concern for the surrounding Heathen with a faithful and vigilant discharge of his duties as Chaplain.

The Preacher will be forgiven this allusion to that fact; as it, at once, strikingly illustrates the advantages of regulations adapted especially to the Colonial Episcopate, and may awaken the most confident belief, that, by the Divine Help and under the Divine Blessing, the intelligent zeal brought into voluntary and successful action at Agra, now twenty years ago, and since matured by unwearied exercise at other stations and in a higher department of service, will be applied with wisdom and urbanity to the healing, confirming, and enlarging of the Communities of Christians, and to the conversion of the Heathen, in Southern India. When the Bishop of Madras shall have shewn to the Native Christians of the South, that their long-cherished attachment to Caste, in its improper and undue application, has no countenance from the Converts in the North, it may be hoped that all disaffection*,

* A considerable number of Natives professing Christianity have fallen to the Roman Catholics, in consequence of the determination no longer to allow any influence of Caste inconsistent with Christianity. Of the indulgence which that Church allows to even the Heathenism of her professed Converts, Bishop Middleton has the following pregnant notice :- "As to such converts as are made by the Church of Rome, I question whether they might not as well retain the name, with the ignorance, of Pagans. I have seen, in small buildings, that I supposed, fifty yards' distance, to be swamy-houses-" small Hindoo Temples-" the Cross being blackened and oiled like a swamy, and placed against the end of a deep niche, with lamps on each side of it. The Natives call it the Christians' Swamy: and they are right, provided the persons

who

occasioned by the present Bishop of Calcutta's most just and decisive prohibition of Caste, will die away; and that these Communities, delivered from such unchristian bondage, and established in the meekness and charity of the Gospel, will, with larger and warmer zeal, labour to gather the surrounding Heathen into the pale of the Christian Church.

In connexion with the right Government and Discipline of the Church's Missionary Labours, no other point is of equal importance to that of a DUE

PROVISION OF COMPETENT LABOURERS.

In the present efforts for the Conversion of the World, there is no reason for expecting any other course to be opened to us by the Providence of God, than that in which He was pleased to lead His Servants in the first conversion and settling of the Christian Nations. Christianity has no where sprung up of itself; nor will it ever be the spontaneous product of any soil. Revealed from heaven, the glad tidings of Salvation are to be communicated from nation to nation until the whole earth be full of the knowledge of the Lord, and these glad tidings are to be conveyed from father to son that every generation of men may fear and serve the Lord. Whoever were the instruments of conveying the

who set up such things can be called Christians. In the country through which I have travelled, these things abound." Le Bas, Vol. I. pp. 222, 223.—Swamy signifies Lord; and this name is applied to Idols, because an Idol is worshipped as a God.

Gospel to any land, it has no where obtained a permanent settlement but through the means chiefly of Native Converts; who possess advantages which no foreigner can attain, in knowledge of the language, in habits of living, in familiarity with the manners and opinions and feelings of their countrymen, and in acquaintance with the most effective means of influencing their minds. There is, consequently, that self-sustaining power in a Native Ministry, which is necessary to the permanent and extended influence of the Gospel in every country, but which Foreign Churches cannot supply. In respect both of an adequate number of Labourers, and of the means of supporting them, our hope must be steadily fixed on native re

sources.

And it is with thankfulness to Almighty God that we see good ground for cherishing this hope; for there is no fact in the History of Modern Missions more remarkable, than the manner and degree in which preparation is making, under the guidance of His good Providence, for the establishment everywhere of a Native Ministry. Schools had from the first been connected with the older Missions: the labours of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and those of the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had always been, in part, directed to the rising generation; but these labours were generally limited to the children of Converts. A wider field has been

insensibly, and in some respects undesignedly, opened of later years.

The Missionaries who led the way in the more recent efforts among the Heathen went out under a prevailing feeling that their one and almost-exclusive object was to preach the Gospel. The education of Heathen Children seems not to have entered into their estimate of the means which might be profitably employed. But the apathy, fickleness, levity, superstition, and sensuality of the Adult Heathen so discouraged, in many instances, the hearts of the Labourers, that they felt relief only in the hope that God might be pleased to bless their endeavours among the children of those Heathens.

So little, indeed, had this course of labour entered into calculation, that doubts arose, in some quarters, whether the Societies at home would not consider such occupation of the time of Missionaries as too remote and contingent in its prospect of benefit, to justify them in entering thereon; and the Preacher well remembers a case in which a company of Missionaries, in utter despair of accomplishing any good work with the Adults around them, who were yet willing from the hope of secular advantages to entrust to them their children, pleaded earnestly with the Society at home that they might be permitted to devote their time to such children: he well remembers, too, the reluctance with which this request was granted: yet

the wisdom of the measure now commends itself to all competent judges; and has so engaged the zeal of different bodies, that there are not fewer, according to recent Returns, than nearly One Hundred and Twenty Thousand Children of Heathens, or of those who were but lately Heathens, receiving education in Protestant Missions.

Missionaries were thus providentially led to lay the foundations of Christianity among the Heathen deep and wide; and were made content to labour that others might enter into their labours. The superstructure began, indeed, to rise before their own eyes; and they were encouraged to hope, that it had pleased God to guide them in a way which they had not known, to the adoption of a System better adapted than any other to the ultimate establishment of the Gospel in the nations of the earth. They found, as might be expected, whereever education was pursued on a considerable scale and on Christian principles, that some Children of the Heathen were not only distinguished from the rest by their mental powers, but in not a few instances by the influence of Divine Grace on their hearts. Classes of such promising Children were formed; and special instruction was given to them, with the view of training them up to become Schoolmasters, Readers, and Catechists to their countrymen. The most important aid has been derived from these Seminaries; and encouragement has been given, by the promising character and