tual improvement?

What is it that breaks

down the impassable barriers of caste, and places men on the common ground of their respective merits and exertions? My brethren, it is the religion of Christ that has done all this. This religion proposes its blessings especially to the lowly-raises, improves, illuminates, emancipates, restores the poor and outcast, and opens before them the career of useful diligence and honourable exertion. And yet, whilst it does all this, it teaches them the duties of humility and cheerful subjection to authority. No voice but that of the Christian apostle, ever addressed to the body of mankind such words as these, Be subject to principalities and powers, obey magistrates, be ready to every good work, speak evil of no man, be no brawlers, but gentle, shewing all meekness to all men.

3. And what, again, has instituted all the charitable designs for the relief of human wretchedness, which are multiplied around us, but the merciful religion of Christ? What has founded our hospitals, opened our dispensaries, formed our unnumbered societies for bettering the condition of the poor, and aiding them under the various calamities to which our nature is exposed? What is it that framed the various wise and humane systems which provide for the sick and indigent, but Chris

tianity? What is it that founded so many thousand institutions for the religious education of the poor? What has made the duties of humanity and benevolence the popular and habitual topic of anxiety and effort? What planted in London the three hundred charitable institutions which are now walking through the haunts of vice and misery, as angels of peace, scattering blessings wherever they go?

4. Again, what has encircled age with reverence in every rank and condition of society? What has inspired for the hoary head and declining years that respect and gratitude, which heathenism knew so little of, as a pervading principle of social life? What has opened in human intercourse those copious sources of tenderness, the love and piety of children to their aged and infirm Christian relatives and parents?

5. Further, what has given to man one day in seven, for repose from toil, for the cultivation of his intellectual and spiritual being, for repairing the decays which his exhausted powers, after six days of labour, require? For connecting man with his God, and preparing him for eternity?

6. Once more, what has infused into Christian legislators and princes, the temper of equity and mercy? Christianity meddles not, indeed,

with the particular form of human governments, nor does it interfere with any acknowledged and long-established authority; but it teaches governors of every class the unbending rules of justice and truth. Christian governments are, for the most part, moulded by the principles of our holy religion. A mild, paternal spirit of legislation has taken the place of brute force and capricious violence. Governments are now acting for the good of the governed, and not for the pleasure of a despot. The most arbitrary Christian states are controlled by religion. Under the heathen governments there was neither internal tranquillity nor external peace. They were continually agitated and distracted within by popular commotions and sanguinary convulsions, or exposed without to unnecessary and inexpiable wars. And in their declines they were torn to pieces by such dreadful massacres and proscriptions, as cannot be recited without horror. Christianity has made princes the fathers of their people. Even in the dispensation of punishment for crime, the severity of the law has been gradually mitigated. Capital punishment is not now inflicted, as under the heathen governments, for the slightest offences; nor is it inflicted in the most despotic Christian states, suddenly, upon the bare order of the sovereign, without a

formal trial, conviction, sentence, and warrant of execution.

7. Further, the Christian religion has conferred upon her subjects the blessing of equal distributive justice in the administration of courts of law. The civil and criminal jurisprudence of the state, that great bulwark of liberty, that most powerful protector of the rights and immunities, the persons and property of the subject-was among the heathen far removed from that degree of purity which prevails in Christian lands. In Rome, especially in the later periods of the republic, the courts of justice were one continued scene of the most open and undisguised iniquity, venality, partiality, and corruption; so that it was hardly possible for the poor man to obtain redress for the most cruel injuries, or for a rich man to be brought to punishment for the most atrocious crimes.

But now the spirit of Christianity has been so interwoven with the texture of governments, that all ranks are placed under the equal protection of the laws; and in our own country, and the other states where our religion obtains in its greatest purity, the evenhanded distribution of justice, the security of person and property, the enjoyment of a high degree of civil and religious liberty, the freedom from

vexatious and unequal imposts, the open career presented for virtue and talent, the repose and tranquillity of private life-our towns and castles dismantled through long ages of internal peace-all proclaim the beneficial effects of the doctrine which has produced them.

8. Even the most distant provinces of the Christian commonwealths feel the salutary influence of the vital principles of religious legislation at home. Under the Roman sway, the provinces were the spoil of petty tyrants. Every governor was an oppressor and a scourge. The privileges enjoyed at the seat of the empire, were violated with impunity in its distant regions. Christianity diffuses its benefits. Our provincial governors carry to remote climes the freedom, the justice, the institutions, the tranquillity, the security for persons and property, of the parent state. The Hindoo acknowledges the difference between a Mahometan and Christian conquest. It was the glory of one governor-general of India to abolish infanticide in Bengal; it was the glory of another to plant the seeds of moral and religious culture; it will be the glory, we trust, of a third, to put an end to the immolation of widows, and similar atrocities of the heathen nations subjected to our sway. In the mean time, the

12 The Marquesses Wellesley and Hastings.