"THE GREAT TEACHER OF NAZARETH."

SUCH is the name accorded by intelligent well-educated Jews in the present day to our Divine Saviour. If our readers suppose that the better instructed classes amongst the Jews revile the name of Christ and despise his doctrines, they are greatly mistaken. They read the New Testament, as a book of history ; they admire the purity of the morals of Christianity; they reverence its Founder. But how shall these classes be reached? How shall they be won to become the followers of Him whom they admire as a teacher, but reject as a Saviour? They can be reached only by those who are intelligent and refined as themselves, and who, to the delicacy of taste, and general information, which are owing only to a liberal education, add the zeal for the glory of Christ, and desire for the conversion of souls, which are the result alone of fervent piety. These are the missionaries we want, or, rather, we want all such men to be missionaries, ready in season and out of season, to warn, convince, and exhort. Alas! the great majority of professing Christians who are accustomed to maintain intercourse with the superior classes of Jews, exhibit a frigid, characterless Christianity, which would never invite to the surrender of an opposite creed.

A series of highly interesting and instructive lectures "On the Post-Biblical History of the Jews," is now in course of delivery, by the Rev. Dr. Raphall, in the theatre of the Philosophical Institution at Birmingham. These lectures have been listened to with much pleasure by a large audience. They are noticed here for the sake of introducing from one of them a passage in which the lecturer describes the character of Jesus, and styles him, in the words which we have borrowed for the heading of our article, "The Great Teacher of Nazareth." The enlightened views of Dr. Raphall are, we have every reason to believe, the sentiments of a large majority of the educated Jews in modern times. The lectures, be it remembered, are delivered at the request of a Christian institution.

I have spoken," said the Doctor, "at some length of Pontius Pilate, not because his administration was important in itself, but chiefly because you may deem it interesting to know what I think of the character and sway of the man, before whose tribunal the great teacher of Nazareth was arraigned. I feel that I am treading on slippery ground, for on this, and

beyond all other subjects, your opinions and mine must be expected to differ. But I stand before you, this evening, as an historian, not as a polemic; and, as an historian, I have only to remark that, in its first origin, Christianity does not appear to have exercised any direct or immediate influence on the polity and public affairs of the Jews. Their traditions preserve but few memorials of the founder of Christianity; indeed, it is more than doubtful, whether he be the Jesus spoken of in the Talmud, and who is stated to have been the contem porary of Joshua Ben Perachia, more than one hundred years before the period at which the Gospels place the birth of the son of Mary. Thus, the Jews, like yourselves, have no other authentic account of his life and teaching than the Gospels, and with these you are doubtless better acquainted than I can pretend to be. I am, therefore, not called upon to speak of his life and actions. But if you are desirous of knowing the opinion of a Jew, ay, of a teacher in Israel, respecting the proceedings against, and the condemnation of the master from Nazareth, I do not hesitate to tell you, that I do not by any means feel bound to identify myself, or my brethren in faith, with those proceedings, or to uphold that condemnation. The Sanhedrim of those days, composed both of Sadducees and partycoloured Pharisees, of timid, time-serving, and, therefore, unprincipled men, does not sufficiently command our confidence; what we know of the motives of some of their acts is not of such a nature as to inspire us with that firm reliance in their integrity and piety, that we should at all feel bound to identify ourselves with them, or to maintain the justice of a sentence, solely because they pronounced it. On the contrary, in the absence of any Jewish account of these proceedings, and taking the account of the trial in the Gospels as entitled to that credence which contemporary history generally claims, I, as a Jew, do say, that it appears to me, Jesus became the victim of fanaticism, combined with jealousy and lust of power in Jewish hierarchs, even as, in later ages, Huss and Jerome of Prague, Latimer and Ridley, became the victims of fanaticism, combined with jealousy and lust of power, in Christian hierarchs. And while I, and the Jews of the present day, protest against being identified with the zealots who were concerned in the proceedings against Jesus of Nazareth, we are far from reviling his character, or deriding his precepts, which are, indeed, for the most part, the precepts of Moses and the prophets.

You have heard me style him the 'Great Teacher of Nazareth,' for that designation I and the Jews take to be his due. No enlightened Jew can or will deny that the doctrines taught in his name have been the means of reclaiming the most important portion of the civilised world from gross idolatry, and of making the revealed word of God known to nations of whose very existence the men who sentenced him were probably ignorant; nor do I, and the Jews of the present day, stand alone in this view, since it was held by the great Maimonides six hundred years ago."

Such are the sentiments of Dr. Raphall. May Divine wisdom guide us in every exertion to induce men so enlightened and so tolerant-we will not say to reject Judaism—but to embrace its full development and perfection in the Christian dispensation!

THE JEWS IN CHINA.

ALL eyes in the Christian church are now turned to China, and strenuous efforts are being made to go up to the land which has long been shut against missionary effort, and claim it in the name of the Lord of hosts. Amid this universal interest, we cannot forget the question—“Are there Jews in China? And, what is their condition?"

