CHRISTIANIZING THE HEATHEN. 299 Christianity in every place of its dispersion, from Jerusalem to every extremity of the Roman empire. 3. Blot out the means of extending knowledge and exerting influence upon the human mind. Destroy the Lancasterian system of instruction, and throw back the mass of men into a state of unreading, unreflecting ignorance. Blot out our libraries and tracts; abolish Bible, and education, and tract, and missionary societies; and send the nations for knowledge to parchment, and the slow and limited productions of the pen. Let all the improvements in civil government be obliterated, and the world be driven from the happy arts of self-government to the guardianship of dungeons and chains. 4. Let liberty of conscience expire, and the Church, now emancipated, and walking forth in her unsullied loveliness, return to the guidance of secular policy, and the perversions and corruptions of an unholy priesthood. And now reduce the 200,000,000 nominal, and the 10,000,000 of real Christians, spread over the earth, to 500 disciples, and to twelve apostles, assembled, for fear of the Jews, in an upper chamber, to enjoy the blessings of a secret prayer-meeting. And give them the power of miracles, and the gift of tongues, and send them out into all the earth to preach the Gospel to every creature. 5. Is this the apostolic advantage for propagating Christianity which throws into discouragement and hopeless imbecility all our present means of enlightening and disenthralling the world? They comparatively, had nothing to begin with and every thing to oppose them; and yet, in three hundred years, the whole civilized, and much of the barbarous world, was brought under the dominion of Christianity. 6. And shall we, with the advantage of their labors, and of our numbers, and a thousand fold increase of opportunity and moral power, stand halting in unbelief, while the Lord Jesus is still repeating the injunction, "Go ye out into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature," and repeating the assurance, "Lo I am with you alway, even to the end of the world?" Shame on our sloth! Shame upon our unbelief! LESSON CXLVII. Character of Washington. 1. THERE are accidental to the character of man two qualities, both developed by his intercourse with his fellow-creatures, and both belonging to the immortal part of his nature; of elements apparently so opposed and inconsistent with each other, as to be irreconcilable together; but yet indispensable in their union to constitute the highest excellence of the human character. They are the spirit of command, and the spirit of meekness. 2. They have been exemplified in the purity of ideal perfection, only once in the history of mankind, and that was in the mortal life of the Saviour of the world. It would seem to have been exhibited on earth by his supernatural character, as a model to teach mortal man, to what sublime elevation his nature is capable of ascending. 3. They had been displayed, though not in the same perfection by the preceding legislator of the Children of Israel: "That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed but so little were they known, or conceived of in the antiquity of profane history, that in the poems of Homer, that unrivalled delineator of human character in the heroic ages, there is no attempt to introduce them in the person of any one of his performers, human or divine. 4. In the poem of his Roman imitator and rival, a feeble exemplification of them is shadowed forth in the inconsistent composition of the pious Æneas; but history, ancient or modern, had never exhibited, in the real life of man, an example in which those two properties were so happily blended together, as they were in the person of George Washington. These properties belong rather to the moral than the intellectual nature of man. 5. They are not unfrequently found in minds little cultivated by science, but they require for the exercise of that mutual control which guards them from degenerating into arrogance or weakness, the guidance of a sound judgment, EXTENSION OF CRISTIANITY. 301 and the regulation of a profound sense of responsibility to a higher power. It was this adaptation of the character of Washington to that of the institution over the composition of which he had presided, as he was now called to preside over its administration, which constituted one of the most favorable omens of its eventual stability and success. LESSON CXLVIII. Extension of Christianity by Missions. 1. Our object will not have been accomplished till the tomahawk shall be buried forever, and the tree of peace spread its broad branches from the Atlantic to the Pacific; until a thousand smiling villages shall be reflected from the waves of the Missouri, and the distant valleys of the West echo with the song of the reaper; till the wilderness and the solitary place shall have been glad for us, and the desert has rejoiced and blossomed as the rose. 2. How changed will then be the face of Asia. Bramins, and Soodras, and Castes, and Shasters will have passed away, like the mist which rolls up the mountain's side before the rising glories of a summer's morning; while the land on which it rested, shining forth in all its loveliness, shall, from its numberless habitations, send forth the high praises of God and the Lamb. The Hindoo mother will gaze upon her infant with the same tenderness, which throbs in the breast of any one of you who now hear me, and the Hindoo son will pour into the wounded bosom of his widowed parent the oil of peace and consolation. 3. In a word, point us to the loveliest village that smiles upon a Scottish or New England landscape, and compare it with the filthiness and brutality of a Caffrarian Kraal, and we tell you, that our object is to render that Caffrarian Kraal as happy and as gladsome as that Scottish or New England village. 4. Point us to the spot on the face of the earth, where liberty is best understood and most perfectly enjoyed, where intellect shoots forth in its richest luxuriance, and where all the kindlier feelings of the heart are constantly seen in their most graceful exercise; point us to the loveliest and happiest neighborhood in the world on which we dwell, and we tell : you, that our object is to render the whole earth, with all its nations, and kindreds, and tongues, and people, as happy, nay, happier, than that neighborhood. 5. The object of the Missionary enterprise embraces every child of Adam. It is vast as the race to whom its operations are of necessity limited. It would confer upon every individual on earth all that intellectual or moral cultivation can bestow. It would rescue a world from the indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish, reserved for every son of man that doeth evil, and give it a title to glory, honor, and immortality. 6. You see, then, that our object is, not only to affect every individual of the species, but to affect him in the momentous extremes of infinite happiness and infinit woe. And now, we ask, what object, ever undertaken by man, can compare with this same design of evangelizing the world. Patriotism itself fades away before it, and acknowledges the supremacy of an enterprise, which seizes, with so strong a grasp, upon both the temporal and eternal destinies of the whole family of man. LESSON CXLIX. A Traveller perishing in the Snow. 1. As thus the snows arise; and foul, and fierce, 2. Beneath the formless wild; but wanders on How sinks his soul! What black despair, what horror fills his heart! DECAY OF THE INDIANS. He meets the roughness of the middle waste, 303 A dire descent! beyond the power of frost; Of faithless bogs; of precipices huge, Smoothed up with snow; and, what is land, unknown, What water of the still unfrozen spring, In the loose marsh or solitary lake, Where the fresh fountain from the bottom boils. These check his fearful steps; and down he sinks Beneath the shelter of the shapeless drift, Thinking o'er all the bitterness of death, Mixed with the tender anguish Nature shoots Through the wrung bosom of the dying man, His wife, his children, and his friends unseen. 4. In vain for him the officious wife prepares The fire fair-blazing, and the vestment warm; In vain his little children, peeping out Into the mingling storm, demand their sire, With tears of artless innocence. Alas! Nor wife, nor children, more shall he behold, Nor friends, nor sacred home. On every nerve The deadly Winter seizes; shuts up sense; And, o'er his inmost vitals creeping cold, Lays him along the snows, a stiffened corse, Stretched out, and bleaching in the northern blast. LESSON CL. Decay of the Indians. 1. NEITHER the government nor the people of the United States have any wish to conceal from themselves, nor from the world, that there is upon their frontiers a wretched, forlorn people, looking to them for support and protection, and possessing strong claims upon their justice and humanity. Those people received our forefathers in a spirit of friendship, aided them to endure privations and sufferings, and |