sought their incitement and their strength in the decrees of Heaven, have often believed that they saw, in some of these more defined and special portions, in these comparatively distinct representations of movements which are to fulfil on earth the purposes of Heaven, the very image of such designs as they were zealous to prosecute. It was quite certain at least that those appointed operations must at any rate involve such as they were projecting or attempting; and the predicted success of the whole must be the success of the included parts.

But, they said again, there are predestinated agents; and who still so likely as men who shall be ready with their life and their death for precisely that service? The inference was not far off;―These very plans and proceedings of ours are decreed, as portions of the sovereign scheme; we and our work are a part of eternal destiny.

We are not here called upon to suggest the cautions against the possible excesses and dangers of this confident assurance, in good men, that their designs are specifically identical with

the divine purposes. Our object was to show, that the consideration of sovereign decrees, which cold, unwilling minds are so ready to allege for their inertness, and which is so commonly asserted to have necessarily that consequence, may, on the contrary, become one of the mightiest forces for action. It is this that can make, but under a far nobler modification, the man that the poets have delighted to feign, who would maintain his purpose though the world fell in ruins around him. A missionary against the paganism of the Hindoos may feel an animation specially appropriate to the service, in this assurance that his intention is the intention of God. Those people fortify themselves in the notion, or the pretence, that they are immediately actuated by some deity, and therefore fulfilling, under a law of necessity, his determinations: the missionary will feel peculiar invigoration in advancing to the assault of a superstition with such a principle in its front, in the force of a principle analogous in form, but of heavenly essence. While they will have it, that he may as well spare the efforts on them which it were his more proper

business to level at the gods, if he could reach them, the energy of his soul will reply, that he accepts the challenge so made for those enthroned abominations, for that he verily believes himself and his confraternity to be an Avatar for their destruction.

We have dwelt too long on this topic of religious fatalism, a term we have employed to signify a perverted application, in reasoning and feeling, of the doctrine which acknowledges God's sovereign and unalterable predestination of events. Our excuse must be, that these reasonings and feelings are peculiarly apt to suggest themselves in contravention to such claims as those we are at present wishing to exhibit. And besides their own direct force, they lend strength to other objections and repugnant feelings not arising from so speculative a source. The meanest of the passions, that can make an opposition to a worthy project, or withhold from it the necessary aid, are very ready to find an excuse, a justification, or even a merit, in a pretended waiting submission to the decrees of Heaven.

OTHER OBSTRUCTIONS TO MISSIONS.

MANY causes of a nature not implicated with these obscure speculations, are operating to prevent or lessen the assistance to an enterprise like that for which we are pleading. may briefly notice one or two.

We

If we just name Party-spirit, it is not in order to indulge in any accusatory complaints that our particular undertaking has materially suffered by it. Doubtless we may be some

what the worse for it; but we have as little the inclination as the means for calculating how much. And even were a calculation made and verified of that proportion of pecuniary and other modes of aid which a perfect Christian liberality would have awarded to this project, and which party spirit may have withheld from it, we should still be gratified in the persuasion that the greater part of what may have been so averted, has probably been devoted to other excellent designs to which we wish all possible success. The history of this portion of the general Christian operations of the age, will have little to say of convoys

intercepted by selfish allies. We are too confident of the prolonged favour of Providence on our work, and too much pleased at seeing that Providence favouring the exertions of the same tendency made by other sects of the Christian community, to regret not having obtained any one particle of the means which have availed to good in their hands. And we think we have too systematically avoided giving any just cause of jealous re-action to our friends of the other denominations, to be debarred in modesty from denouncing, with unrestrained censure, the spirit which cannot see the merit of a noble object, when there is some point of controversy with its promoters, and which would almost rather wish it might be lost, than aid them to attain it a spirit which, in promoting an interest professedly as wide as the world, as liberal as the sun, would enviously account success, or the means of success, conferred on a different class of labourers in the same general cause, so much unjustly subtracted from our own connexion and project; and would avenge on the grand, catholic object, the petty offences of party, or affronts to individual vanity.