men almost as ignorant of the spirit of the gospel, are struggling for independence in the South. We have looked over Europe, and behold there one nation putting forth her energies in the cause of evangelizing the world. We have looked for another such nation; but it is not to be found. A few others are beginning to awake. Most of them, however, yet slumber. Many are themselves in need of missionaries. Nay, we know not but the movement of the cause of man in Europe is at present retrograde. There seems too evidently a coalition formed of the powers that be, to check the progress of moral and intellectual improvement, and to rivet again on the human mind the manacles of papal superstition. God only knows how soon the reaction will commence, which shall shake the continent to its center, scatter thrones and scepters and all the insignia of prescriptive authority, like the dust of the summer's threshing-floor, and establish throughout the Christian world representative governments, on the broad basis of common sense and inalienable right. We have looked over Africa, and have seen that, upon one little portion, reclaimed from brutal idolatry by missionaries, the Son of righteousness has shined. It is a land of Goshen, where they have light in their dwellings. Upon all the remainder of this vast continent, there broods a moral darkness, impervious as that which once vailed her own Egypt, on that prolonged and fearful night when no man knew his brother. We have looked upon Asia, and have seen its northern nations, though under the government of a Christian prince, scarcely nominally Christian. On the West, it is spell-bound by Mohammedan delusion. To the South, from the Persian gulf to the sea of Kamschatka, including also its numberless islands, except where here and there a Syrian church or a missionary station twinkles amid the gloom, the whole of this immense portion of the human race is stiting in the region and shadow of death. Such, then, is the field for our exertion. It encircles the whole family of man; it includes every unevangelized being of the species to which we belong. We have thus surveyed the missionary field, that we may know how great is the undertaking to which we stand committed. We have also made an estimate of the miseries of this world. We have seen how, in many places, the human mind, shackled by ignorance and enfeebled by vice, has dwindled almost to the standard of a brute. Our indignation has kindled at hearing of men, immortal as ourselves, bowing down and worshiping a wandering beggar, or paying adoration to reptiles and to stones. Not only is intellect everywhere, under the dominion of idolatry, prostrated; beyond the boundaries of Christendom, on every side, the dark places of the earth are filled with the habitations of cruelty. We have mourned over the savage ferocity of the Indians of our western wilderness. We have turned to Africa, and seen almost the whole continent a prey to lawless banditti, or else bowing down in the most revolting idolatry. We have descended along her coast, and beheld villages burned or depopulated, fields laid waste, and her people, who have escaped destruction, naked and famishing, flee to their forests at the sight of a stranger. We have turned to Asia, and beheld how the demon of her idolatry has worse than debased, has brutalized the mind of man. Everywhere his despotism has been grievous; here, with merciless tyranny, he has exulted in the misery of his victims. He has rent from the human heart all that was endearing in the charities of life. He has taught the mother to tear away the infant as it smiled in her bosom, and cast it, the shrieking prey, to contending alligators. He has taught the son to light the funeral pile, and to witness, unmoved, the dying agonies of his widowed, murdered mother! We have looked upon all this; and our object is, to purify the whole earth from these abominations. Our object will not have been accomplished till the tomahawk shall be buried forever, and the tree of peace spread its broad branches from the Atlantic to the Pacific; until a thousand smiling villages shall be reflected from the waves of the Missouri, and the distant valleys of the West echo with the song of the reaper; till the wilderness and the solitary place shall have been glad for us, and the desert has rejoiced and blossomed as the rose. Our labors are not to cease until Africa shall have been enlightened and redeemed, and Ethiopia, from the Mediterranean to the Cape, shall have stretched forth her hand unto God. How changed will then be the face of Asia! Brahmins, and sooders, and castes, and shasters, will have passed away, like the mist which rolls up the mountain's side before the rising glories of a summer's morning; while the land on which it rested, shining forth in all its loveliness, shall, from its numberless habitations, send forth the high praises of God and the Lamb. The Hindoo mother will gaze upon her infant with the same tenderness which throbs in the breast of any Christian mother; and the Hindoo son will pour into the wounded bosom of his widowed parent the oil of peace and consolation. In a word, point us to the loveliest village that smiles upon a Scottish or New England landscape, and compare it with the filthiness and brutality of a Caffrarian kraal, and we tell you that our object is to render that Caffrarian kraal as happy and as gladsome as that Scottish or New England village. Point us to the spot on the face of the earth, where liberty is best understood and most perfectly enjoyed, where intellect shoots forth in its richest luxuriance, and where all the kindlier feelings of the heart are constantly seen in their most graceful exercise; point us to the loveliest and happiest neighborhood in the world on which we dwell; and we tell you that our object is to render this whole earth, with all its nations, and kindreds, and tongues, and people, as happy, nay, happier than that neighborhood. We have considered these beings as immortal, and candidates for an eternity of happiness or misery. And we can not avoid the belief that they are exposed to eternal misery. Here, you will observe, the ques tion with us is not, whether a heathen, unlearned in the gospel, can be saved. We are willing to admit that he may. But if he be saved, he must possess holiness of heart; for without holiness no man shall see the Lord. And where shall we find holy heathen? Where is there the vestige of purity of heart among unevangelized nations? It is in vain to talk about the innocence of these children of nature. It is in vain to tell us of their graceful mythology. Their gods are such as lust makes wel come. Of their very religious services it is a shame to speak. To settle the question concerning their future destiny, it would only seem necessary to ask, "What would be the character of that future state, in which those principles of heart, which the whole history of the heathen world develops, were suffered to operate in their unrestrained malignity?" No! solemn as is the thought, we do believe that, dying in their present state, they will be exposed to all that is awful in the wrath of Almighty God. And we do believe that God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have everlasting life. Our object is to