With reference to religion, we readily acknowledge that dining a la Fijienne does not appear exactly to be a divine institution, as slavery has recently been discovered to be.  From olden times it used to be the belief of superstitious man that there was a divine afflatus in liberty; but our profound theological scholars and Biblical critics have found out that the divinity is on the other side.  Neither Tertullian nor Austin, neither St. Bernard nor any Pope, good or bad, neither Luther, Bossuet, Calvin, nor Baxter, no commentator, exegetist, or preacher, ever found out, what these profoundest inquirers have at length discovered, that slavery is divine, like matrimony.  Had they discovered this great truth before the Catholic Church settled the number of sacraments, there must have been eight instead of seven.  Why was their advent so late?

Possibly these grave and candid, deep and fervent theologians, whose opinions on theology are quoted everywhere, whose works are spread over the globe, and whose lore is stupendous, may yet discover that there is a divine flavor even in a soup a la Mexicaine.  One thing, however, is quite certain, namely,—­that there is no prohibition of digestively assimilating our neighbor with ourselves, from one end of the Bible to the other.  Was not Fielding’s parson logical, who preferred punch to wine, because it is nowhere spoken ill of in Scripture?  When Baron Viereck was rebuked by a friend for having given his daughter in marriage to the King of Denmark, the Queen, undivorced, continuing to occupy the throne, the shrewd father replied, that he had found no passage in the Bible that prohibits a King of Denmark from having two wives; and has not the democratic Fijian as good a right to that logic as the noble Baron had?

To say the truth, all these objections are founded mainly upon sentiment, and we trust that morbid sentimentality will have no weight in an age which ridicules the horror of the British Commons at the descriptions of the middle passage, and demands calm judgment when the question arises, how to increase the number of representatives and the profits on sugar and cotton,—­in our poetic age, in which republican senators have openly declared their chivalrous allegiance to the sovereign substance of which night-caps are made, and petticoats,—­to His Majesty, King Cotton,—­not a very merry king, it must be owned, as young King Charles was, or old King Cole, but still a worthy sovereign; for, after all, he is but a new and most bulky avatar of Almighty Dollar.

No objection whatsoever can be made to the deglutinatio Fijiana on the score of utility.  The islands of the Fijians are but small; no Fijian Attila can lead forth his hosts into neighboring countries; no Fijian Goths can pour down from Polynesian Alps into an Oceanic Italy; no Athenians can there send sons and gods to a Coreyra:  and no Fijian Miles Standish can there walk up and down before his pipe-clayed bandoleers