God's government of the world hitherto, that our population will advance with rapidity, even though it should be checked by licentiousness. We may estimate that, in such circumstances, our numbers will be fortyfive, instead of fifty millions, at the end of fifty years; an hundred and fifty, instead of two hundred millions in fifty years more; and five hundred, instead of one thousand millions, in one hundred and seventy years from the present time. The wickedness of the people, left almost without restraint from counteracting example, would increase at such a fearful rate, that, by the period last mentioned, it would greatly have retarded the progress of population; and much beyond that period, any increase of numbers would be slow and doubtful.

"Here then, we have five hundred millions of human beings, all living, (with exceptions too small to be taken into the account,) according to the maxim, Let us eat and drink, før to-morrow we die.

What would be the number of theatres and other receptacles of vice to amuse and gratify such a population? What the number of jails and penitentiaries, of police officers and armed guards, to coerce and restrain so vast a multitude, who would have no restraining principle in their own bosoms? Atheists may talk about liberty; but we know, that there can never be a truly free government, without an intelligent and conscientious subjection to law; and where there is no sense of accountability to God, there can be no respect for the order of society, or the rights of men.

"Populous heathen nations, and nominally Christian nations that have sunk nearly to the level of heathenism, are indeed without any restraining influence of true religion; and they are able, by means of racks, dungeons, and armies, of spies, guards, and officers, to preserve some kind of public order. The people are prepared for this, having been transformed into beasts of burden, by the long influence of superstition, and the domination of privileged orders. But, if the people of America speaking the English language should lose nearly all the religious restraint which now exerts so salutary an influence in our land, they will be a very different sort of men from the Chinese, or the inhabitants of Turkey, or Spain. All determined to gratify themselves, and none willing to submit to others; all having arms in their hands, and refusing to surrender them,-wickedness and violence will reign with tremendous and indomitable energy.

"The Sabbath will have ceased to shed its benign and holy radiance upon the land; for when the number of religious persons shall have dwindled to a very small fraction of the community, it will be impossible to preserve the Sabbath, except as a day of thoughtless festivity and noisy mirth,-and preeminently a day of sin. Then God will hide his face from an erring and self-destroying people; and dense and angry clouds, the precursors of his vengeance, will gather from every quarter of the horizon. One cry of violence and blasphemy will ascend like the cry of Sodom, from all the dwellers between the two oceans, and between the gulf of Mexico and the northern sea. No extraordinary instruments of divine wrath need be furnished. The remorseless cravings of unsatisfied desire, the aggressions and resistance, the insults and revenge, the cruelty and perfidy, the fraud and malice, pervading all ranks and classes of men, will supply more than a sufficient number of public executioners.

VOL. XI.-NO. XLI.

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"Who, that has not a heart of adamant, can, withont shuddering, regard such a day as probable? Who, that really expects such a day, but must wish to leave no posterity of his own, to mingle in the horrid strife-to become either tyrants or slaves, oppressors or victims ;-all victims, indeed, to their own follies and crimes?

"Yet this is the very state of things which multitudes among us are laboring to produce. They do not see the whole effect of what they would gladly accomplish; but they most heartily desire that the time should arrive, when the Sabbath shall be universally regarded as an exploded superstition, and when there shall be no concentrated public opinion to pass censure even upon the most odious vices.

"Not only is such a state of things desired and aimed at by multitudes, but it is precisely such an issue as the unresisted depravity of man will speedily terminate in. It is altogether a practical matter; and will be the sad history of this country, unless the good, and the public spirited, and the pious of the present and succeeding generations, acting under the great Captain of salvation, avert so awful a calamity.

"The remaining supposition is, that the relative power of religion will increase, till, before the expiration of the longest period here mentioned, opposition shall gradually have died away; and all the happy millions of this continent shall live together as brethren, adoring their Creator and Redeemer, and lending a cheerful influence to every good design. Then will be a day of glory, such as the world has never yet witnessed. As the sun rises on a Sabbath morning, and travels westward from Newfoundland to the Oregon, he will behold the countless millions assembling, as if by a common impulse, in the temples with which every valley, mountain, and plain will be adorned. The morning psalm and evening anthem will commence with the multitude on the Atlantic coast, be sustained by the loud chorus of ten thousand times ten thousand in the valley of the Mississippi, and prolonged by the thousands of thousands on the shores of the Pacific. Throughout this wide expanse, not a dissonant voice will be heard. If, unhappily, there should be here and there an individual whose heart is not in unison with this divine employment, he will choose to be silent. Then the tabernacle of God will be with men. Then will it be seen and known to the universe, what the religion of the Bible can do, even on this side of the grave, for a penitent, restored, and rejoicing world. But while contemplating such a display of glory and happiness on earth, we are not to forget that this illustrious exhibition of divine power and love would derive nearly all its interest from the fact, that these countless millions were in a process of rapid transmission from earth to heaven.

