COMFORT IN THE DESERT.

There was something so very interesting in this strange specimen of Arabian life so suddenly presented to us, that it was some time before I had any curiosity to visit the interior of our own tent, although pitched close by, and destined tO be our only habitation for at least thirty days, moreover, a kind of dwelling to which we were total strangers. Our European dread of the difficulties and discomforts of tent life were agreeably disappointed by our finding a warm thick carpet of camel's hair neatly spread over the floor, each mattrass rolled up at the head of a Turkish rug, a little table in the middle with a couple of camp-stools; while the door opened upon a blaring fire, near which our servant Mohammed Ali, in the gay dress and peculiar turban of Mocha, of which be is a native, was preparing our evening coffee. Ile was assisted by two of the senior camel-drivers, venerable steady men, whom we afterwards found great reason to respect, as solid, sober-minded attendants.

But we will turn from the forms of things to manners and men. Here is, a picture of the

MISSIONARY SCHOOLS AT CAIRO, AND THE RESULTS.

The premises contain, besides other buildings, two ample and well-populated school-rooms. The details of the system seemed all very complete, and the young Arabs very clean, rosy-faced, well behaved, intelligent children ; and I could not help (-lining the beautiful Arabic handwriting which many of them were able to exhibit ; not a few of them could read and spell English very well, and seemed to bid f.ir soon to become amphibious in European and Eastern life. Mr. Kruse now informed us that many of the children were Mahometans, and that several of those whom we had observed among the singers on the Sunday service were so too. We were conducted over the whole establishment : and certainly, if this kind of process be the true method of converting the Heathen, nothing can be more complete than these schools : because it is very seldom in Europe, except in the very highest schools, that the grammar of niece than one language is taught ; hut here the pupils are well instructed in two languages, and possess many other proficiencies, besides being capital arith- meticians and excellent scribes.

However, on going home, the inquiry occurred to Inc. what has really been done, what has been gained, by the missionary efforts of which so much has

been said, written, and reported of late years? • •

Is human nature in need or not in need of such a church polity as that which we have ourselves inherited ? Is not religion a power, a creed, a rule of life, and a visible communion with other men, under a system of invisible in- fluences? or w ill a mere intellectual glimpse of redemption suffice ? Now, if the last-mentioned be the end aud aim of missions, then certainly schools as at present conducted are the just and true way of practically attaining to it. For the whole system of school-instruction, from beginning to end, as far as it touches upon religion at all, treats it as a literature, and makes it a mere matter of knowledge. Practically and as a matter of fact, to the pupils in mission-schools the articles of the Christian faith are things in which they have just as much heartfelt interest as we have in the tenets and doctrines of the school of Pythagoras. The religion of their hearts is that of their parents, so long, that is, as it survives the information daily sought to be instilled into them, that it is false. And what is the fate of these young people when they come to leave the school? They are never afterwards seen ; their faith in the religion of their parents is shaken; they have had no really vital and better one given—only a mental form of doctrinal words, rapidly effaced, as a lan- guage which is no longer spoken, from the only place where it had ever found a reception, viz, the memory. They carry away a very good secular education; they learn to write, to spell, to cast up accounts, to read both English and Arabic ; and they end by entering into life upon a much higher worldly footing than they entered the school, either as dragomen or merchants' clerks, &c., or in some worldly service, where they earn good wages and rise in rank. Now in all this there may be very much philanthropy, but how much there may be of Christianity and of the spread of the Gospel is another question. Of this it is to be feared there is not much hope. But again, what is the motive which overcomes theprejudices ofeither Heathen or Mahometan parents; for these prejudices, particularly in the case of Mahometans, are exceedingly strong. There is a curious struggle, as I satisfied myself by inquiry, between the temptation to take the offer of this worldly advantage and the necessity of receiving it at the hands of Christians. The power, therefore, which brings the pupil within the proselytizing influence of the school, is plainly a secular one—a worldly temptation overcoming the existing scruples of the parent, which some parents have the fortitude to resist, and some have slot; the school being the cause of a good deal of jealousy in the town on this very score. Naturally, a parent whose faith has yielded to the overpowering temptations of the school accomplishments, is loath to relinquish the hope of being notwith- standing able to obtain them salvo the sacrifice of the child's former faith : the lessons of the school are therefore industriously frustrated at home; and between the two the poor child's faith in both home and school religion is for the time deadened; and when he leaves the school, he is generally taken before the Oolema, or Mahometan priest, and by him not uncommonly terrified into reembracing his former faith; or if not, he lapses into a character unhappily too common in Egypt, one who practically despises all religion; and thus the latter end comes to be worse than the first.

