our God. Among the things which are revealed, and which belong to us and our children, none is plainer, none more imperative, none more important, than that we go forward as fast as possible with the work of propagating the gospel; and to cease from, or to be at all hindered in this work, because a prophetic theory is against it, is to hearken unto man more than unto God.

The objections from expense are not less repulsive. They imply either that the silver and gold of the earth do not belong to God; or that when he created the precious metals he did not know how much of them he should need for the accomplishment of his ends, or else could not create enough; or that when he made us his stewards he put himself out of ownership, so that we were no longer to regard his interest in the use of property; or that he has given us particular instruction against liberal appropriations for the spread of the gospel, and against self-denial and sacrifices of ease and pleasure for Christ's sake; or, finally, that all these great and shameless impieties are facts.

There is in these objections an effrontery which entitles them to indignant resentment. They are made in the face of existing facts, by which they are reproved of glaring hypocrisy. While it is alleged that our missions are too expensive to admit of further advancement, there are not a few members in our churches with more wealth already in possession than can well belong to any one without danger to his soul, who are yet proceeding on to lay up treasures upon treasures, to themselves; adding house to house, and field to field, and investment to investment, and the passion for accumulation enlarged and strengthened by every new accession. And of the rest, there is only here one, and there another, who restrict themselves of any indulgence for the gospel's sake! What respect should be paid to objections on the score of expense, while self-denial is so great a stranger amongst the professed disciples of the cross?

And, after all, what is the truth as to the cost of missions? As a very remarkable illustration on this point, a statement shall be repeated from the Day Spring, with a few verbal changes, concerning the mission at the Sandwich Islands. The pecuniary expense of that mission during twenty-three years has but a little exceeded half a million of dollars. And what has been the result? The language has been reduced to writing; a variety of religious works with the entire Bible have been translated and printed in it, and circulated in great numbers; forty-two thousand persons have been taught to read them; twenty-two churches have been organized, to which twentyfive thousand natives have been admitted; seminaries for training teachers have been established; Christian marriage has been introduced in place of former unspeakable licentiousness; intemperance has been nearly banished; and morality and social improvement have been advanced among the rulers and people; a written constitution and laws have been introduced; and the nation, as it were, a new

created people has recently taken rank among the great nations of the civilized world:- all for half a million. The result not only great, but good, and only good to all concerned. There is no painful drawback.

What is the cost of other things, and such as wise men approve ? The small army of the United States cost last year four millions, nearly eight times as much as this mission from the beginning; and what better results are there to be shewn for it? The original cost of every one of our ships of the line, with one year's expense in service, exceeds what has been spent on this mission. France has expended one hundred and twenty millions, and twenty thousand lives in conquering and holding Algiers; almost two hundred and forty times as much in money, beside the lives, us the entire cost of this mission, and yet what good, to the conquerors or the conquered, has come of it? Christian missions cannot be carried on without pecuniary means. Progress in them will increase the demand for money as well as men. But they are gainful, beyond calculation on the whole. Their reflex influences, to say nothing of their direct results, are more than a hundred fold recompense; and to object to them, because of what they cost, is the madness not only of a rebellion against God, but of sinning against our own richest mercies.

Nor can the objections from domestic exigency better endure examination. They are wholly without force, unless they assume, either that the world has no claim while home has any want unsupplied; or that the wants of home and the world cannot both be met at once; or at least that they cannot be as well met, by receiving simultaneous attention; and if they do involve these assumptions, or either of them, they proclaim their own falsity, and confute themselves. For what is more contrary to truth than that the church is not a debtor to the world till all within her own pale and neighborhood is as the garden of God, or needs no improvement? And not less erroneous are the other positions, that either the world or home must be neglected; that their interests are conflicting; and that if Foreign Missions advance, it must be by exhausting or limiting the resources needed for domestic wants. The work of human salvation is one-the work of God-on whose resources, not ours, it depends; and its parts are so related that it can be neglected no where without injury to the whole, and advanced no where without giving an impulse of new life and strength to the whole so that contributions to missions wisely made, are in effect contributions to our own churches; nor is it to be questioned that these churches are, at this moment, more benefitted and blessed by means of what they have given for evangelizing the heathen, than they would have been by appropriating it directly to themselves. So preposterous is it to set the claims of home in collision with those of the world, or to imagine that the former will be interfered with by discharging the latter.

