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Christianity of workshops, on the Christianity of crowded and industrious establishments, on the Christianity of nearly all our cities and all our parishes. That the hope which is in us may have the property of endurance there must be a reason for the hope, and where, we ask, in the whole field of their habitual contemplation, are the toil-worn children of poverty to find it? Are they to search for the reason among the archives of history? Are they to gather it out of the mouldering erudition of other days?-Are they to fetch it up from the profound and puzzling obscurity of argumentation? -Are they to encounter the toil of scholarship, and ere the light of revelation can guide or gladden them, think you that they must learn to number, and to balance, and to confront the testimony of former generations?

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Refuse the evidence that we have been insisting on, and in doing so you pass oblivion on nearly all the Christianity that is in our own land. It may still continue to be talked of in the cloistered retirements of literary debate and speculation, but the mighty host of our people could take no more rational interest in its questions than they would in any controversy of the schools; and if the authority of this volume be not legibly stamped upon all its own pages, if all the evidence by which we can affirm it to be most thoroughly and visibly impregnated, be a delusion, if all the varied points of accordancy between the book of revelation and the book of human experience be not sufficient to attest the divinity that formed it, or if this attestation be far beyond the understanding of an ordinary peasant, then must Christianity be ever shut up from a vast majority of our species, nor

do we see one possible way of causing it to circulate at large among the families of our land.

On this subject, therefore, we again with confidence appeal to the experience of any Christian minister within the limits of his own parish, did he ever witness the conversion of one of his own people, and more especially in the humble classes of society, and where then, we ask, was the instrument or cause in that conversion. Did it lie, we ask, in any thing external to the subject matter of the Gospel, or did it lie within the subject matter of the Gospel itself. Did the light lie in that history which the documents of antiquity enabled him to give of the book, or did it lie in that doctrine and information which stands engraven upon its pages? Did it lie in the exhibition he made of the proof of the communication, or did it lie in the exhibition he made of the substance of the communication? Let him tell us the argument of that awakening Sermon under which he remembers some secure hold of infidelity to have been stormed? was it in combatting the hostility of nature's blindness? was it in the act of combatting the hostility of literature, when in all pride of erudition he demonstrated the faithful conveyance of the Scriptures of truth from the first ages of Christianity; or was it in the act of combatting the hostility of nature's blindness and nature's opposition, when he opened the Scriptures and made the truth itself manifest to the consciences of men? This last, we imagine to be the only way of converting the human soul. It is not done by descending into the depth of the earth, and there fighting the battle of the truth against the dark and visionary spectres of theology; it is not done by ascending up into the heavens,

and fetching from those wondrous and the attributes, and the love of regions some sublime illustration. It is done by bringing the word nigh unto them, by entering with it into the warm, and well known chambers of their own consciences, by making them feel the full force of its adjustment to all their wants and experiences, by telling them of that sin, under a conviction of which, nature tries to forget GOD, or would flee affrighted from his presence, and of that Saviour, who alone can hush the alarms of nature's philosophy.

These are the lessons which could do to those, my hearers, what they did in the days of the Apostles. They can make the unbelievers, and the unlearned, feel themselves to "be judged of all and convinced of all, and thus can manifest the secrets of their hearts, so that they shall acknowledge GOD to be in them of a truth."

III. We would now come to the THIRD and last head of our discourse, in which, as briefly as possible, we would consider THE LIKELIHOOD OF SUCCESS IN THE MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE, AND MORE ESPECIALLY THE ACTUAL, AND HISTORICAL SUCCESS,

WHICH ALREADY HAS ATTENDED IT.

GOD. The Greenlanders did not
comprehend them, and the mission-
aries were mortified to find that after
years of labour they had not gained
a single proselyte to the faith. On
this they resolved to change their
measures, and, as a last desperate
experiment, they gave up all prepa-
ratory instruction, and made one
great and decisive step onward in
the peculiar doctrines, and these too
couched in the peculiar phraseology
of the Gospel. When simply told
in Scriptural words, of sin, and of
the Saviour, the effect was instan-
taneous; there was something in the
hearts of these unlettered men which
responded to the truths and tidings
of the New Testament. The de-
monstration of natural religion fell
fruitless and unintelligible on their
ears; but they felt the burden of sin,
and of death, and listened attentively
to the preacher's voice when it told,
that" unto them a Saviour was born."
They live on the very outskirts of
population, and beyond them there
is nothing seen but a wilderness of
snow, and nothing heard but the
angry howling of the elements.