There is much more, and of an equally cogent kind, which we have not room to quote; but Mr. FORMBY considers the failure to ori- ginate in the absence of a constituted church, and especially of bishops. The missionary, he says is opposed by a priesthood—of a false religion, or rather of a religion which has a truth for its basis though the superstructure is false—but still of a priesthood with all the advantages of discipline and prescription; whereas the missionary is an individual.

"Let a missionary leave this country upon the present system, earnest and resolved, knowing to what labours he is called ; let him select his own station let him establish himself, with his printing-press and assistants ; let him con tinue his whole life faithfully labouring; and what' after all, is gained? Take the instance of Schwartz. The chief missionarydies ; the few converts and subordinates lose their only bond of union ; the establishment comes to nothing ; the whole falls to pieces, as a piece of burnt lime on being exposed to the air. And supposing his life to be long spared, which it seldom is, his success con- sists in forming personal friendships rather than converts; and it is a question whether he could transfer his flock to a stranger, with whom they were not personally acquainted, without putting their faith to a very serious risk."

" Oh relation too nice, but yet too true." Still Mr. FORMBY fails to see that, upon general principles, the true religion, once admitted, ought to overcome the false ; and that, upon his own principles, the sacraments ought to work their effects,—unless, indeed, he denies that they can be administered by a Noncon- formist minister; in which case, it would be more distinct to have said so.

However, quitting these theological niceties, let us exhibit an- other phase of Mr. FORMBY'S book.

THE PINE OLD TURKISH GENTLEMAN.

Every nation, as far as we can judge, is worthy of respect when its ancient customs and usages are upheld by its sovereign authorities. The old and re- spectable Turks therefore deplore and lament over the decline of their name and political existence, as evinced and portended by the European aping. of their rulers. Infidelity is at the root of the French adoption of Eastern habits; in- fidelity is at the bottom of the corresponding change in Constantinople; and

every religious mind among the Turks hates and abhors what it sees, and most justly so. There is something noble even in the contempt which a Turk has for the Frank, whom he esteems a giaour and an unbeliever. The same spirit, with a purer light of truth, would scorn to shake bands and pretend to a hollow friendship with Socinian or Infidel, however refined their manners might be, or however apparently creditable their appearance. I confess, I never could re- sent the occasional "giaour "which one would now and then hear muttered from some fine old veteran Turk with a silver beard. I felt I deserved it—it was but my due—to him I was a giaour and unbeliever, and he was but acting up to his belief in calling me so. But so it is. The fine old Turkish feeling is gone from the government, and lingers yet in the devotion and reverence of the people ; but then, as a whole, it is nerveless, because infidelity poisons the fountain of all, viz. the Sultan's government ; and can it be expected it should be otherwise, with the example of European diplomacy before their eyes ?

THE TRAVELLED AND EDUCATED EGYPTIANS.

The Pasha is very much commended for sending youths to Europe to learn European sciences, &c. But what kind of characters do they come back ? They have a smattering of French, of sciences and other matters, of all which they have a magpie knowledge. They return not Christians, hut despisers of the Prophet, with their faculties only the more sharpened to avail themselves of every iniquitous mode of rising in the world. They learn a curious sort of apish politeness, very different from either European gentility or Turki,h re- serve. In a word, whatever they may be besides, they are generally finished scoundrels, with scarce one single principle of right. I consider a strict Ma- hometan, setting aside his contempt for others, to be a moral, estimable cha- racter; but the new race of Arab-Europeans are real infidels, not even under- standing the sciences and arts, by means of which the ancient glory of Egypt is expected to revive. I have seen the style of these semi-Frenchmen in our visit to the different schools ; and I confess I think the few that have come back from England, though destitute of the mannerism of the other, are both all the better for it and have acquired some tolerably solid and useful accom- plishments.