position is to be looked for, moral changes would seem to be previously necessary, which, not to require the lapse of ages in their accomplishment, would be little short of miraculous.

In opposition to this dispiriting view of things, Mr. Douglas has succeeded in shewing, that the undeveloped means which lie within our power, are adequate to produce, and that within a comparatively short term, a revolution of the most important and extensive kind. If his Hints should answer no other purpose, they will, we think, have a very beneficial effect as they tend to infuse a higher degree of animation into the hopes and exertions of Christians. The comprehensive view which he has taken of the whole sphere of Missionary exertion,—of the agency actually in operation, and of the resources and means. which it remains to employ, is at once highly interesting and valuable. If, while we follow him through his review, we are made to feel that the cause is as yet in its infancy; if we are led to look back on the past ages of the Church as barren in their greatest splendour, and to contemplate with shame our own apathy; if the time that has been lost appears as a most fearful account against the professors of the Christian faith; still, he shews that it will not require ages to repair that neglect. An accumulation of means, such as have never been in the possession of any former age, are placed in our hands, at a juncture the most critical. If the numerical proportion of Christians is wofully small, the population under Christian government, or accessible to Christian influence, is greater, perhaps, than at any former period. The simple means of evangelization are the same that they have ever been; and yet, in the application of them, they appear to possess all the freshness of a new discovery. Translation, as now applied to the Scriptures, seems almost like a new mechanical power. The art of Printing itself led not to a more rapid and extensive multiplication of written works, than the art of translation, or the wonderful extension of that art, has to that of books. Translation is not, as Printing was, a new discovery, but it is a conquest of difficulties equal to a discovery; and in its multiplying powers, or rather in the facilities of communication which it creates, it is to Printing, what Printing was to Writing. And if the means is not new, the power brought to act through that means, the impulse which has put the machinery in action, has originated in the spirit of the present times. The Bible Society has been the chief agent both in promoting and in circulating versions of the Scriptures in all the languages of Babel. It has, so to speak, created a market for translations; and the demand has created the supply. The Bible Society, however, is but one centre of impulse and exertion among many, to

which the present day has given birth. And all these operations of the various institutions which have for their object to act upon the darkness and vis inertia of heathen nations, are but preliminary to those internal movements which may confidently be anticipated to take place among the natives of those benighted countries, when once roused into moral life and action.

6

Many,' says Mr. Douglas, deem the conversion of the world chimerical without sensible miracles; but as long as the laws of the mind remain the same, we may be of good courage as to the ultimate success: the only miracle necessary, is, that Christians should have some concern for the souls of their fellow creatures.

"While belief is connected with truth, we shall never want converts; and while the belief of truth impels to the communication of truth, we shall never want preachers.

He

"I believed, and therefore have I spoken." Here is a measure derived from heaven to judge of the sincerity of belief. The laws of the human mind are not circumscribed within degrees and parallels. who has no desire to proclaim the gospel abroad, has none to proclaim it at home, and has no belief in it himself; whatever professions he may make, are hollow and hypocritical. Bodies of Christians who make no efforts to Christianize others, are Christians but in name; and the ages in which no attempts are made to send the glad tidings to heathen countries, are the dark ages of Christianity, however they may suppose themselves enlightened and guided by philosophy and moderation.

'The ages of Christian purity have ever been the ages of Christian exertion. At the commencement of Christianity, he who believed in the gospel became also a preacher of the gospel." We believe, and therefore we speak." The effort was correspondent to the belief, and the success to the effort. Christians grew and multiplied, and their very multiplication insured a fresh renewal of their increase. The primitive prolific blessing was upon them, and one became a thousand.

'But faith waxed feeble, and with faith charity, and with charity all efforts to instruct and to save; and Christians, instead of publishing the truth to others, disputed about the truth among themselves; and the Bible in their hands, instead of being a highway for the simple, became a labyrinth of subtleties for the disputers of this world; and, no longer proclaiming peace, was changed into a magazine of weapons, offensive and defensive, where every combatant might be furnished to his need; where texts were set in array against texts, Evangelist against Evangelist, and Apostle against Apostle.

'Religion, stripped by the fury of contending parties of every peculiarity belonging to it, remained but an empty name, or retained, like vacant space, the sole attribute of being infinitely divisible, while each division contained within itself the living germ of a future subdivision; and sects sprung from sects, as numerous and as noisy as the whelps Milton describes to have littered in the womb of sin, " hourly conceived and hourly born."

'At the Reformation, when religion was risen to second life from the

rubbish under which for so many centuries it had been buried, the zeal of the Reformers for spreading truth kept exact pace with their discovery of truth; but when, like Augustus, grown old and despairing of further conquest, they attempted to fix the bounds of its empire, those boundaries continually shrunk in, and their successors, instead of gaining ground, had to maintain a perpetual and unsuccessful struggle for what had already been achieved. Yet it was not unnatural to expect that wisdom should die with them, seeing that it had come into the world at their breath and bidding, and that, therefore, it ought to be embalmed with all possible speed in creeds and confessions, and that the truth which, though unendowed, had won themselves, now that it was older and of longer standing in the world, had need of wealth and revenues, in order to procure to itself other and younger lovers. It is not very surprising, then, how soon religion became stationary and even retrograde; how quickly its early glow of charity was overcast by dark and doubtful disputations, and that the Reformation itself needed anew a reform in the spirit, if not in the letter. 'That second Reformation has begun. It makes less noise than that of Luther, but it spreads wider and deeper: as it is more intimate, it will be more enduring. Like the Temple of Solomon, it is rising silently, without the din of hammers or the note of previous preparation; but, notwithstanding, it will not be less complete in all its parts, nor less able to resist the injuries of time.'

