The Puritan Fathers of New England were more successful, and the world is yet wondering at the rapid development each new generation is making of the influence those Christians exercised. Some of the strongest and noblest minds of Europe looked intently to our country as the scene of missions. Such were Cromwell, and Boyle, and Berkeley, in England. Such was Fenelon, one of whose youthful schemes it was, to become himself a missionary in Canada, then a French province.* Amongst ourselves, too, God raised up missionaries, at a time when the Protestants of Europe were comparatively inactive in this work. Our Eliot, our Mayhews, and our Brainerd, labored long and devoutly. The memoirs of the latter, especially, served to excite the zeal and to mould the character of William Carey and of Henry Martyn, two of the most honored names among the modern missionaries of Great Britain. And in our own times, the Great Head of the church has given to the Christians of this land, among those whose work is now ended, and those who yet toil in the mission field, some names not likely to be forgotten as long as the earthly church has a history and a being. As the children of a soil which the Christians of Europe thus sought to evangelize; as the descendants of those who labored when the Protestants of the Old World were comparatively inefficient; as the compatriots of those who have left their bones in Asia, in Africa, and in the islands of the sea, taking possession thus for Christ and his church of the countries of the heathen, American Christians have an undeniable interest in the examination of every scheme and every question that bear directly or indirectly on the great duty of evangelizing the world. They are thus repaying the debt they owe to the Christians of other nations; asserting anew the principles of their forefathers long since gathered to their rest, and guarding also the memory of their brethren who have more recently fallen in the missionary field. In the discussion, too, of some of these questions, the Christians of this country have stores of experience that are peculiarly their own, and that are not equally accessible to their fellow-Christians in Europe. We need but name the power of the voluntary principle, as seen amongst us in the support of religion and its institutions; and the exemption of our churches alike from the oppressions of the state, as dissenters, and from its patronage, as an establishment, evils felt by our brethren in the foreign as well as in the home field.

1. A question of great moment, that has within the last few years perplexed the missionary bodies both of the Old and New World, is that of the mode in which funds may be secured, adequate to the support of the missions which the providence of God has cast upon them. And these missions need not only to be sustained, but the wants of the heathen and the commands of the gospel join with the invitations of Divine Providence to require that they should be widely extended. This was a difficulty which the earlier friends of moder missions scarce anticipated as one that could by any possibility

* Bausset, Hist. de Fenelon.

occur. Such, at least, was the sentiment of Fuller. In a letter of advice to a friend, who had commenced a society for the evangeliza tion of Ireland, he recurs to his own experience in the work of propagating the gospel in India. "Be more anxious to do the work than to get money. If the work be done, and modestly and faithfully reported, money will come. We have never had occasion to ask for money, but once . . . The first contributions at your meeting were much beyond £13 2s. 6d., with which we commenced. Money was one of the least of our concerns; we never doubted, that if, by the good hand of our God upon us, we could do the work, the friends of Christ would support us."* Yet, within a short time, we have seen schools disbanded, the cries of missionaries for assistants in their labor disregarded, and our Missionary Boards compelled, by the dread of bankruptcy at home, when the loud summons of Providence called them to enter upon the widening and whitening fields ripe for the harvest, to meet the call with the complaint, that an exhausted treasury left them no means for enlarging, scarce even of sustaining, their present endeavors. Various modes have indeed been attempted, and not without some measure of success, to remedy this distressing state of affairs. Among the most promising are, perhaps, the appeals made through Sabbath schools to the younger members of the church. The Wesleyans of England, and the London Missionary Society, have both received large and efficient aid from these sources. Under the auspices of the latter body have been lately prepared a series of missionary works for the use of children. The method has the advantage of not only creating in the minds of the young habits of liberality likely to grow with their growth, but of also training up many to become themselves missionaries, dedicated with "the dew of their youth" upon them to the service of Christ among the far heathen. Amid all the worldliness of which the church must yet complain, it is yet a truth, equally gratifying and indisputable, that the standard of liberality in the Christians of the age is rising. Though, yet, far beneath the measure of the primitive disciples, it is certainly much in advance of what was seen but a few years since. Even the very deficiencies, of which the various evangelical bodies of our time complain, in the funds required for their missions, grow in part out of the rapid development and increase those missions have experienced. Some have proposed to keep down the expenditures of the church in the mission work, until a time of higher devotedness on the part of Christians shall have arrived. This course seems indefensible, whether we look to human nature or to Scripture. The souls of men are not likely to be stirred to support adequately a work, even in its present state, unless it gives signs of continued advancement. And continued advancement in the work of evangelization inevitably brings an increase of expenditure. Success is necessary to sympathy and support, and success itse.f involves growing liabilities and widening efforts. Such re

