cannot fail to be some striking instances of particular and apparently inconsiderable means thus rendered productive of distinguished effects, and those effects producing new and greater ones, in a continued succession enlarging as it advances,—this confidence is authorized, (independently of all other reasons,) by the fact, that such instances have occurred in every recorded scheme of Christian enterprise which has been prosecuted on a wide scale, from right motives, and with indefatigable perseverance. Not that in all of them there have been such magnificent and prodigious ultimate effects from little causes as we have been describing; not that in every province of benevolent activity a rill from some little obscure source has swelled into a Nile, and fertilized a whole region; but in all of them it may be safely asserted, that there have been instances, of a magnitude to throw contempt on frigid, indolent, and irreligious calculation.

FATALISM MUST BE ABANDONED.

It is not improbable the chief strength of whatever reluctance may still remain, among the friends of Christianity, to yield their full co-operation in projects for sending that religion to supplant the delusion and idolatry of the Heathen world, consists in a kind of Religious Fatalism, which would make the objection in some such terms as these ;-If that Being whose power is almighty has willed to permit on earth the protracted existence in opposition to him of this enormous evil, why are we called upon to vex and exhaust ourselves in a petty warfare against it?—why any more than to attempt the extinction of a volcano? If it were his will that it should be overthrown, we should soon, without having quitted our places and our quiet, in any offensive movement toward it, feel the earthquake of its mighty catastrophe; and if such is not his will, then we should plainly be putting ourselves in the predicament of willing something which he does not will,

and making exertions which must infallibly prove abortive.

We may question such an objector as to the real length to which his opinion or feeling goes. May it approach to a sentiment like this,that, the thing contemplated being permitted by Him that is infinitely good and powerful, it is therefore not of a nature hostile to him, not of a tendency directly the reverse of that of his attributes, not of deadly malignity to his creatures; that, in short, the brand of divine reprobation stamped by both revelation and reason upon idolatry, and on each of its deceits and depravities severally, is itself, in truth, but a deceit of another kind, a mere accommodation to a certain superficial and conventional theory; the real fact being, after all, that God is at peace with the thing thus reprobated?

We may presume he will instantly reply in the negative, and say, that he holds this mass of error and turpitude to be intrinsically and immutably opposite to the divine goodness and holiness, and pernicious to man, -any other judgment of the matter being, according to all

fact and all Scripture, utterly and impiously absurd; and that therefore the divine permission of this great evil appears at every step of thought but the more mysterious.

Well, then, we immediately say to him, there are two views, according to one of which you are to form your scheme of conduct; on the one hand, a mystery in the divine government, a permission infinitely inexplicable to you; and on the other, the most glaring manifestation of the quality of the thing so permitted, as hateful in itself and in the sight of God. Consider from which of these two it is the most rational for you to take your rule of action, from that where your understanding is utterly lost, or from that where all is demonstration or self-evidence. You have light given you on the nether tract where you are placed, beneath the awful mystery in the heaven above, which interposes darkness between you and the reasons and counsels of the Almighty. By this light you have an infallible manifestation of the infinitely odious nature of an object that stands before you. What can this light and this manifestation be for, but

that you might not have need to look up into the darkness for an authority, from reasons unknown, to determine your sentiments and action? And is it rational, and can it be safe, that the clear evidence which has thus been given, in order to define for you a scheme of duty with the advantage of being independent of the mystery, should be rejected that you may revert to that very mystery for a determination of your duty,—or rather for an authority to conclude that you have none? Or would you, both despising this light and defying that darkness, aspire to surmount the region of mystery itself, ascend into the light around the throne of Heaven, and, sharer of Sovereign Intelligence, enter into God's own reasons for permitting the evil? For this indeed, even this exaltation of intellect, must be attained, to authorize it as a principle of action that you will permit a great moral evil because God does so. For you to maintain a calm tolerance toward it because he does not destroy it, is no less than to yield it an amicable acquiescence, no less therefore than an alliance with his enemy, unless this tolerance is main