ceiver; a Non-doer, who thinks, nevertheless, that practical religion is his great characteristic. Let us turn to another description of Non-doers. Severus is also, as he thinks, a great friend to practical religion, which consists, as he often says, in keeping himself unspotted from the world. Severus often declaims against all places of public entertainment, and especially against the theatre; and he wonders how some persons, who seem to him to understand the doctrines of the Gospel, can allow themselves to go so much into the world. He dislikes pomp and shew, as well as frivolity and dissipation; he is a frequenter of the chapel, and the familiar friend only of those whom he deems to be very strict and serious like himself. Severus, if this were all, might be pronounced a pious and sterling Christian; but there is another side on which he must be viewed: he is by no means so self-denying in some of his habits as you would infer from the strictness with which he judges others. He is late in bed, rather self-indulgent at the table, sharp towards his servants, capricious in the management of his children, and so often in an ill-humour, that he is secretly disliked by most of those who are much in his house. He has little kindness, and still less generosity; he is unamiable, unaccommodating and suspicious. When you view him at a little distance, he appears a most serious character, you approach him with awe, and expect, if admitted into his house, to witness a saintlike calmness and beneficence, and to behold the manners of a most strict disciple of Christ; but after the residence of a few days you discover, that instead of peace and love; all is discord and confusion. He complains of the depravity of man, and is completely orthodox in this doctrine of our religion, but of his own peculiar kind of depravity he is little conscious. He laments his iniquity in general, and judges of others by the degree in which they affirm themselves to be miserable sinners, but he has made little progress in his own victory over himself. He is very apt to be angry, and if you seem to charge him with any particular fault, then his lip quivers, his eyes begin to dart fire, or, perhaps, he turns away with disdain and disgust; for he assumes that you are prejudiced against the Gospel, and against him, on account of his being so strict a professor of it. In truth, there is much pride within his heart. He also is a Non-doer of another sort. There are, moreover, some very good judges, and even critics in all matters of religion, men who are sober thinkers and decent livers, who swell the sect of the Non-doers. Those will doubtless concur in all that has now been said. They com.plain of the characters just described, and of the common want of practical religion. The misfortune is, that they mistake their own general approbation of what is right for the actual practice of it: like the Pharisees, "they say and do not." Their religion is in word and in tongue, not in deed and in truth. Are there not ladies of this class, who, when they are talking around the tea-table, are liberal in their praise of very pious persons; who are orthodox in their creed, and somewhat religious in the general cast of their conversation; to whom, nevertheless, if you were to put that question, "What do ye more than others?" they would have little answer to make? They are about as good tempered as people of the world; about as beneficent; about as strict and self-denying. They differ only in this small particular, that they, perhaps, censure the common kind of dissipation a little more, and give into it a little less. The persons of whom I now speak, do not keep the heart with all diligence; they do not take any great heed not to offend with their tongue; they have not the law of kindness ever on their lips; they have not considered how pure and holy are those principles, how large and extensive that benevolence, how patient, useful, and selfdenying, that whole course of life, to which we are called by the Gospel. They also are Non-doers, though they know it not. ther they fulfil, I mean, the minor and domestic duties, to many of which they are just as solemnly pledged as to the ministerial work itself. Every relative duty of life demands its share of our attention. Very few of us are under a temptation to pass the whole day in listlessness. Our sin consists, for the most part, in our inadequate attention to some of the duties which Providence has set before us, and in our preference of a favourite pursuit. And now, lastly, let me ask the reader, whoever he may be, whether he is not of the sect of the Nondoers, though possibly not a member of any of the subdivisions which I have described. We all deceive ourselves in this respect. We do something possibly useful, but by no means proportionate to our abilities and opportunities. We neglect the duty of the hour, in order to apply ourselves to what we say is good, but is not, at present, our most proper work. We select the employments which are most agreeable and light. We, perhaps, exer- But we must not push our criticise the body when we should be cisms too far. We may refine and girding up the loins of the mind. analyze too much. We may also bring We gratify our imagination when into too great suspicion many a real, we should be cultivating our reason. though imperfect, Christian, by our We saunter when we should read. severity of remark. Let it, thereWe read when we should write. fore, be understood that the object We write when we should apply of this paper has been not to deliourselves to some still more self-neate living characters, but to guard denying task. Even ministers of the Gospel, eagerly occupied in the work of evangelizing