of these nine, that is regarded as so expansive and tremendous; probably because there is no exorcising of that spirit of acquiring languages, of translating, writing, and printing, which so desperately possesses the principals of them, and in which a certain description of men, whether permitted to wriggle into the British Parliament, or privileged to preside at the rites of idolatry, have instinctively recognised their evil genius. And assuredly these lovers of darkness are not mistaken in the deadly nature of this their foe; only it is rather strange they should approach so near to phrenzy in their ideas of the degree and progress of its power. We are aware it is one of the painful and self-tormenting circumstances incident to hatred, especially when mingled with a little fear, that it magnifies and multiplies, far beyond their actual dimensions and number, the very objects which it wishes annihilated; but really it does look more respectable, when it has the discretion to talk about them coolly, and not tell in what frightful shapes they appear to it. A certam guarded language, which should represent the object as very odious, but without elevating it into any thing vast or portentous, would save malice from making itself ridiculous; it cannot, to be sure, help its venom; but there might be a judicious policy in the manner of emitting it. Our author certainly did not write with the desire of attracting ridicule; but there could not have been a more infallible expedient for doing it, than to amplify a scattered fraternity of between ten and twenty missionary preachers into an overwhelming host of crusaders, committing outrages on gods, priests, and religions, in numberless different places, at one and the same time, and carrying their projects with so high a hand, as to strike fifty millions of people with consternation; insomuch that India has seen nothing like it since the days of Timour. But the worst of it for our author, is, (and a similar ludicrous inconsistency often happens in such cases) that, after a formidable exhibition of the powers and influence of the missionaries, he goes directly to calling them by every name and epithet expressive of meanness and insignificance. This unlucky turn in the course of his rhetoric, spoils all. Had he proceeded consistently to the end,-with a representation of their dangerous importance, which required a solemn interposition of the legislature; or with an uniform assertion of their contemptible, though bustling insignificance, requiring only the exercise of the authority of some petty peace officer,--it might have been possible to give him some credit, as, in the one case, a sort of honest fanatic for "religion," or, in the other, as one of the subordinate class of philosophers; but this gross inconsistency gives to the whole piece a cast of scandalous

farce. We will quote some of the sentences in which he sets off the character of these men.

If the increase of the English missionaries is a very serious evil, that evil is aggravated by the description of persons who have found their way to India in that character. Such persons are very proper, perhaps, for employment in countries where men are but little removed from the savage state. They appear to be illiterate, ignorant, and as enthusiastic as the wildest devotees among the Hindoos. Such men are not calculated to convert a civilized race from a false to the true religion. Those who have conceived it possible to convert the natives to Christianity, should have been careful not to throw India into the hands of schismatics.' That such persons ever obtained permission to proceed to India, is very extraordinary; and if they got there by stealth, it is singular that they have not been recalled.' xlv. p.

An act of contumacy, for which they ought to have been shut up, as dangerous maniacs, or immediately sent to England.' p.lv.

Much indeed is it to be lamented, that two clergymen of the Church of England, Mr. Brown and Dr. Buchanan, should encourage such mischievous madmen as these English missionaries are." "We may conceive the narrow bigotry by which the men are actuated, by the conduct of Mr. Carey and Mr. Moore to some native Christian Catholics, whom they met in a village, when they were driven from Dacca by the magistrate and collector. To these poor Catholics, the descendants of Catholics, they pointed out the errors of Popery, and warned them of the danger of worshipping and trusting to Idols." p. lx.

The new orders of missionaries are the most ignorant and the most bigotted of men: Their compositions are in fact, nothing but puritanical cant of the most vulgar kind; worse than that so much in fashion during the days of Oliver Cromwell." p. lxv.

"After so frank a confession, can the Legislature hesitate an instant in recalling these madmen from Bengal?" p. lxvii.

With regard to the illiterate character of the persons in question, there would seem to be a considerable difference of faith between this writer and Mr. Twining, who has transcribed into his pages the testimony of Mr. Brown, on his own immediate knowledge, that these ignorant persons are translating the bible from the original into the following languages, Shanscrit Bengallee, Mahratta, Orissa, Telinga, Shanscrit Hindostanee, Dehhi Hindostanee, Guzerattee, Persian and Chinese. It is but little to add, that some of them carried from England a highly respectable proficiency in what we distinguish as the learned languages. There is one of them, (we do not speak of the principal) who used at one period of his life to study sixteen or eighteen hours a day, with a pertinacity of application which no man ever exceeded. To hear of translating in ten different languages and dialects of the East, is surprising to ordinary men; and no doubt exceedingly confounded the fa

