Southern Christian Advocate

LATE FOREIGN NEWS.

The arrival of the last British Steamer, has brought intelligence of great interest and importance. To planters and commercial men the vigorous operations and steady improvement in the Cotton market will constitute the best news they have received from abroad for many months. This favourable change has been occasioned by the conclusion of the wars which Great-Britain has been carrying on in China and India, and by the ratification of a treaty of peace with the former power, the provisions of which are highly favourable to the English. Five important Chinese ports will be thrown open to British commerce, among which are Canton, Amoy, and Ningpo; Twenty-one millions of dollars are stipulated to be paid in three years; and the Island of Hong Kong is ceded for ever to her Britannic Majesty. Leaving out of the present consideration, the important results to commerce and science, which must grow out of this treaty, who can calculate the probable civil and religious advantages to a heathen and benighted population which is numbered by scores of millions. British guns have made a breach in that wall of separation which hemmed in the Celestial Empire; and with the tide of European civilization that will rapidly rush in, there will go the Christianity which hitherto has been obstinately barred out, and which shall, ere long, erect its trophies throughout the vast circuit of Asia.

The right-minded Christian cannot fail to watch, with unspeakable anxiety, the great changes which signalize the present times. If the sentiment be indeed true, that the revenues of an empire ought not to be grudged as the price of rescuing even a single human soul from perdition, how great ought to be the concern of all hearts imbued with genuine Christian feeling, that the openings so marvellously and effectually made for the spread of the Gospel among benighted millions, should be properly seized. An awful responsibility rests upon the nations speaking the English language, and holding the principles of the Reformation. The most momentous results, whether for weal or woe, take their stand on the centre of English and American intelligence, energy and piety. Let the miser hug his bags; let the voluptuary recline on his secluded couch of repose; let the hypocrite rail on; let the splenetic bigot who claims infallibility, and holds with deadly grasp "to the least and last particle of his beloved peculiarities; whose petty scruples about trivial ceremonies and marble forms, and precise phrases, take up all his thoughts; whose reptile conceptions of the true, and the beautiful, and the god-like in genuine religion, have never crawled beyond the threshold of his own--the true church: and who keeps in "the alabaster box" of a Christian profession, not the "precious ointment" of expansive brotherly love, but the gall of malignant ecclesiastical hatred.--let him dote on: let the fierce polemic who knows no religion, but what wears the livery of his own abstractions; who deals so much with the mysteries of secret "decrees," that he has no time to ask what is the plainly revealed will of God,--let all such persist in their frivolities and follies if they will. There is before the men who have not so learned Christ, or so apprehended the substance of religion, a most solemn and specific duty imposed by the spirit of the times in which we live, and by the great events which are succeeding each other on the stage of actual life. They hear a loud and distinct call to the glory of contributing their prayers, their sympathies, their energetic efforts, their liberal expenditures for the actual salvation of all men throughout the whole earth! They are bound to cultivate the purest piety of feeling, to act upon the largest impulses of universal principles. Let the true disciples of Jesus everywhere and ever more say--"Lord increase our faith."