more reason to be obliged to the friend who has placed me here."

In the following spring (May 1824) he collected around him the Episcopal clergy of the presidency of Calcutta, and held a visitation. The number was but small, but he experienced much pleasure in bringing them together for mutual acquaintance, and in particular that he might himself be enabled to acquire a knowledge of their characters and views. At this time he had the pleasure of ordaining the first native convert who was admitted to the ministry of the English Church, "in the person of Christian David, a black catechist of Ceylon, and a pupil of the celebrated Schwartz." On this occasion he delivered to the clergy an eloquent charge, in which he expatiated at large upon the qualities, principles, and habits, which to him appeared to be necessary to the usefulness of those who should undertake the labours of an Indian missionary. Delighting, through the whole of the time he passed in India, to be considered simply as its chief missionary, it may easily be believed that he dwelt on those topics con amore. In the following passage of that charge, he pours

forth his soul in a strain of awful and indignant rebuke against the Abbe Dubois, and other opposers of Christian missions, which is scarcely to be paralleled in our language.

"Nor can it be a matter of reasonable surprise to any of us, that the exertions (missionary) of this kind, which the last fifteen years have witnessed, should have excited a mingled feeling of surprise and displeasure in the minds, not only of those who are strangers to the powerful and peculiar emotions which send forth the Missionary to his toil, but of those who, though themselves not idle, could not endure that God should employ other instruments besides; and were ready to speak evil of the work itself, rather than that others who followed not with them should cast out devils in the name of their common Master. To the former of these classes may be referred the louder opposition, the clamours, the expostulation, the alarm, the menace and ridicule which, some few years ago, were systematically and simultaneously levelled at whatever was accomplished or attempted for the illumination of our Indian fellow-subjects. We can well remember, most of us, what

revolutions and wars were predicted to arise from the most peaceable preaching and argument; what taunts and mockery were directed against scholars who had opened to us the gates of the least accessible oriental dialects; what opprobrious epithets were lavished on men of whom the world was not worthy. We have heard the threats of the mighty; we have heard the hisses of the fool; we have witnessed the terrors of the worldly wise, and the unkind suspicions of those from whom the Missionary had most reason to expect encouragement. Those days are, for the present, gone by. Through the Christian prudence, the Christian meekness, the Christian perseverance, and indomitable faith of the friends of our good cause, and through the protection, above all, and the blesing of the Almighty, they are gone by! The angel of the Lord has, for a time, shut the mouths of these fiercer lions, and it is the false brother now, the pretended fellow-soldier in Christ, who has lift up his heel against the propagation of the Christian gospel.

"But thus it is that the power of antichrist hath worked hitherto and doth work. Like those

spectre forms which the madness of Orestes saw in classical mythology, the spirit of religious party sweeps before us in the garb and with the attributes of pure and evangelical religion. The cross is on her shoulders, the chalice is in her hand, and she is anxiously busied, after her manner, in the service of Him by whose holy name she is also called. But outstrip her in the race, but press her a little too closely, and she turns round on us with all the hideous features of envy and of rage. Her hallowed taper blazes into a sulphurous torch, her hairs bristle into serpents, her face is as the face of them that go down to the pit, and her words are words of blasphemy!

"What other spirit could have induced a Christian minister, after himself, as he tells us, long labouring to convert the heathen, to assert that one hundred millions of human beings-a great, a civilized, an understanding, and most ancient people, are collectively and individually under the sentence of reprobation from God, and under a moral incapacity of receiving that gospel which the God who gave it hath appointed to be made known to all?

D

"What other spirit could have prompted a member of that church which professes to hold out the greatest comfort to sinners, to assert of a nation with whom, whatever are their faults, I, for one, should think it impossible to live long without loving them, that they are not only enslaved to a cruel and degrading superstition, but that the principal persons among them are sold to all manner of wickedness and cruelty; without mercy to the poor; without natural affection for each other; and this with no view to quicken the zeal of Christians, to release them from their miserable condition, but that Christians may leave them in that condition still, to the end that they may perish everlastingly?

"What other spirit, finally, could have led a Christian missionary, (with a remarkable disregard of truth, the proofs of which are in my hands,) to disparage the success of the different Protestant missions; to detract from the numbers, and vilify the good name of that ancient Syrian church, whose flame, like the more sacred fire of Horeb, sheds its lonely and awful brightness over the woods and mountains of Malabar,