who wrote that beautiful hymn, among others, "Watchman, tell us of
the night." He also wrote, "In the Cross of Christ I Glory." One is
tempted to ask, in which Cross?--the kind made of gilded tin which
holds itself aloft in pride on the top of the church steeple, or
the Cross proclaimed in the challenge of the great Cross-bearer,
"Whosoever doth not bear his Cross, and come after Me, cannot be my
disciple"? The Cross is the emblem of self-sacrifice for the salvation
of the world. Oh, that men really gloried in such self-sacrifice, and
held it forth as the worthiest principle of life! Did Sir John Bowring
hold aloft such a Cross as this, and, with his Master, recommend it
to the world as the means of its elevation and emancipation from the
blight of sin? We shall not judge him individually. His example should
be a warning to the fact that even the most religious men can too
often hold very different views of life according to whether they are
embodied in religious sentiments or in one's politics. But nowhere are
right moral conceptions more needed (not in hymn-book nor in church),
as in the enactments by which one's fellow-beings are governed. Other
religious men not so conspicuous as Sir John Bowring, but of more
enlightened days than his, have died and left on earth a testimony to
strangely divergent views and principles, according to whether they
were crystallized in religious sentiments, or in the laws of the land,
and according to whether they legislated for men or for women.

On May 2nd, 1856, Sir John Bowring, Governor of Hong Kong, wrote to
the Secretary of State for the Colonies at London submitting a draft
of an Ordinance which was desired at Hong Kong because of certain
conditions prevailing at Hong Kong which were described in the
enclosures in his despatch. Mr. Labouchere, the Secretary of State for
the Colonies at the time, replied to the Governor's representations
in the following language: "The Colonial Government has not, I think,