It is indeed, wise and requisite, and comformable to scripture precedent, to give present attention to certain portions of the great field rather than others; and among the different localities taken under culture to prefer some one or more, far before the rest; and accordingly, it cannot well be questioned that this country at the present time, should have a very uncommon measure of regard, especially from the American Branch of the Church. The importance of its thorough evangelization is probably overrated by no one. To the soundness of the views, which have been expressed on this subject, with so much earnestness and force, by men of great perspicacity on both sides of the ocean, there can scarcely be a dissenting judgment. So far as can now be seen, all probability and likelihood will fail, or the moral condition of these United States is to decide that of the world. But it is not a logical consequence from this, that we should come to a pause or retard our movements, in the work of Foreign Missions. Our people, whatever they are destined to become, do not yet amount to a fiftieth part of mankind; and it is neither love to the souls of men, nor love to Christ, nor a wise economy, that on a calculation of what a small fraction of the race may grow to in a century or more, will leave the great mass till then, to proceed on to destruction through the third and fourth generations, while the means of evangelizing the whole, are at hand; and while, too, the fraction itself would be better attended to, if the whole were in no way or measure neglected. Never let it be overlooked that the spirit of evangelism is essentially the spirit of foreign missions. In its very nature it is spontaneously and illimitably egressive. It cannot endure confinement. Its irrepressible tendency is to be abroad in all the earth to its utmost bounds, and in all the isles of the sea, wherever man, the redeemed sinner dwells. To restrain is to enervate and oppress it. It will not, cannot neglect home if it be sent away, but if it go not away, it will be as an invalid within doors, rather to be nursed than to diffuse life and strength. What powerful teaching did our Lord employ to enforce this truth; and what is better corroborated by reflection, observation and experience? While, therefore, we institute comparisons between our land and others, our people and others; and while America in its perspective greatness and power rises in our thought above all the rest of the globe, let us take heed lest a selfish nationality, or pride, or carnal reasoning so blind us to the true genius of evangelism, that we be found opposing ourselves to the plans and counsels of Infinite Love. Nor should we think it needless to qualify our confidence as to the coming fortunes of this or any other nation. We do not certainly know that the world's end, will not come, ere our anticipated importance as a people can be realized. Or, if that should not be, and if our national advancement and influence be not impeded, we are not sure that God judges as we do, in respect of our eligibility, as the people by whom the world is to be saved. As he has often done before, may he not in this matter again disappoint human expectation; and may not the world's enlargement and deliverance arise from an

other place, which by its comparative obscurity may render the Hand of God more conspicuous.

In conclusion, then, it remaineth, Fathers, Brethren and Friends, that we gird up the loins of our mind, and strengthen ourselves in God for the fulfilment of that glorious work, in reference to which we have now come together. Better were it for us to die, than to be at a stand in our undertaking. That must not be, until God repent of having determined to save the world. He hath prescribed and commanded our race; let us hold on in it till he himself arrest us, even to the end, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth towards those things which are before. The race to an unbelieving heart, cannot but seem impracticable and preposterous; but it hath been set before us by Him, who calleth for things that are not, and they come, and who, has also guarantied our success, by his promise, oath, death, resurrection and enthronement in Heaven. By these, we know that we are not running in vain. Let increasing progress then be our law, as demanded by those great principles and truths of the gospel, on which missions rest their plea and warrant; by the great precept, "go ye into all the world" by the long ages of neglect, which this high behest of Heaven hath hitherto received; by the slowness of our own past movements; by the strong encouragement we have in the Divine blessing on our churches and missions, and in the existing state of the world; by the cause we have to hope the future course of Christianity on earth, is to be wonderfully accelerated; by the unspeakable dangers in such circumstances as ours, of any other than this onward way; and by those relations of profound and awful interest, in which our missionary operations have placed us, with the hosts of darkness. Let us turn objections into arguments. Let us demand of those who would dishearten us by their prophetic expositions, if they would by their theories, make void the grace and command of God. Let us tell them who would make missions too expensive, of the resources of their Almighty author, and of their own bad stewardship, and of the cost of other things, and of the countless gains of missions, both to the world and the Church. Let us reply to those who plead against us, as opposing domestic interests, that our Heavenly Father can take care of the world and home at once, and that it is home's honor and happiness, as well as duty, not to confine its influences of "saving health," within its own narrow limits, but to expand and spread them out to the ends of the earth. Let all straitness and restraint be insufferable to us. If required to enlarge our plans, let us praise God for this and wrestle with Him by prayer, and with his people by doctrine and remonstrance and entreaty, for the means of enlargement, until they come. If new openings present themselves, every time we survey the field, let us praise God for this; yea, if a new world suddenly open itself to us, for this also, let us praise God; and farther, if the Spirit be poured out at all our stations, so as to demand a univer

sal movement, on the part of the Church, equal to that of the primitive times, still let us praise God with all our strength, and cry to him day and night, and give him no rest, until the demand be met, and the Church look forth again as in the day of her espousals, beautiful as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners, and become an eternal excellency, the joy of the whole earth, having by the Divine blessing on her influence, recovered the human race from the curse of evil, and united it through Christ to the society of the Holy and the Blessed.