working for our good, and the everlasting glory to be revealed at the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, and acceptance of him and reward by him in that day; we, believing in Jesus, and loving him and his, and all men, view that day not as the day of terror, but as the blessed hope of his people. Yes, we can say to ALL WHO TRULY BELIEVE IN THE LORD JESUS, and are faithfully serving him, Ye are come unto Mount Zion, and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and Church of the first-born, which are written in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel. We are already at the foot of the mount; we see the glorious company who have gone before; we anticipate the speedy admission into their blessed society, and we will by God's grace be followers of them who through faith and patience inherit the promises.

And, O people of God, now in Babylon, would that the voice of the Most High, here sounding in his Word, could reach your ears; and his own Spirit then lead you to come and join us in our spiritual liberty, love, and blessedness. You You are in bondage, when God calls you to freedom; you are in fear, when he calls you to confidence; you are in danger, when he calls you to safety. Refuse not this last voice given by his Spirit in our text, before the final and everlasting destruction of that which, however surrounded by impregnable walls and gates of brass, will be found in the day of wrath to be a vain confidence, and ensnaring you to receive of its final plagues.

See that ye refuse not him that speaketh, for if they escaped not who refused him

that spake on earth, much more shall not we escape if we turn away from him that speaketh from heaven.

Help us then to convey this voice of God, amongst our perishing fellow-creatures. They will not come to hear us. You must be then the heralds of this proclamation of our God. By acquiring full scriptural information on the apostasyby circulating our religious publications by being ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear; by exhorting them to search. the Word of God, like the Bereans of old, to see if these things are not so; by warning them of the accumulated danger of bringing upon themselves all the guilt of former ages in the idolatries, and massacres, and burnings at the stake, torments in prisons, tortures, and bloodshed, which the apostasy has occasioned, and which will all be justly required in the day of wrath of impenitent Rome, when her sins at length have reached to heaven: thus plead with your perishing brethren, that they may be plucked as brands from the burning.

Above all, let us, like Abraham, abound in intercession for that which is called in the Revelation, Sodom (Rev. xi. 8), as well as Babylon. With patient intercession he persevered, and at length God remembered Abraham, and Lot and his family were delivered from destruction. With patient perseverance let us pray for Babylon; and who can enumerate the countless multitudes that may yet escape, and be partakers with us of all the glories of the heavenly Jerusalem. I would conclude with the touching prayer especially suited to those in Rome,-THAT IT MAY PLEASE Thee to bring intO THE WAY OF

TRUTH ALL SUCH AS HAVE ERRED AND ARE

DECEIVED: WE BESEECH THEE TO HEAR US, GOOD LORD.

THE exertions of corrupt and Antichristian communions to proselyte the unevangelized nations afford an argument, to prove the duty of the Christian Church. While we would never deny the excellence that has been found in individual members of the Romish communion, we cannot overlook the fact, that, as a body, it is denounced in the prophe cies of Scripture as the Antichrist of the last times. Now, of the nominal Christians of the globe, somewhat more than one-half, one hundred and thirty or one hundred and forty millions,-belong to this apostate church; besides the my riads clinging to those scarcely less corrupted bodies, the Greek and oriental churches, where a mass of cumbrous and superstitious ceremonies, and a general absence of living piety, are alike, as in Romanism, prominent and palpable, as the characteristics of a spurious or degenerate Christianity.

All error is more or less contagious. But Paganism and Mohamedanism are comparatively effete as proselyting systems. The days when Brahminism was a form of faith, converting the nations to itself, are past, probably never to return. There were times when Mohamedanism carried its mission of the Koran and the sword from the pillars of Hercules on the West, to the banks of the Ganges on the East. But Mohamedanism, also, has, in our times, lost its missionary spirit, except, perhaps, in a few of the darkest portions of Africa. Paganism and Mohamedanism now content themselves with retaining their old possessions. It is not so with Romanism.