convey to those who are perishing, the news of this salvation. It is to furnish every family on the face of the whole earth with the word of God, written in its own language; and to send to every neighborhood a preacher of the cross of Christ. Our object will not be accomplished until every idcl temple shall have been utterly abolished, and a temple to Jehovah erected in its room; until this earth, instead of being a theater on which immortal beings are preparing by crime for eternal condemnation, shall become one universal temple, in which the children of men are learning the anthems of the blessed above, and becoming meet to join the general assembly and church of the first-born, whose names are written in heaven. Our design will not be completed until "One song employs all nations, and all cry, Earth rolls the rapturous hosannah round." The object of the missionary enterprise embraces every child of Adam. It is vast as the race to whom its operations are of necessity limited. It would confer upon every individual on earth, all that intellectual or moral cultivation can bestow. It would rescue a world from the indig nation and wrath, tribulation and anguish, reserved for every son of man that doeth evil, and give it a title to glory, honor, and immortality. You see, then, that our object is, not only to affect every individual of the species, but to affect him in the momentous extremes of infinite happiness and infinite woe. And now we ask, what object ever undertaken by man can compare with this same desire of evangelizing the world? Patriotism itself fades away before it, and acknowledges the supremacy of an enterprise which seizes, with so strong a grasp, upon both the temporal and eternal destinies of the whole family of man. But all this is not to be accomplished without laborious exertion. Hence we remark, II. THE MISSIONARY UNDERTAKING IS ARDUOUS ENOUGH TO CALL INTO ACTION THE NOBLEST ENERGIES OF MAN. Its arduousness is explained in one word: our field is the world. Our object is, to effect an entire moral revolution in the whole human race. Its arduousness, then, results of necessity from its magnitude. I need not say, to those acquainted with the nature of the human mind, that a large moral mass is not easily and permanently affected. A little leaven does not soon leaven the whole lump. To produce a change even of speculative opinion upon a single nation, is an undertak ing not easily accomplished. In the case before us, not a nation, but a world is to be regenerated: therefore, the change which we would effect is far from being merely speculative. If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature. Nothing short of this new creation will answer our purpose. We go forth, not to persuade men to turn from one idol to another, but to turn universally from idols, to serve the living God. We call upon those who are earthly, sensual, and devilish, to set their affections on things above. We go forth, exhorting men to forsake every cherished lust, and present themselves a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable unto God. And this mighty moral revolution is to be effected, not in a family, a tribe, or a nation, but in a world which lieth in wickedness. We have to operate upon a race divided into different nations, speaking a thousand different languages, under every different form of government, from absolute inertness to unbridled tyranny, and inhabiting every district of country, salubrious or deadly, from the equator to the poles. To all these nations must the gospel be sent; into all these languages must the Bible be translated; to all these climes, salubrious or deadly, must the missionary penetrate; and under all these forms of government, mild or despotic, must he preach Christ, and him crucified. Besides, we shall frequently interfere with the more sordid interests of men; and we expect them to increase the difficulties of our undertaking. If we can turn the heathen to God, many a source of unholy traffic will be dried up, and many a convenience of unhallowed gratification taken away. And hence we may expect, that the traffickers in human flesh, the disciples of mammon, and the devotees of pleasure, will be against us. From the heathen themselves we have the blackest darkness of ignorance to dispel. We have to assault systems venerable for their antiquity, and interwoven with every thing that is proud in a nation's history. Above all, we have to oppose the depravity of the human heart, grown still more inveterate by ages of continuance in unrestrained iniquity. In a word, we go forth to urge upon a world dead in trespasses and sins, a thorough renewal of heart, and a universal reformation of practice. Brief as is this view of the difficulties which surround us-and time will not allow us to state them more in detail-you see that our undertaking is, as we said, arduous enough to task to the uttermost the noblest energies of man. This enterprise requires consummate wisdom in the missionary who goes abroad, as well as in those who manage the concerns of a society at home. He who goes forth unprotected, to preach Christ to despotic, or badly-governed nations, must be wise as a serpent, and harmless as a dove. With undeviating firmness upon every thing essential, he must combine the most yielding facility upon all that is unimportant. And thus, while he goes forth in the spirit and power of Elias, he must, at the same time, become all things to all men, that by all means he may gain some. Great abilities are also required in him who conducts the mission at home. He must awaken, animate, and direct the sentiments of a very large portion of the community in which he resides, while at the same time, through a hundred different agents, he is exerting a powerful influence upon half as many nations, a thousand or ten thousand miles off. Indeed, it is hazarding nothing to predict, that if efforts for the extension of the gospel continue to multiply with their present ratio of increase, as great abilities will, in a few years, be required for transacting the business of a missionary society, as for conducting the affairs of a political cabinet. The missionary undertaking calls for perseverance; a perseverance of that character, which, having once formed its purpose, never wavers from it till death. And if ever this attribute has been so exhibited as to challenge the respect of every man of feeling, it has been in such instances as are recorded in the history of the missions to Greenland, and to the South Sea Islands, where we beheld men, for fifteen or twenty years, suffer every thing but martyrdom, and then, sceing no fruit from their labor, resolve to labor on till death, if so be they might, at last, save one benighted heathen from the error of his ways. This undertaking calls for self-denial of the highest and holiest character. He who engages in it must, at the very outset, dismiss every wish to stipulate for any thing but the mere favor of God. His first act is voluntary exile from all that a refined education loves; and every other act must be in unison with this. The salvation of the heathen is the object for which he sacrifices, and is willing to sacrifice, every thing that the heart clings to on earth. For this object he would live; for this he |