* Letter of Fuller to Ivimey, dated Kettering, April 22, 1814.

trenchment is, above all, indefensible, if we look to the Book we are commending to the heathen. Legible on the last the outermost fold of Matthew's Gospel, where hangs the very seal of the minister's commission, stands the precept," Go ye into all the world." Would the church obliterate or conceal that irksome commandment? In doing so, she must also erase the promise that accompanies it—“Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." She cannot abridge her task without renouncing her helper, and foregoing the promised presence of her Lord. Ruinous, indeed, would that economy be, which should bar out the Redeemer from his own church, as too exacting and expensive a guest. The church has abundant resources, and it needs but a higher grade of piety, and a juster sense of duty, to reach them. Systematic contributions on the part of all, of every age and of every condition, would give the funds needed, and funds so given would be abundantly blessed. Might not a literal return to the primitive rule of laying by on each Sabbath day, as God hath prospered us, largely swell the missionary revenues of the church? Frequent and small gains, in their aggregate, always exceed large sums obtained at longer intervals. The poorest might give without inconvenience, in weekly payments, a sum which in its yearly amount they would never think of contributing. The sacredness of the Sabbath, and its softening and elevating associations, might tend also to make the richer Christian more liberal than he would be if solicited amid the cares and hardening influences of the week. And, again, the principle of giving as God has prospered seems to imply a grateful acknowledgment thus to be made of mercies received since the past Sabbath, the rearing, week by week, of a new Ebenezer along the pathway of life. It is but too evident that feelings of thankfulness, like all other passive impressions, are easily effaced, and can only with difficulty be preserved in their original freshness. A deliverance received, an unexpected accession of property, the recovery from the verge of the grave of a beloved child, are all blessings likely to be more justly appreciated and more liberally acknowledged, in the devout meditations of the Sabbath immediately succeeding the bestowment of the benefit, than when we come at the year's end to review them as they are seen faintly and afar through the mists of distance. Were the periods of Christian liberality thus made more frequent, on the part of the opulent especially, large sums, again, that now go to swell the capital of an estate, and as such are never to be touched by the hand of almsgiving, would be kept, where they belong, in the place of profits, gained by the blessing of Providence, and which it would be felt are to be liberally dispensed at the command of the Father in heaven who gave them. And we doubt not that the church is yet to witness the pouring of entire fortunes into her treasury, upon the return of that primitive spirit, which of old laid the price of houses and lands at the apostle's feet.

2. A question yet remaining in some obscurity, though the course of events has thrown increasing light upon it, is, that of the best form

of missionary labor. The error once so prevalent, that civilization must precede conversion, is now well nigh exploded. Once it seemed so certain a truth, that the acute mind of Warburton adduced it as a reason, why Protestant missions had been comparatively inefficient, that they had overlooked the absolute necessity of civilization to prepare the way for the gospel.* But, in the work of commending the word of God to a heathen people, what proportion of the labor should be given to schools, what to translations, and the care of the press, and what to preaching, seems a more difficult inquiry. Reason, Scripture, and experience, all seem to require that the living preacher should be the chief and foremost instrumentality upon which the church should rely; while there are circumstances and seasons that may require the church to make large efforts and expenditures for the instruction of the young through schools, and to supply a nation of readers with Christian books; as, in yet other situations, much attention may be justly given to the instruction of a nation, emerging from barbarism, in the use of the plough, and the shuttle, and the various arts that go to adorn and enrich the Christian home. But whatever may be urged in commendation of other modes of presenting the gospel, the preaching of the word has an honor that is put upon no other instrumentality; in its having been the form of our Lord's own labors while on the earth, and in its selection by him, as the means which he commanded the church to employ, and which, in his promises, he specifically bound himself to bless. It was in its use that Christianity won its earliest and most glorious victories. Ere yet a single book of the New Testament had been written, it was by the use of preaching that the apostles had already, as their enemies alleged, "filled all Jerusalem with their doctrine." Philosophy had her lectures, given in the grove, or the garden, or the porch, to her select auditors, " fit and few," and given only for pay. She had never dreamed of bringing down the loftiest truths to an indiscriminate audience, and that without fee or reward. But by what the wise of this world deemed eminently "the foolishness of preaching," the new religion overturned their power and scattered their dreams. The church of the first century was not comparatively a church of writers, and hence the remains of primitive antiquity are scanty in amount, and often breathe a rude simplicity; but, though the writings of the new sect were few, the devout and fearless preacher was every where, and hence it was that one of the Fathers spoke soon of the Christian church as being found every

