conflict at every point of its execution. Against every good he can think of, he will find an appropriate antagonist evil already in full action, an action that will not remit and sink into quiet when he approaches to effect the intended good. Nay, indeed, in what way is it that the servant of God the most readily apprehends the nature of his vocation but in that of seeing what it is against? And when he puts the matter to experimental proof, does he ever find that those apprehended adversaries are nothing but menacing shadows? Let him that has made the most determined, protracted, and extensive trial, tell whether it is idle common-place and extravagance when we say that all Christian exhortation is in truth a

summons to war.

There are many modes of the action of this grand enemy, moral evil, which press so immediately on a man's own personal concern, that a habitual conflict with them is an essential condition of the Christian character: a practical question of hostility or acquiescence is implicated with the ordinary course of his self

government. There are other forms, of great magnitude and hatefulness, existing in the world, which do not so directly force themselves into the question of his being a Christian or not. In judgment and feeling he must be, of course, their implacable enemy. But since they throw no temptation in his way, have the sphere of their malignant operation at a great distance, leave a very wide space clear for Christian exercise, and may seem also, by their vastness and consolidated establishment, to be placed the very last of all things that individuals can account themselves competent to attack, -to be as enormous mountains limiting their

field, it may be acknowledged a matter of somewhat less defineable obligation in what degree he shall actively expend his animosity upon them. The exhortation to apply a share of his efforts in that direction, may be considered as partly an appeal to those higher sentiments of the religious spirit which aspire to the full magnanimity and zeal of the Christian character. It is an admonition to the professed adherents of Him who came on earth with a design extending in hostility, without limit or

exception, to every thing adverse to goodness and pernicious to the human soul, that if all the moral evil in the world is not acting immediately against them, it is against Him; and that it is most reasonable that one of the laws of their devotion to him should be, to identify themselves with him in the practical warfare to the widest scope which is really open to their enterprise. It is an incitement to their ambition, not to leave it to be ever said again, with respect to any part of his operations against evil among men, that he trod the winepress alone, and that of the people there was none with him.

When animated to this high and adventurous spirit, a good man may wonder that the Heathenism prevailing over large tracts of the world should so little have been, in this country or other Protestant nations, till a comparatively recent time, accounted as comprehended within the sphere of required Christian exertion.*

The indifference of Protestants was not for want of examples, such as they were, of activity in this department. It was very well known that there had been various missionary enterprises under the appointment of the Romish Church. And certain individuals em

One most amiable fraternity, indeed, whose gentleness at home involves a principle by which it glows into energy and heroism in proportion to the remoteness of the distance, and the barbarousness and ruggedness of the field of action, to which it is voluntarily exiled, have made missions to the Heathens an essential part of their institution. But in general, the friends of religion seem to have regarded those great maladies of the moral world, the delusions and abominations of paganism, with a sort of submissive awe, as if, almost, they had established a prescriptive right to the place they have held so long; or as if they were part of an unchangeable, uncontrollable order

ployed in those missions were held worthy of perpetual remembrance for their invincible perseverance, and for a share, it was fair to believe, of a truly Christian principle in the motives which actuated them. But when these undertakings were viewed in their general character, it was so notorious that they were, as to the prevailing motive, projects of hierarchical ambition, and that, in their mode of prosecution, they accommodated, with the corruptest policy, to the paganism they professed to convert, and introduced a great deal of what was no better than paganism of their own, that Protestants could hardly regard them as Christian projects; and therefore felt no stimulus at the view of their activity, and derived nothing to excite hope from the boasts, or the facts, of their success.

of nature, like the noxious climates of certain portions of the globe, and the liableness in others to the terrors of earthquake. Or at least, when these religious men have looked on these mighty forms of darkness and iniquity, as destined to vanish at some time from the scenes of which they have been so long the curse, and have prayed for that time to be hastened on, they have found themselves anticipating and invoking, with undefined conception, some entirely unwonted and even properly miraculous mode of divine interposition, and have felt as if it would be for men to stand off and see what God can do ;-in this very feeling perhaps admitting on their minds, in a degree, the imposition through which a defect of faith and zeal may be mistaken for humility and devotion.

Within a later period, however, (within that, chiefly, which has shown, on so vast a scale, the availableness of human agency for overturning things of ancient, and wide, and commanding establishment in the world,) many good men have begun to regard with much less prostration of feeling, those gigantic "dom