But I must here restrict myself Who will say that the enterprise to a few gleanings from a now mul- is chimerical now that a Christian tifareous and daily accumulating his- people is formed in a country so untory, and such as may best illustrate promising--that the limits of the the rationale of the missionary enter- Christian church have been pushed prise. When the first missionaries forward to the limits of human exwent to Greenland we may be as-istence, and the tidings of goodwill sured that they had the ignorance to men have been carried with acof a rude and unpromising population to contend with. They thought they would go systematically to work, and before presenting them with the Christian message in the terms of the message, that they would give them some preparatory ideas as in natural religion. For this purpose they expatiated in formal demonstration on the existence, and the unity,

ceptance to the very last and uttermost of the species. The discovery there made by the Moravians was converted by them into a principle which they carried round the globe; and which ever since has been the fertile source of their marvellous success in the work of evangelizing the heathen. They now learned that it was impossible to antedate the

Their services are
every where
sought after. It is a most substantial
testimony in their favour that the
West India planters have found the
best results from their preaching and
discipline in the good order and fide-
lity of their slaves. When their
accounts were made up at the end
of 1827, they had under Christian

groes.

message of the Gospel in any manner, and they availed themselves of this experience in Greenland in all their subsequent operations among the Exquimaux of Labrador, among the Indians of North America, and among the negroes of the Danish and Barbadoes Islands, and lastly, among the Hottentots of South Africa. As the effect of this peculiar, yet pow-instruction, no less than 35,629 neerful moral regimen, villages have arisen in the wilderness, and we now behold men of, before, untamed and savage nature, as if by the touch of a miracle, completely become radically transformed, living in gentleness together, and tutored in the arts and decencies of a civilized people. Many there are who nauseate the peculiar evangelism which lies at the root of this great, moral, and spiritual change, yet are forced to admire the beauteous efflorescence which proceeds from it, just as there are many who can eye with delight the graces of a cultivated landscape, yet have no taste for the operations of husbandry which called it into being. Certain it is that Moravians have become the objects of a popular and sentimental admiration among men who would not tolerate the methodistical flavor, as they may term it, of a Moravian report, a thing just as possible as that they might feel a most exquisite relish for their music along with a thorough distaste for their hymns. The fruit and the flower are both pleasing to the eye of many to whom the culture is offensive; and who could not look upon it without the revolt of nature's en-zation a graft upon christianity. There mity to the truth as it is, in Jesus, were none more hurt and scandalized and, therefore, it is that they look by these eulogies than the Moravians only to the one, and continue to over- themselves, and they have actually look the other. And accordingly penned a vindication of their method, Moravians have, of late, become the not against the sneer of malignant objects of very general request, as enemies, but against the praises of well as of very general admiration. mistaken admirers. The whole his

This seems to be the best place for the adjustment of the question, whether the first attempt should be to | christianize or to civilize, or which it is of these that takes the precedency of the other. The Moravians themselves have innocently given rise to a delusion upon this subject. The result in these converts has now become so striking and so palpable— they have at length succeeded in raising so beauteous a spectacle as that of christians and well ordered villages, which were before the fruitful haunts of prowling and plundering barbarians - there is something so inexpressibly pleasing in the chapel service, and the well attended school, and the picturesque garden, and the snug habitations and prosperous husbandry of reclaimed Hottentots, that Moravians are now cried up by sentimental travellers and eloquent writers as an example, nay, as a reproach to all other missionaries; and they have supposed, perhaps naturally enough, that what was first in exhibition was also first in time ;— that the christianity in short was a graft upon civilization, and not the civili

tory of christianization since the days of the apostles tends to prove that wherever the faith of the gospel arises in the mind, it is rooted and has its deep foundation in the workings of that moral nature which is common to all the species. And so it is that these Moravians tell us how they began the topic of sin, and of the Saviour, at the very outset of their converse, even with the very rudest of nature's wanderers, and they find a conscience in them which responds as readily to their sayings, and which loses the pre-occupations and prejudices which obstruct their efficacy, as in the lettered Mahometan, or the demi-civilized Hindoo. It is true they also attempt, as all other missionaries do, to insinuate among them the arts and industry of Europe from the very beginning of their enterprise, and the two educations of religion and humanity go on contemporarily. It may in some instances be difficult to assign what the precedency is in the order of time, but as to the precedency in the order of nature, or in the order of cause and effect, there is no difficulty. It is not the process of civilization which makes way for the Christianity, it is the christianity makes way for the civilization. This is the strict philosophy of the process; Christianity does not wait for civilization, it is civilization that waits, and follows with attendant footsteps on Christianity. In a word, the message of GOD to man might be delivered immediately to all men; it is a message alike to the “barbarian and the Greek." And here too, as in every thing else, there is the fullest harmony between the declaration of the gospel itself, and the findings of experience.

