hand pour forth its spontaneous benefactions! How speedily would messengers be dispatched with the staff of life! Alas! my brethren, we speak to you of a more terrible famine; a famine not of bread, nor of thirst for water, but of hearing of the word of the Lord. We plead with you not for expiring bodies; it is the spirit, the spirit that dies! To the heart of the Christian be our appeal. Suppose thy Bible taken from thee; thy Sabbaths blotted from thy days; the mercies of the sanctuary fled; thy father's fellowship denied; thy hopes, full of immortality, vanished; the shadows of eternal night stretching over thy soul-And if the thought be more intolerable than ten thousand deaths, think of yonder pagans, without God, and without hope. Ah! while the sentence is on my lips, they are passing, by hundreds, into that world unseen, with no renewing spirit, and no atoning blood! O that mine head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep unceasingly over the mighty ruin !

If any additional argument can be needed to render the proof of our duty, on this point, completely triumphant, that argument is supplied by the command of our Lord Jesus Christ. When he left this world, and went unto the Father, his parting injunction to his

followers was, Go ye and teach all nations. And that the precept is binding upon the whole church to the end of time, the promise of his presence and support most clearly evinces-Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. The command, being express and full, leaves no room for evasion. It either obligates all, or obligates none. If we may be exempted without sin, the exemption must extend to every Christian society under heaven; and then the Master's commandment would be a nullity, and his promise have neither grace nor meaning. In this matter, therefore, my brethren, we are by no means guiltless. With a single exception,* all denominations of Christians among us have violated their faith to their Lord; and are now chargeable with habitual disrespect to his authority. Instead of hastening, with generous emulation, to the aid of the heathen, we have gone, one to his farm, and another to his merchandize : we have clamored for the shibboleths of party, and have been unanimous (ah, shameful unanimity!) in declining, on carnal and frivolous excuses, that work of faith, that labor of love. Now, therefore, thus saith the Lord, consider your ways. If we persist in neglecting these heathen, while we have the means of sending

* The honor of this exception belongs to the Moravian brethren.

the gospel to them, they shall die in their iniquity; but their blood may be required at our hands.

Let no one object difficulties.* In a question of plain duty, a believer is not to be de

* An objection to missions among the Indians, or other savages, which many view as unanswerable, is, "that some considerable progress in civilization is previously necessary to prepare a people for the reception of Christianity. You must first make them men, say the patrons of this opinion, before you make them Christians. You must teach them to live in fixed habitations, to associate in villages, to cultivate the soil, and then you may hope that they will hear and understand when you unfold the sublime principles of the gospel."

Plausible and popular as this objection is, it is equally unsupported by reason, by scripture, or by fact.

If the gospel cannot succeed among the Indians, for example, the obstacle must be either in their understandings or in their manner of life.

The former opinion "supposes a wider difference between the understanding of the man of the woods and the man of the city, than what does, in fact, take place. The human mind is not, in any country, below the reach of discipline and religious instruction. The American Indian, the Pacific Islander, and the African negro, are shrewd men, whose intellectual capacity will not suffer in comparison with the uneducated classes of people on the continent of Europe." Why should it, since it is culture, and that alone, which destroys the level of abilities naturally equal? Surely the Indian, whose necessities compel him not only to hunt and fish for his subsistence, but to be, in a great measure, his own artificer, as well as the guardian of his public and private right, must be superior, in point of general understanding, to those vast bodies of Europeans whose intelligence the division of labor has confined to

* Dr. Hardy's (of Edinburgh) Sermon before the Society, in Scotland, for propagating Religious Knowledge, p. 14.

† lb. p 15.

terred by difficulties. THUS SAith the LORD, is his warrant and as long as there is nothing too hard for Omnipotence, there is nothing to justify disobedience or demur. Unbelief looks

a detached article of manufacture, or to the merely servile operations of agriculture. Indeed, all the national transactions with the Indians show them to possess great acuteness, and no small share of what learning cannot bestow-common sense. How seldom will you find, I do not say among the vulgar, but among the polished orders of society, better specimens of well-formed idea, and of genuine eloquence, than are frequent in the Indian talks?

If, on the other hand, their manner of life be considered as presenting the decisive obstacle, this opinion supposes it much more difficult to alter outward habits than inward principles. Christians will not dispute that the gospel can and does transform both the heart and the character; yet it is thought unable to overcome a propension to wandering from place to place. The plain meaning of the objection, therefore, is this, that some means more powerful than the gospel, must be applied to civilize the Indians, and prepare them for its reception. For if it be admitted, that the gospel can civilize as well as save, the objection falls at once to the ground. But if its power to civilize be denied, while its power to save is admitted, it becomes the objectors to show the reason of this distinction, and also what those more effectual means of civilization are. Be they what they may, since the gospel is excluded, they must be merely human; and then the principle of the objection turns out to be this, that the wisdom of man is better adapted to civilize the Indians, than the wisdom of God.

Further the objection supposes that savages are to be civilized without any religious aid. For whatever arguments prove the utility, in this matter, of religion at all, conclude, with tenfold energy, in favor of the religion of Christ. But to neglect the religious principle, would be to neglect the most potent auxiliary which can be employed in managing human nature; and to act in the spirit of that wise philosophy which would erect civil society upon the basis of atheism.

at opposition, and faints. Faith looks at the promise of God, and conquers. In the strength of the promise, worm Jacob thrashes the mountains, and beats them small as chaff. It

It would swell this note into a dissertation, to state the various considerations which militate against the idea of civilizing the Indians before we attempt to Christianize them. But granting this, for a moment, to be necessary, who shall effect it? Philosophers? Merchants? Politicians? If we wait for them, the sun will expend his own light, and the business be unfinished. The Indians have had intercourse with the whites, in the concerns of trade and policy, nearly two hundred years, and most of them are as wild as ever. To put off evangelical missions to them, till, in the ordinary course of things, they become civilized, is, therefore, equivalent to putting them off forever.

2. If the opinion that the gospel can succeed only among civilized people, receives little countenance from reason, it receives less from scripture.

No such restriction of its influence is contemplated in prophecy. Its universal reception is the subject of numberless predictions; but they contain not a hint that the want of civilization shall be such a bar to its progress as is commonly imagined. On the contrary, it is expressly declared, that the most roving and untutored tribes shall rejoice in Messiah's salvation, even while they retain their unpolished characters and manners. Sing unto the LORD a new song-Let the wilderness and the cities thereof lift up their voice, the villages that Kedar doth inhabit-Let the inhabitants of the rock sing; let them shout from the top of the mountains. Beyond all controversy, the general sense of the prophet, in the words of that elegant scholar, Bishop LowтH, is, that "the most uncultivated countries, and the most rude and uncivilized people, shall confess and celebrate, with thanksgiving, the blessing of the knowledge of God graciously imparted to them." And he particularizes, as an

* Or tents.

+ Translation of Isaiah. Notes, p. 198, 4to.