It is impossible for the thoughtful Christian to overlook the fact, that the Romish Church is, in our days, awaking to efforts of the most gigantic kind in the field of foreign missions. She has revived the Jesuit order, the society probably of the highest general ability that the world ever saw,-the body that, in conjunction with the Inquisition, broke the shock of the Reformation in southern

Europe, and, for the time, when evangelical truth seemed invading that seat of the Beast, turned the battle to the gate, carried the war into Germany, the home of the Reformation, and re-established Romanism in a portion of that country, as by its missions in the New World and in the extreme eastern portions of the old world, it threw, in the fame of its Xaviers, Riccis, Nobregas and Anchietas, a lustre on the Romish communion of which that church has ever since continued to boast. Of their unprincipled and supple policy, and their restless intrigues we need not pause to speak. To this order of men have been recently committed all the Indian Missions of Rome in North America, and to the same order is entrusted the College of the Propaganda at Rome, the great missionary school of that church. With these aids, in addition to other Missionary Associations, centreing in France and Austria, Romanism is developing an enterprising and grasping policy, that jostles, perhaps, at this moment, nearly every successful Protestant mission on the globe. She is spinning afresh her web of power boldly over the very crater of the volcano of French infidelity, scarce yet cooled from the lava floods of the revolution; and from thence, as a centre of political influence, is shooting the meshes of that mighty web over the islands of the South Sea. Fixing one cord of her farspread network at Oregon, on our shores, washed by the Pacific in the remote West, she seems preparing to attach another of the threads amongst the simple Karens, in the provinces of British Birmah, in the far-distant East. Her missionary emissaries are intriguing in Syria and in Persia. And the same restless Church is meddling with the School question in our country, that but recently was squabbling over the Marriage question with Protestant Prussia, entangled with the Democratic movement in Spain at one corner of Europe, and contending with the Autocrat of the Russias at the other; every where exhibiting the same

restless, relentless, all-daring and allgrasping energy. Upon China, the field of her old glory and shame, she is preparing to enter anew, with the advantage of having already concealed in that empire some 10 bishops and some 250,000,* or, according to later estimates,† 350,000 converts to her corrupt form of religion, already gathered, and forming the basis of her future operations. From the small islands near Madagascar, her priests have lately driven some of the native Christians of Madagascar, who were labouring there; and she is supposed to be meditating a descent on the northern portion of Madagascar itself. In the Society Islands and the Sandwich Islands, she is seeking to rival, and hoping, doubtless, ultimately to extrude Protestant missionaries. The Marquesas Islands she has engrossed to herself. Southern America is wound up in her web.

A community thus widely diffused and thus eager, energetic and versatile, is no contemptible rival. And, it should be remembered, she has the carnality of the human heart on her side. Her showy, and gorgeous rites, her substitution of the forms for the inward life of religion, will naturally conciliate the heart, sooner than the simple, spiritual and self-denying doctrines of the cross. In addition, she finds in Buddhism, the most widely established, as we have seen, of all forms of Paganism, a system that has, in many points, a striking resemblance to her own. The two systems, in their reiterated and formal prayers, their rosaries, their monasticism, their fasts, their doctrines of merit, their sacred languages, as elsewhere, have points of unison, that excited long ago the astonishment and perplexity of the Romish missionaries. Upon this form of Paganism, Protestantism as well as Romanism, must now make its onset, as it presents itself in the vast and populous empire of China. Will the Antichristian Church find no advantage in these its resemblances? Alluding to this advantage, in its approach to any form of heathenism, that the Romish system has, the Tahi

Medhurst.

+ Chinese Repository, April, 1843. + Lond. Evang. Mag., 1843.

tians, since the French invasion of their islands, have remarked, that had Romish priests first visited them, instead of the Protestant missionaries of the ship Duff, they would not have found the difficulties, and met the delays experienced by the Protestant labourers; because the new faith would have so closely resembled their old idolatry, as to have been easily embraced.*

With the written word of God, which Rome has ever so dreaded, and with the Spirit of God, the evangelical missionary has no cause for fears as to the ultimate result. But whilst he may not dread, he has little reason to despise the Romish Church. She has talent, wealth and zeal. She has her heroes and her martyrs; and can draw into her service the most varied instruments, and the most opposite interests, whilst many of the stronger affections of our fallen nature, are enlisted as at the first summons, under her banners. From her present movements it is apparent, that she hopes to encase the globe in the web of her strong enchantments, and to entangle in her cords of delusion its freedom, its science, its art and its literature. It is not the vaunted spirit of freedom, or the boasted illumination of the press and the common school, that will avail to break her spells : and they who trust in such defences will find her steadily gaining upon them, as' she has gained, spite of these defences, on some of the old strongholds of European Protestantism, Germany, England and Scotland. There is much in the condition of the times, in the importance of the crisis, and the greatness of the difficulties to be encountered, that ought to crush out of the true church all selfconfidence, and make her faith in Christ more simple, direct and entire, regarding him as her only resource in the impending conflict.