This will explain, I hope, that very prevalent misconception, in virtue of which it is, that while in the West Indies, and more especially through

a great portion of British society, there is such a demand and veneration for Moravians, there is still so strong a remainder of dislike, and even of derision for all other missionaries. The reason is simply this, the Moravians are the oldest of all our modern Protestant missionaries, and they have had time to work up a more conspicuous result as the evidence of their labours. They also went through the very ordeal of contempt and of bitter calumny,which the missionaries have still to undergo, and which they must continue to endure, so long as the Christianity of the attempt stands out so nakedly to the eye of worldly observers, and the mantle of civilization is not yet sufficiently thickened to cover it from their view. We doubt there is a rawness which is now most comfortably and most completely softened away in the older establishments of the Moravians. The one is just as solid and deeply founded as the other, in the sacredness of the enterprise which led to it, but there is not yet that secondary luxuriance which catches the eye, and calls forth the homage of sentimentalism. The honeysuckle has not yet fully grown at each cottage door, nor is the picture yet completed for the enraptured traveller to gaze upon, and at which he may kindle perhaps into strains of sweetest poesy. So meagre, so utterly superficial, and ignorant, are the conceptions of those who, when they would exalt the Moravians, do it at the expense of the nakedness of all other missionaries. They exhibit the mere finery of sentimental criticism, without the depth of Christian principle, without the substance and the depth of philosophic observation.

I consider it necessary before I conclude to give you just one instance more, in justice to the usefulness and the efforts of another society, not com

posed of Moravians, I mean the Lon- | physics (for I am supposing this to don Missionary Society. Let me be a company of philosophers and just say a few words on what is still savans)-well, had they proceeded considered to be the most illustrious thus far, and furnished with the best of all achievements. Had the memand fitted lessons for man in the inbers of some school of philosophers fancy of understanding brought their by dint of a skilful and laborious well weighed processes to bear on analysis, become profoundly con- them-had they got pupils from versant with the mysteries of the among all their families, and in human spirit, had they speculated twenty years wrought a change more with accuracy and effect not merely marvellous than twenty centuries on the progress of the individual rolling over the heads of many tribes mind, from its first rude and barren and many nations of our world have elements to the highest finished being been able to accomplish-in a word, of its moral and intellectual cultiva- had they transformed this horde of tion, but also on the progress of the cannibals into a lettered and humancollective mind in society: 30 as to ized peasantry, and from the cruelties trace all the continuous footsteps by of their desolating superstition turned which the transition is made from them to the peaceful charities of this savage to civilized life-had they on world, and to the rejoicing hopes of the principle of a new system de- another-had they been further envised a plan of tuition, and instituted abled to grace the whole of this a method of discipline and formed a exhibition by such pleasing and book of elementary doctrine and picturesque accompaniment as those scholarship, in virtue of which they of newly formed villages, and cultiheld themselves prepared for a grand vated gardens, and prosperous inphilanthropic experiment on some dustry, and the whole customs of remote remnant of barbarians, yet in industrious and well-regulated life— the primitive ignorance of nature and all this on the part of a people, had they been enabled so to interest who but a few years ago were prowlthe public in their scheme as to be ing in nakedness, and who with fierce upheld by them in all the cost of a and untamed spirits could assemble beneficial expedition, then set forth in delighted multitudes around the on the wide ocean of adventure till altar of a human sacrifice an they reached a far distant shore that achievement so wondrous as this was peopled by the most degraded would have blazoned forth on the tribes of idolaters, where all the arts world as one of the noblest triumphs and habits, and decencies of Europe of philosophy; it would have filled and delighted the whole of our litewere unknown, and where hideous misshapen sculpture bespoke rary republic, and her academies a paganism of the most revolting would have vied with each other in character-had they in these cir- heaping their orders and honorary cumstances offered parley with the titles on the men who had found out natives, and gained their confidence, that specific charm by which to reand won such an ascendency as that claim savages to the walks of humathey could assemble and detain them nity, and to quicken a hundred fold at pleasure, for the purposes of edu- the march of improvement of our species. cation, and furnished, as they were, by an enlightened scheme of meta

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Now it is not very many years ago

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