There are Jews in China. A colony of them was discovered at Kae-foong-foo, in the province of Honan, by the Jesuit missionaries, in the seventeenth century. Père Gozani, a Jesuit priest, thus writes concerning them, in a letter, dated 1704:-"As regards those who are here called Tiao-kin-kiao, (the sect that plucks out the sinew,) two years ago I was going to visit them under the expectation that they were Jews, and with the hope of finding among them the Old Testament; but as I have no knowledge of the Hebrew language, and met with great difficulties, I abandoned this scheme with the fear of not succeeding. Nevertheless, as you told me that I should oblige you by obtaining any information concerning this people, I have obeyed your directions, and executed them with all the care and exactness of which I was capable. I immediately made them protestations of friendship, to which they readily replied, and had the civility to come to see me. I returned their visits in their synagogue, where they were all assembled, and where I held with them long conversations. I saw their inscriptions, some of which are in Chinese, and the

rest in their own language. They showed me their religious books, and permitted me to enter even into the most secret place of their synagogue, whence they themselves (the commonalty) are excluded. There is a place reserved for the chief of the synagogue, who never enters there, except with profound respect. They told me that their ancestors came from a kingdom of the west, called the kingdom of Judah, which Joshua conquered, after having departed from Egypt, and passed the Red Sea and the desert; that the number of Jews who migrated from Egypt, was about 600,000 men. They assured me that their alphabet had twenty-seven letters, but that they commonly made use of only twenty-two; which accords with the declaration of St. Jerome, that the Hebrew has twenty-two letters, of which five are double. When they read the Bible in their synagogue, they cover the face with a transparent veil, in memory of Moses, who descended from the mountain with his face covered, and who thus published the Decalogue and the Law of God to his people: they read a section every Sabbath-day. Thus the Jews of China, like the Jews of Europe, read all the law in the course of the year: he who reads, places the Ta-king, (great Sacred Book) on the chair of Moses: he has his face covered with a very thin cotton veil: at his side is a prompter, and, some paces below, a moula, to correct the prompter should he err. They spoke to me respecting paradise and hell in a very foolish way. There is every appearance of what they said being drawn from the Talmud. I spoke to them of the Messiah promised in Scripture, but they were very much surprised at what I said; and when I informed them that his name was Jesus, they replied, that mention was made in the Bible of a holy man named Jesus, who was the son of Sirach; but they knew not the Jesus of whom I spoke."

From the ignorance of Christ and his religion which these Jews exhibited, it is reasonable to suppose that they must have settled in China before the coming of our Lord. Indeed, on the marble tablets of their synagogue, it is said to be inscribed that, "in the time of Han, they settled in the land, i.e. between A. c. 205, and A. D. 220.

These Jews were industrious, and much esteemed by their heathen neighbours; some of them had even attained the rank of mandarins. A solitary glimpse into their middle age history is found in an account of India and China, by two

Mohammedan travellers of the ninth century, who describe a rebel, named Bac-choo, taking Canton by storm, in A. D. 677, and slaughtering 120,000 of Mohammedans, Jews, Christians, and Parsees.

The route of the Jews into China is necessarily uncertain. Their own account is, that their forefathers came from the west, probably by way of Khorassan and Samarcand; and their use of Persian words has been connected with this circumstance.

How large a portion they possess of the Sacred writings is not yet ascertained. Their Haphtorah is a selection, dating from the persecution by Antiochus Epiphanes, about A. c. 170, comprising the law, and portions out of the prophets; but we are in ignorance as to whether they possess any other part of the Old Testament Scriptures.

It is supposed that other Jews are resident in different parts of China, as Nanking, Ning-po, Hang-chow-foo, &c.; and as our intercourse with this vast country will, in all probability, be gradually extended, we shall eagerly embrace every opportunity of acquainting ourselves with any facts that may be brought to light respecting the Jewish people resident there.

VISIT TO THE SYNAGOGUE IN DUKE'S PLACE.

ON entering, we found a large and respectable congregation,listening with some attention, or, at least, with much quietness, to Dr. Adler, who, at a small desk, in front of the sacred receptacle of the law, was preaching in English, without notes, and with considerable earnestness and affection. He spoke of the existence and attributes of God, dwelling principally on his spirituality, explaining the representations of Scripture as though he had hands or feet; could be angry or repent, by the necessity of adaptation to our limited and imperfect conceptions. The nature and obligations of the law, its Divine authority, immutability and perpetuity, were enforced with much power, and his hearers were reminded of their duty to worship, fear, and love God; that their confidence would not be impaired, but strengthened by holy fear; that they needed thankfulness for the past, grace for the present, and supplication for the future. He spoke of the oral law as being of equal authority with the written, not as additional to it but explanatory of it. He strongly urged the duty and blessedness of a virtuous life, and referred to the moment when, not like the spirit of the beast which goeth downward, the spirit that is in us shall return to Him who gave it. He also alluded to the resurrection. He knew not how it will be brought about, but we do know that "many who sleep in the dust shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt." He reminded his "dear brethren" that although they were originally a kingdom of priests, they were now scattered through all lands for