"Is it asked, What has this subject to do with the meeting of a foreign missionary society? Much, in various respects. It is perfectly clear to the mind of a contemplative Christian, that efforts made in this country to send the gospel to distant heathen, are as sure to bring permanent and spiritual blessings to ourselves, as any evangelical efforts that can be made. And, if missions to the heathen were to receive no future support from America, what would this prove, but that Christian benevolence was at so low an ebb among us; that there was so little of primitive zeal or apostolic enterprise to be found; that

nothing great, and noble, and effectual, in the way of charitable effort, could ever hereafter be expected from this people? If our domestic missionary societies are to be sustained, they must be sustained by Christian benevolence: but, wherever this divine principle exists, it will seek access to the heathen; and where access is once gained, it will not be relinquished. In a thousand ways, the beneficial influence of sending the gospel abroad, is felt in our religious prosperity at home. If, through the apathy of Christians in regard to the condition of the heathen, it should be necessary first to curtail and then to withdraw our foreign operations, sad would be that hour, and of most disastrous influence upon all our domestic institutions.

"Be it known, then, and felt by us all, that there is no way in which we can so powerfully aid the cause of God in our own land, as by doubling and quadrupling our sacrifices for the salvation of distant pagans.

"These considerations are not to be set aside as a theoretical discussion. We, and our associates and friends throughout the country, are to have an agency in fixing the destiny of the generations to come; and in fixing their destiny by what we shall do, or neglect to do, in this very matter of sending the gospel to the heathen. Christians in the United States have a character to sustain, or to lose. They are to receive the approbation of posterity for perseverance in well-doing; or to be sentenced to public reprobation as betrayers of high trusts. They are to be rewarded as benefactors of their race, or to share the doom of the servant who hid his lord's money in a napkin. There is no avoiding this responsibility. They cannot hide themselves in dishonorable graves, in such a manner as to escape reproach, if they now raise the craven cry of surrender, instead of anticipating the shout of victory and triumph.

"When John Carver and his associates landed at Plymouth, and afterwards John Winthrop and his associates arrived at Charlestown, they might have doubted, on some accounts, whether their names would be known to posterity. They labored, however, for the good of mankind, and laid foundations with a distinct and special and declared regard to the benefit of future times. Their posterity remember them with inexpressible gratitude; and their names will receive new tributes of admiration with every succeeding age.

"The moral enterprises of the present day are novel,—if not in their character and principle, yet in their combination and effect. They will be thoroughly examined hereafter, and the hundreds of millions of Americans will, in the next century, declare the result. We may now imagine these millions convened, as in some vast amphitheatre, and directing their anxious and concentrated gaze upon us. Happy will it be for our country and the world, if they can then exclaim, These were the men of the nineteenth century, who came to the help of the Lord against the mighty ;-these friends and patrons of missionary and Bible institutions; these supporters of a press truly free, which, by its salutary issues, emancipated the nations from the thraldom of sin;these defenders of the Sabbath and all its holy influences;-these are the men who counted the cost of denying themselves and cheerfully made the sacrifice of throwing all their powers and resources into an effort for the world's deliverance. God smiled upon their persevering

and united labors, acknowledged them as his friends and servants, and we now hail them as benefactors of our happy millions, and of thousands of millions yet unborn.'