the world, are not exempt from the necessity of examining whether they are in any degree of the Non-doing sect, whe The act, indeed, of teaching. others, is often a gratification both to our vanity and indolence. It spares us the task of labouring like common men, erects us into censors, and may be the means of preventing our communing with our own hearts; and we who write, as well as those who preach, are exposed to danger of this sort. against approaches to the faults MISCELLANEOUS. To the Editor of the Christian Observer. Ir is an old remark, that the nearer any human work approaches to perfection, the more desirable it becomes, that its few remaining faults should be corrected. Let this be my apology, for presuming to point out a defect in the late Dr. Paley's Evidences of Christianity. In the second volume of that work p. 246, he has occasion to quote a pretty long passage from Crantz's History of Greenland; of which book he gives us the title at full length. But in the marginal reference for vol. ij. we ought to read vol. j. Had this, however, been the whole mistake, I should have taken it to be a fault of the press, and thought no more about it. But in the body of the work, where the author quotes the passage in question, it is asserted, that the historian, in the conclusion of his narrative, could find place for no reflections more encouraging than those which he inserts. Now, how can a passage be said to occur at the conclusion of a historian's narrative, when it is not only at some distance from the end of the first volume, but when there is an entire second volume to come? This is not a trivial fault, or one of small consequence. How it bears upon the doctor's argument shall be mentioned hereafter. But it will be evident to every careful reader, that it is calculated to injure a highly respectable body of Christians, by giving an erroneous and disparaging idea of that branch of their labours, in which they are allowed to have been the most successful. That reader must be ignorant indeed who never heard of the missionary labours of the United Brethren, or Moravians, and that they have had a reasonable share of success. Still I may presume, that thousands of readers of Dr. Paley's work, never heard their mission in Greenland particularly specified, before they met with the doctor's quotation from the printed history. Now, what must all those readers infer from that passage? What can they infer, but that the United Brethren, after labouring for several years in Greenland, with exemplary zeal, fortitude, and patience, were under the neces sity of abandoning the attempt in despair? Yet how very different is the matter of fact? A few years after the period, to which the paragraph quoted by Dr. Paley refers, the conversion of Greenlanders, by means of the United Brethren, commenced. Already in the first volume of the history, the conversion of several individuals is related; and the work of conversion, thus begun, continues improving throughout the whole narrative of the second volume, which ends with a period at which two flourishing congrega-. tions of believing Greenlanders had been settled by the Brethren. The work, indeed, continues at thisday to be accompanied with God's blessing; and there are at present three congregations of Christians, consisting of about 300 souls each, gathered from the Greenland nation; so that, besides those who have departed this life, nearly a thousand living Greenlanders have been brought to the saving knowledge of the Gospel, through the endeavours of the Brethren. Nay, by the united attempts of the Brethren and the Danish Lutheran missionaries, the whole western coast of Greenland, formerly pagan, may now be considered as christianized; the majority of the inhabitants being no longer heathen. And is that a trifling error, which tends to throw a veil of concealment over facts so consoling to all those, who are praying with the earnestness of sincerity to our Father in heaven, "Thy kingdom come?" The question now arises, does not this change of circumstances render the whole quotation useless? Or, in other words, had Dr. Paley not mistaken the matter, would he have introduced the subject of Greenland at all? What he would have done, I will not pretend to divine; that he might still have introduced it, and introduced it with increased advantage to his argument, I will venture to assert, and will now proceed to shew. The nature of Dr. Paley's argument will best appear from his own words: "From the widely disproportionate effects, which attend the preaching of modern missionaries of Christianity, compared with what followed the ministry of Christ and his apostles, under circumstances either alike, or not so unlike as to account for the difference, a conclusion is fairly drawn, in support of what our histories deliver concerning them, viz. that they possessed means of conviction, which we have not; that they had proofs to appeal to, which we want Upon this argument, the quotation from the History of Greenland, in its present mistaken state, bears thus: The zeal and patience of the Moravian missionaries in Greenland have never been surpassed, perhaps never equalled in modern times; yet with all their efforts, they effected, by their own confession, nothing. The apostles, by one discourse, converted three thousand. Therefore, the latter possessed means vastly superior to those of the for mer. I will now state the result of the same quotation, as it ought to have stood; and then appeal to every candid reader, whether the doctor's argument does not rather gain than lose by the change. The zeal and patience of the Moravian missionaries have never been surpassed, perhaps never equal led in modern times. And