If there be much to awaken apprehension in the conflict and rivalry with Rome in foreign countries, there is also much to encourage. The extent of our opportunities should animate us.

The more we can do, the more we are bound to do. Such opportunities are in

dications of Divine Providence confirming and reinforcing the requirements of the sacred Scriptures, that we should use the powers and influence entrusted to our keeping, in the Master's service, and occupy till He come again. England and North America are, from their political freedom, their commercial enterprise, and the number of their shipping, exerting a more extended influence on most unevangelized shores of the globe than any other nations. Their language, if not destined to supplant the French and German in the literature of the world, seems likely to become the language of the world's commerce. This will give to missionaries speaking it some great advantages. Our political institutions, again, having furnished the leaven that first commenced the political fermentations which now fill the old world with commotion; our broad territories inviting the surplus population of that old world, and our shores continually receiving its emigrants, our position is one of influence even upon the oldest governments of Europe. Were the streams of emigration that reach us but pervaded with the influence of a pure gospel, the strongest holds of a corrupt form of the gospel in the European world, must feel the consequent reaction.

A great preparatory work for the final triumphs of the gospel has been accomplished in the form of Scripture translations. In effecting these, Protestant missions have done much. The Bible is now translated into all the leading languages of the world. Perhaps it would not be too great an estimate to say the

lively oracles of God are now printed, partially or entire, in the tongues spoken by nearly seven-eighths of the race. In these its earliest operations, the Protestant mission moves of necessity more slowly, and with less of immediate, apparent effect, than the missionary policy of Romanism. But the ultimate result is more abiding, more extensive, and more sure than that of the opposite process. Like the pioneer husbandman of our western forests, this the method of the Protestant churches first girdles the trees, and then sows the harvests amid the dead trunks. In India, the decay and dying off, under this process, of the heathen superstitions, are seen even in neighbourhoods where there is yet but little of conversion to the gospel. Rome far more rapidly persuades an idolatrous people to substitute one set of names and rites for another. The Virgin Mary wears the cast-off finery of some heathen goddess; the old heathen festivals are retained under different names; and the Romish catechists, as in India, (Missionary Herald, November, 1843,) are found, in the intervals of their teaching as Christians, busied in making images. In such a system of transferred and baptized idolatry, the trees of the forest are not even girdled, much less uprooted, and what religious truth may be sown is like seed left to perish under the rank luxuriance of the jungle, very speedily sown indeed, but yielding no very permanent harvest. There is no slow and toilsome destruction of the old and deep-rooted idolatry of the land, and therefore at first, the Romish missions seem more speedily successful.

The publication of the present number of the PROTESTANT QUARTERLY REVIEW has been delayed a few days in the expectation-which, unfortunately, is not fulfilled-that the editor would be able to present in its pages an article on the Bible in Public Schools, by an eminent citizen, who has written much and most ably on that important subject.

The contents of the future numbers of the Review, will be more various and interesting. It is intended to make the work, for the present, at least, chiefly a repository of the most rare and valuable tracts on the Roman religion, and with this view the editor has made arrangements to receive every thing of importance

connected with the Great Controversy which may appear in England, from the Secretary of the Protestant Association in that country.

Several valuable papers-to the authors of which the editor tenders his grateful acknowledgments, have been received since the publication of the January number, and declined, because, while treating of questions at issue between the Papists and the Christian churches, they embrace opinions in which all evangelical Christians do not themselves concur. We can have "no peace with Rome till Rome makes peace with God;" but in this work we cannot discuss, in any way, the minor differences which separate the Protestant communions.