"In words like these may we imagine that our humble instrumentality will be commemorated, if we are faithful to our engagements. But should we become weary of our work and relinquish it; should its difficulty dishearten us, and the confused shouts of the enemy terrify us; should we say, that these Anakims are too tall for us to encounter, and their fortifications are too strong for us to assail; and we must leave to better men and after times the glory of such high achievements should we fold our hands and say, that another age of darkness must intervene before the dawn of the millennial day shall rise; —that we have been beguiled by a meteor, which we took to be the morning star ascending on high; and that we must remit our efforts, and make up our minds that our children and our children's children, for centuries to come, are to grind in the vast prison-house which is preparing for their reception :-if these are to be our conclusions, and these the depths to which our high hopes have fallen, let no man write our epitaph. The sooner we are forgotten, the better. If it were possible, let every recorded trace of the religious exertions of the present day be blotted out, so that the knowledge of our disastrous failure may not discourage the enterprise of some future age. But it will not be possible; for the enemy will preserve our sanguine predictions and the memory of our gigantic plans, to grace his triumph, and as a standing exhibition of a design which joined all that was splendid and glorious in anticipation to all that was feeble and abortive in execution. In such a melancholy termination of our efforts, some indignant prophet of the Lord, in that retirement to which the prevailing wickedness shall have consigned him, will utter his complaint against us. 'These are the men,' he will say, to whose energy and fidelity God committed the condition of their posterity. The charge fell from their feeble hands. They began to build, but were not able to finish, because they were not willing to labor. They put their hands to the plough, but looked back, and were not fit for the kingdom of heaven.' "If we would avoid this catastrophe, more deplorable than words can describe, we must feel deeply and constantly, that without Christ we can do nothing; and that from him must proceed,

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'Our high endeavor, and our glad success,

Our strength to suffer, and our will to serve.'

"To him must we look habitually, as the Hope of Israel, as the Redeemer of his chosen people, as King of kings and Lord of lords. Knowing his power and willingness to save, we must distrust ourselves only; and, in such a temper, we must apply to him to call forth more zeal and devotedness, and to place more consecrated talent in requisition.

The professed friends of Christ,-those who are charitably regarded as his real friends, must, as a body, show more zeal and selfdenial in his cause, or it cannot advance: that is, it cannot advance according to any known method of the divine administration.

"This is a very solemn concern. It is a painful truth, but thou

sands of facts prove it to be a truth unquestionable, that the mass of those who are regarded as the real friends of Christ, are in no degree awake to the responsibility of their situation. They have but a very indistinct apprehension of what they are able to do-of what they ought to do of what the world is losing by their neglect; and the very imperfect decisions of their minds are but slowly and partially executed by the performances of their hands.

"This is the more to be lamented, as we are now at the very harvest time of the world. The individual who annually gives his few dollars or his few cents, puts tracts and Bibles into the hands of distant heathens immediately; or places heathen children in a missionary school; or aids in training up native preachers to itinerate and proclaim the gospel among their countrymen.

"As to consecrated talent, never was there such a call to bring it into exercise; never such a reward as it now has to offer to a benevolent heart. The man whose labors contribute in any material degree, to raise up, and purify, and ennoble the future millions of America, will do more for himself, as aiming to exert a salutary influence, (even if his name should never be known to his grateful fellow men,) than has ever yet been done for the most successful aspirant, by all that the world calls fame.

"The preacher, who sends abroad a sermon full of great and striking thoughts, that command the attention of the religious world, and make their way through a thousand channels to successive ages;-the sacred bard, who composes a hymn that shall be stereotyped a century hence, on the other side of the Rocky Mountains, and printed on the same page with Cowper's O for a closer walk with God,' or the 'Martyrs Glorified,' of Watts ;—the writer, who shall print a warm and stirring treatise on practical religion, which shall stand by the side of the Saint's Rest, in the library of every family, when our country shall have become thoroughly and consistently Christian ;—the editor of a periodical, or the agent of any of our religious charities, who shall indite a paragraph, able to move the hearts of men to great and noble deeds, and to secure for itself a permanent existence among the elements of thought and action the man who shall do any one of these things, or any thing of a similar character, will exert an efficient influence over more minds than have ever yet heard the name of Homer or Cicero ; and will cheer more hearts, during a single generation, than have ever yet responded to the calls of the mightiest genius. To aid, even in a feeble and indirect manner, the work of bringing thousands of millions to glory and virtue, to heaven and to God, is to reach an exalted rank among those whom their Saviour will honor as the instruments of his divine beneficence."

In the following winter, he was compelled to embark for Cuba, on account of his health. But finding himself rapidly failing, he made early arrangements to return again to the north. He came as far as Charleston, S. C., where on the tenth of May, 1831, he died in a most triumphant and glorious manner, fully exemplifying, in his