unbroken band of veterans trained in conjunction to victory in the service.

And even as regarding these men themselves, willing, like St. Paul, to forego, if it might be put at their option, a more speedy emancipation from their toils to the final rest, and to labour on to the last period of exhausted nature, it seems due from our sympathy and gratitude to wish, that if death should not deny them the time, the Christian public should not refuse them the other means, for advancing the introductory process of the great work to a point where they would be perfectly willing to bid it adieu. That supposed limit of their Christian ambition is not altogether an imaginary one: Elijah's chariot, sent to bear them away, would not inspire in them such joy, in quitting the world, as to know that the most important parts of the revelation of God. had been brought to speak in every considerable language of Asia.

But at all events, they will depart with the delight of knowing, that their distinguished lot on earth has been to open the way, in an important sense, to the region whither they are

going, for a countless multitude, many of whom they will be assured are to follow them; while they will rejoice to have staid long enough to see the evinced and completed efficacy of their appointment as evangelists in some that are gone before them. They will know that by the cause in which they have lived and laboured, and are dying, a new mode of the divine attention, a greater measure of the divine interest, has been drawn and must remain fixed in benignant radiance upon a formerly estranged and desolate tract of the world; inasmuch as wherever there are faithful witnesses to the truth, repenting sinners, and pagans making sacrifices of the idols to which they had offered sacrifice, and commencing in the name of Christ a new life, amidst prayers and praises in languages which never addressed the Almighty before, there is (speaking reverently) something to necessitate toward that spot a far more special emanation of favour and providence from heaven, than when that moral waste contained nothing related to God. If there were but one particle there of such new and sacred existence, heaven must con

tinue in communication with the spot where there is something so much its own, till it became extinct, or were resumed to the sky. How happy then if there shall be there an augmentation, every day, of what thus bears a special relation to God, to become a continually mightier attraction of the divine benignity thitherward; till at length the language of prophecy shall be fulfilled, "Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God."

In a confidence of a progressive prevalence of the gracious dispensation of which we think we see the commencement, it might be permitted to indulge for a moment in the contemplation of India as in a future age, in which distant period we can in a measure conceive what will be the reflections of a devout observer, regarding the scene in reference to the past. With the picture on his imagination of India as the missionaries will have recorded that they found it, and as many other preserved authentic descriptions will agree with

them in representing it, he may look over the ample region, to wonder what is become of that direful element which was once perceived pervading and corrupting the whole wide diffusion of mental and moral existence, bringing out to view, as it were in a darkness visible of depravity, the souls of men conspicuously through their less sable exterior. The dusky visages, the attire, the structure of habitations, and the grand features of Nature, will be seen the same; but a horrid something, composed of lies, and crimes, and curses, and woes, that did rest in deadly possession over all the land, will be broken up and gone. Where has a place been found for what occupied for ages after ages so many cities, and villages, and houses, and minds? What tempest has driven it away? What presence has been here which that presence could not abide? Wast it that Spirit in awe of whom eternal night vanished at the creation of the world?

He may look from the southern shore toward the sublime mountain-boundary of the region on the north, and reflect what a scene it was to confront heaven, in all this breadth, with

deities, and doctrines, and devotions, detestable to the true God; each individual of unnumbered millions being infatuated, and busied by notions and practices not one of which could have been in existence but by the fall of our nature. But how glorious for that reflecting observer to feel it verified to him that this is but a vision of the past, and that, departing like a dream, when one awakes, it leaves him in view of a bright and blessed reality. How he will exult in the palpable evidence that the Son of God has spread his dominion from those shores to those mountains; that the oracles of truth have taken place of the most silly, and loathsome, and monstrous legends with which the father of lies ever made contemptuous sport of the folly of his dupes; and that the new religion admitted in faith, has crowned itself and its believers with all its appropriate virtues. When joming with them in exercises of worship to the true God, he may have short lapses of the mind into a view of the past, presented in vivid images of the fantastic fooleries, and the orgies, that once celebrated the infatuation which reigned as religion in the