*Even yet, the error lingers in quarters where it was scarce to be expected, amid all the blaze of recent missionary experience on this subject. Bloomfield, in his Recensio Synoptica on Hebrews 5: 12, has said, "The Christian religion may be said to form a kind of science; for which very reason (and would that some who have a zeal, but not according to knowledge, would bear it in mind) civilization ought ever to precede evangelization." The Italics are his own. To us, we must say, the remark displays as little of knowledge as of zeal. The principle it asserts has been disproved in either hemisphere, and under every zone, from Greenland to Brazil, amid the Caffres and the Karens, the inhabitants of New Zealand and those of the Sandwich Islands.

where, in the city and the village, in the army, the senate, and the forum. In the growth of anti-Christian delusion and imposture, the pulpit lost its legitimate influence; and the Reformation early distinguished itself by the new impulse which it gave to preaching, not merely among the Protestant nations of Europe, but even in the bosom of the Romish church. It was preaching, carried back yet one step nearer the apostolic model, in its being grafted upon a system of itineracy, which, in the shape of Methodism, broke up the dreamy slumber of the English Established Church, and carried the ight of the gospel into the most neglected recesses of the island.

We would not diminish in the least the just claims of the press, that instrument by which such preachers as Baxter are yet uttering their message with a voice that death cannot still; nor forget the honor due to schools, for which that devoted missionary, our own Eliot, was accustomed so fervently and frequently to pray. But over the written page, the living preacher has ever this preeminent advantage. He varies his message to his varying auditory; he reaches the prejudiced who will not, and the illiterate who cannot read; he commends his errand to the heathen by the voice and the look, and all those signs of human sympathy that no literature can paint, no powers of the press transfer into written characters. Yet, beyond all this, he is himself the living imbodiment of the truth that he publishes, a speaking model of the peace which he promises, the patience that he commands, and the self-denial and the charity his religion is to produce. And beside this, he is himself, if a man of God, the partaker of that Spirit whose blessing alone can render any human efforts successful to the conversion of souls. Taught by that Spirit, he follows, which the tract cannot do, his message with his prayers, and steeps thus the seed which he scatters in the quickening dews of heaven. Over schools, the preaching of the gospel has the advantage of its aiming directly at the grand end of missions, the salvation of the nation, while the school-teacher seeks the same end circuitously, and with much consequent loss of time and labor. The preacher addresses the adult generation, in whose hands the power and character of the country lie; the teacher acts upon the young, whose present influence is circumscribed, and whose future influence we cannot safely count upon, when removed from the restraints of the academy, and flung into the midst of a heathen society which outnumbers, corrupts, and overwhelms them, just so far as their character is merely the result of education, and not the result of that renewing grace which the preacher seeks to impart to the parent, the youth, and the child, alike. Preaching is, as Francis Xavier called it," a universal good,”—that Xavier whose own influence was at once so wide and powerful, and in whose character and history there is so much for the devout Protestant to emulate; even while he may listen incredulously to the claims set up for him by a brother Jesuit, the eloquent Bourdaloue, that he preached the gospel in fiftytwo kingdoms, and over more than three thousand leagues of territory, and baptized with his own hands a million of pagans.*

* Bourdaloue, ii, 510.