ing the will of the Supreme Authority by leaving this country in prosecution of our Society's undertaking in Hindoostan, to` die in the service. They had devoted themselves so to die, and rejoiced in the confidence that they were also devoted by a superior decree. In what manner may we believe that their departing spirits have been received by their great Master? Has it been a qualified "Well done, good and faithful servant," that they have heard?as if he should say,- Feeble in judgment, rash in temperament, but honest in intention, you are pardoned through a peculiar extension of mercy, and are admitted now to a state of illumination in which you may cultivate the humility that was so defective on earth, and see in the future progress of your Lord's administration, how long his servants ought to have repressed the presumptuous forwardness of their zeal.

No, this could not be their reception in a world where they were soon to be joined by the first-fruits of that very zeal, those converts from idolatry, who, subsequently to some of their teachers, have died in the faith of Christ,

and carried demonstrative living proof to heaven, that the true religion had not in a premature and officious zeal been conveyed sooner than the divine appointment had commissioned it to go, sooner than the divine power was ready to accompany it, to a region whither some of its professed friends would not have contributed to send it. And if we may imagine the nature of the emotion in the great assembly at the arrival of these spirits from the dominions of idolatry, we shall not believe it to have been the melancholy felicitation which should welcome them as almost solitary exceptions to a destiny, regarded as still permanently abiding on the immense division of the human race whence they came. We cannot conceive of an unmingled delight in receiving them as translated thither chiefly to exemplify that sovereignty of God which he will manifest in every department of his government, by suspending in rare instances his most general appointments; as two individuals have been exempted from the general law of mortality. The sentiment without which the joy would be languid, must have been that which should

hail them as signs that a decreed change of dispensation, a new aspect of the divine sovereignty, is beginning to shine on a dark hemisphere of the world; that death is becoming incomparably more tributary to heaven; and 'that the ancient barrier between the realms of Asia and the kingdom of eternal glory is beginning to break down.

This indulgence of thought in representing to ourselves the feelings experienced in an invisible and superior world, is quite within the just range of our contemplation of the subject. It is a noble distinction of religion, that (once admitted as true,) it affords a rational substance to bear out the most imaginative exercise of thought. It is a ground on which our ideal excursions may with sober propriety go such a length as they cannot attempt on other grounds without turning into poetry or into vanity. It verifies to us as a reality a solemn relation between us and another economy of existence; and constitutes a vital intermedium through which we have the sense of a real interest in beings and a state beyond the sphere of this world. Thus religion, believed and felt, is the

amplitude of our moral nature. And how wretched an object therefore is a mind, especially of thought, sensibility, and genius, condemned to that poverty and insulation which infidelity inflicts, by annihilating around it the medium of a sensible interest in the existence, the emotions, the activities, of a higher order of beings! Our Lord tells us of great and happy intelligences in the invisible world, who rejoice over a sinner when he repents. It is quite rational, then, to have indulged our imaginations for a moment in ideas of the reception, in that scene, of those first converts from paganism, in the course of our Mission, who have been followed in death by some of the persons whose labours were crowned with this success. And we are especially warranted in the most vivid imagination which it is possible to form of the emotions of these proclaimers and these converts of the truth, in their mutual recognition, when thus re-united, and in communion with the preceding believers, apostles, and confessors. If but a comparatively faint apprehension of the emphasis of those congratulations could be brought, by some momentary illapse, upon the

souls of the most neutral or even the most hostile spectators of the attempt which has had such an effect in the happiest society, it would instantly turn to grief at the thought, that those heavenly felicities had owed none of that rapture to them.

And let us remind those professed Christians, whose coldness toward a great project of evangelization would justify itself under a plea of reverently awaiting the disclosure of the divine purposes, that by their profession they aspire to join ere long that company to which departed missionaries and their converts have been added. It may be the destination of some of them to leave this world at nearly the time appointed for the removal by death of other of these indefatigable labourers, and of more of their proselytes. In the reflections which may be excited by such an idea, will there be no sentiment partaking of apprehension? No mortifying anticipation arises at the thought of entering the other world in company with an angelic being, the different rank of his nature precluding all comparison, or precluding reproach for the difference, if comparison were