This is eloquent writing; but, what is more, it is as just as it is eloquent. In the contrast between the means and the agencies employed in the present day to extend the moral conquests of Christianity, and those which the Reformers were tempted to call in, we have the surest pledge that this second reformation will not be overlaid by patronage, or circumscribed by polemical zeal, or overborne by opposition. The first successes of the Reformers were achieved by the sword of the Spirit; but the day being won, they laid by the spiritual weapon, and thought only of securing their conquests by the sword of the magistrate. The extinction of the Missionary spirit was the inevitable consequence,not only because their own exertions became paralysed, but because the genius of human governments is at variance with the aggressive zeal of the Missionary. It is true, that the Church of Rome, prompted by the lust of empire, encouraged enterprises of this nature; and the Jesuits have been distinguished by their efforts to bring wanderers into the papal fold. The very universality of its claims, the all-comprehending grasp of its ambition, supplied, in this case, motives to extend the nominal triumphs of Christianity, and to procure at least an external subjection to the true faith. But the well-defined boundaries and insulated character of a national Church, admit of the operation of no such stirring motive. Accordingly, the modesty of Protestantism has been one cause of its

inactivity. It has carried its domestic character to the excess of scarcely stirring out of doors. It has, at least, seldom, till lately, ventured beyond its own acknowledged domain, contenting itself with acting on the defensive, and leaving to sects and papists the spirit of enterprise. The exceptions to this statement have been of too partial and limited a nature to affect its accuracy: they have been confined in England to our own colonies, and the common fate of chartered and incorporated societies has attended them.

The mission to the South of India,' remarks Mr. Douglas, was carried on at home by an Aulic Council of established churchmen, interspersed with laymen of clerical intercourse and habits of thinking; and the tactics were accordingly better adapted for defence than enterprise, and the operations every now and then languished, like other operations of that time, conducted with British money and German mercenaries.'

The true Missionary spirit appeared for a long period to be kept alive only among the little brotherhood of the Moravian Church. The duty of Missions to the heathen seemed almost a tenet peculiar to Moravianism; and the society to which the keeping of this truth, and the perpetuation of this holy flame were confided by Providence, has, at least in this country, been preserved, if we may not say for this purpose, yet chiefly by this means, from extinction. The Missionary spirit is not more a sign of vitality, than it is, by its reaction, a source and wellspring of life to the community which cherishes it. The church which is isolated, stagnates. The Gospel, like the mercy from which it emanates, is thrice bless'd,' in that it blesses him who gives,' in the act of giving, as much as him who receives it. Not only national churches, but sectarian communities had relapsed into antichristian indifference. Nor is it a little remarkable, that the first demonstration of an awakened zeal should have been made by that which has been esteemed, and not without reason, the most sectarian of sects, the most entrenched and fortified in the narrow circle of its communion--the Baptists. To them, next to the Moravians, is due the merit of having, as a body, broken new ground, and set the example to the Christian world, of invading the inmost territories of the prince of darkness. The London Missionary Society was formed on a wider basis; yet, nothing could be less promising than the auspices under which its first rash and unpractised efforts were made; and the cause suffered not a little from the wild pretensions, the pompous display, and the badly economised measures of its earlier years. When the money was raised, and the ship Duff had weighed anchor, the South Seas were already proclaimed to be evangelised. Captain James Wilson was

an admirable man, and he feelingly lamented, that so much more care had been bestowed on providing the means than in selecting the agents. The first two Moravian missionaries to Greenland, set out on their enterprise, we think we have heard, with half a guinea between them! Since then, however, the London Missionary Society has amply redeemed its character; and its experience has been not less useful, perhaps, to other societies than to itself. The qualifications of a Missionary are now beginning to occupy that priority of consideration which, from an enlightened estimate of the nature of his undertaking, they must obtain; and the foreign service is no longer supposed to require a lower average of talent and a narrower range of acquirement, than would be deemed respectable, and command attention at home.

But, in some points of view, the formation of the Church Missionary Society, may be considered as the most remarkable circumstance in the present day. This new shoot put forth by an Establishment venerable with age and borne down with honours, in which the principle of life had long forsaken the core, and seemed to be perpetuated only by the rind, is a prodigious and most animating spectacle. Much as we may pity, we cannot wonder at the alarms expressed by some of the rulers of the hierarchy at this unusual sign in the times. The Bible Society itself was scarcely a more portentous phenomenon. That such an institution as this, should take root, and flourish in the very heart of the National Church, and be sending far and wide its missionaries beyond the confines of episcopal jurisdiction,-its machinery, though confessedlysubordinate, yet extrinsic to the constitution of the hierarchy with which it is implicated, the sources which feed it, the impulse which gives activity to it, and the whole apparatus of its operations, being, in fact, independent on the main system of the Establishment,this is what no one, we think, would have ventured to predict, or

Matthew Stach and Frederic Boehnisch, two young men, being at work together in preparing a piece of ground for a burial place at Hernhut, in the course of conversation, found they had both, unknown to each other, formed the desire of going as missionaries to Greenland. They therefore proposed themselves for this service; but the delay of a year intervening before their offer was accepted, Boehnisch having meanwhile undertaken a considerable journey, Christian Stach consented to accompany his cousin. These two missionaries, along with Christian David, the principal agent in the Moravian emigration, who intended to return to Europe, after the settlement of a mission, set out from Hernhut, Jan. 19, 1733, attended with numberless good wishes from their brethren.' Crantz. Vol. II. p. 5.