accordingly, their success is well known to have been superior to that of most other protestant missionaries, as will farther appear to all who will take the trouble to read the second volume of Crantz's History of Greenland. Yet, even they, with difficulty, in the space of nearly four score years, converted about one half of the number whom the apostles converted with ease in the lapse of one day. Can any man then doubt, that the latter possessed means of conviction which the former had not; that the one had proofs to appeal to which the others wanted? an accurate comparison between the best modern missionary endeavours and the preaching of the apostles: a comparison, which, being carried almost to the precision of calculation, establishes the advantage on the part of the apostles with all the evidence and strength of demonstration. It is difficult for me to dismiss this subject, without indulging in one farther inquiry: and that is, by what fatality a mistake of this nature could possibly be committed? This question I find it impossible to answer, without fixing disingenuousness, or a degree of negligence little short of criminality, somewhere. It will give me singular pleasure, if any of your readers can help me to an explanation of the phenomenon, free from a necessity so painful to Christian charity. Were Dr. Paley an ordinary writer, or had he been a man of ordinary information, I should conclude at once, that he never read the History of Greenland at all; but that, chancing to stumble upon the passage, which he has quoted, and finding it suited to his purpose, he entered it in his common-place book; in doing which he actually mistook the first for the second volume. And perhaps, after all, it will not be easy to give a solution of the difficulty more probable than this. But surely an English classical author like the late Dr. Paley, conscious that he was writing for posterity, not to say for eternity, ought not to bave quoted any work, without reading at least so much of it as would suffice to make him master of the full scope of the author. THEOGNIS. name of Jesus, merely because they bies, or Vahabies, of whom very follow not after them. I have good little is known in England; it is reason, however, for acquitting Dr. taken from the travels of Mirza Paley of such weakness. If, there- Abu Taleb Khan, lately translated fore, there be any mixture of disin- from the Persian, and written in the genuousness in the case, I should year 1803. suppose, that some designing acquaintance of the late doctor, gave him the whole passage in its present form; which he, charitably thinking no evil, and finding it to contain a strong corroboration of his argument, inserted without examination. The History of Greenland, to which I have so often alluded, is undoubtedly a work highly interesting to every lover of piety and of missionary labours. But it is so wretchedly translated, (not, however, from the Dutch, as Dr. Paley says, but from the German), and, especially in the second volume, so full of barbarisms, tautology, and useless repetition, that it is no wonder an elegant scholar should not be eager to read it. It would be well if some competent person would publish a judicious abridgment of it: a thing the more to be desired, as the book has long been out of print. The late celebrated Dr. Johnson, however, took the trouble to read this history quite through, with all its faults; and it is perhaps one of the strongest proofs of that great man's predominant piety, that, fastidious critic as he was, he yet declared, when he had finished the reading, that though the language was certainly far from inviting, yet there was that in the spirit of the work, which bad completely called off his attention from critical examination, to fix it upon the narrative; and that, upon the whole, there were not many books which he had read with greater delight. OMMA. To the Editor of the Christian Observer. PERHAPS you may gratify your correspondent OROZO, as well as many of your readers, by the insertion of the following account of the Waba During my residence at Kerbela, I endeavoured to collect as much information respecting the laws and religion of the Vatiabies, as I could procure. I learned, that the founder of this sect was named Abd al Vehab (The Servant of the Bestower of all Benefits'). He was born in the neighbourhood of Hilla, on the banks of the Euphrates, but brought up as an adopted son, by a person of some consequence, named Ibrahim, in the district of Nejid. During his youth, he was considered as superior to all his contemporaries, for his ready wit, penetration, and retentive memory. He was also of a very liberal disposition; and whenever he received any money from his patron, he distributed it immediately amongst his inferiors. After having acquired the common principles of education, and a little knowledge of the law, he travelled to Ispahan, late the capital of Persia, where he studied for some time, under the most celebrated masters of that city. He then travelled to Koorassan, and thence to Ghizni; whence he proceeded to Irac: and, after sojourning there some time, he returned home. About the year of the Hejira 1171 (A. D. 1757-8), he began to publish his new doctrines. At first, the fundamental principles of his religion were the same as those of the celebrated Imam Abu Hanifa, but in his exposition of the text he differed considerably. After a short time, he drew his neck from the collar of subserviency, and promulgated doctrines entirely new. He accused the whole Mohammedan church of being associators (giving partners to God), infidels, and idolaters. He even accused them of being worse than idolaters, For these,' said he, in the |