culties of Mr. Twining; but several of these illiterate missionaries make no more of learning a new language, and ransacking its books, than other men do of reading a tolerably long history or a book of voyages and travels in their native language. We have little doubt they have mastered the elements of one or two more, during the identical weeks in which this author has been making up his pamphlet to abuse them. And though he too has resided in India, and no doubt must have cut some considerable figure there, since he is qualified to speak in the British Parliament, it is rather amusing to think how many dialogues with persons of how many different parts of Asia, these ignorant men could carry ou, in his hearing, and he be never the wiser. They might be concerting with one another, in his presence, the most wicked projects, if that were their vocation, and he never be guilty of misprision; they night be blaspheming fifty heathen idols without his deference for that sort of personages being at all affronted. We have not the smallestobjection, nor will the missionaries have any,to his calling them bigots, madmen, maniacs, and so forth; it is somewhat of a favourable indication; since the gentleman who has received the polish of the drawing room, where he has heard, as he assures us, the conversation of an elegant courtier and ambassador, must feel it a very desperate cause that he is trying to support, when he is reduced to such a rage as to roll himself in the aromatic ordures of Billinsgate. We should not have heard this genteel sort of diction from him, if so many of the most prominent characters in the India Company had not been friendly to the promotion of Christianity. These missionaries, our author says, cant like puritans, and worse; it would be no dereliction of the high objects of their office if they were to adopt a more modernized phraseology, and it would preclude in a small degree some of the cavils of such men as this; but it is exceedingly natural that in looking back to a past age for the noblest assemblage of apostolic teachers and examples, in order to stimulate and direct their zeal, they should have acquired both a conscious partiality, and an unconscious resemblance, to the mode of expression which prevailed among the mort venerable divines, and most illustrious bigots and fanatics, that made war on error and wickedness in the seventeenth century. Our author is at leisure, in one place, to make a sort of question whether Mr. Carey is intitled to the prefix of Reverend neither Mr. Carey, nor his friends, care a straw whether this trivial epithet is put before his name or not; in the better ages of India, the name of this person will be spoken and written without affixing any distinctive word at all, as we say Wickliffe, or Luther.

This pamphlet indicates a certain complexity of motive, which makes it difficult to know how far the safety of the Indian empire is really the object of his concern; that it is not the only object will be tolerably evident from such passages as these ;

That we have "sinned" by withholding instruction from the natives, that is, by not having had either the courage or the presumption to interfere with them in the free enjoyment of their religion, laws, and local customs, is a doctrine perfectly new.' p. xxxv.

Heretofore, the Brahmins lived on the most intimate terms both with Protestant and Roman missionaries, without betraying one symptom of jealousy or enmity; but these English missionaries, by what I may call a ruffianly and abusive attack on the national religions of Hindostan, naturally excite the enmity of the Brahmins, and, I am sure, of all the Hindoos who read their tracts. p. lix.

6

Marquis Wellesley, with a laudable anxiety to conciliate our new subjects in Oude, proposes to increase and even to extend, the religious establishments in that country. "These instructions do infinite credit to Marquis Wellesley, and we have heard, from private accounts, that he displayed the same spirit of conciliation on another occasion." Observations, pp. 12, 23.

A copy of one of the pamphlets, as the missionaries call the papers they give away, is in England. In that paper the people are exhorted to abandon their idolatrous Shastah, and to embrace the religion taught by the true Shastah, the Holy Bible. Should we be surprised if, instead of abuse, the people had thrown such madmen into the Ganges?' p. lxvi.

What city, town, or village in Hindostan, is not filled with “bigots,” if the true meaning of the word bigotry is, that every man who thinks differently from these missionaries is a bigot? The fair way to state the fact is, that the whole population of Hindostan are invincibly attached to their religion and local customs.' p. lxvii.

A whole village rose against these Hindoo converts, and, on a circumstance so dreadfully alarming to every rational man, the English missionary quotes this passage. "Think you that I am come to send peace on the earth? I tell you, nay." This abominable and impious perversion of a passage of that gospel which inculcated the mild doctrine peace on earth and good will amongst men, surely merits public reprobation! It is precisely the language held by the Spaniards and the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. p. lix.

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When Mr. Carey and Mr. Moore were at Dacca, they write, on the Lord's day, "What an awful sight have we witnessed this day! a large and populous city wholly given to idolatry, and not an individual to warn them to flee from the wrath to come. As soon as we rose in the morning, our attention was unavoidably excited by scenes the most absurd, disgusting, and degrading to human nature." Could men possessing common sense, have written such nonsense as this, unless blinded by enthusiasm? Had they discovered that a single Englishman was a convert to the Hindoo or to the Mahometan religion, they would have been justified in giving their sentiments to him as to his apostacy from the true to a false and idolatrous religion; but to pour out such unmeaning and useless abuse on an immense population, which merely observed those

forms and ceremonies which had been used throughout Hindostan for above two thousand years, is folly and arrogance in the extreme.' p. lxv.

The author did not write these paragraphs, we are persuaded, with any wish to exercise the ingenuity of his readers in drawing any other inference from them than the obvious one, that, whatever degree of apprehension he may really entertain for the stability of our eastern empire, from the introduction of Christianity, he has at the same time a deeper and much more radical objection, and protests in the character of religionist as well as that of politician. He would be understood, that there are venerable religions already established in India, which Christianity has no right to supplant, and which it therefore strongly borders on iniquity for Christians to attack. In the worshippers of the Divinity he thinks it a gross defect of decorum, and a ridiculous excess of spiritual avarice, to be discontent that the idols of Asia should be in possession of several millions of human minds. It is not that he objects to Christianity in its proper place, and he will even permit its emissaries to attempt the extension of its jurisdiction "into Africa and the wilds of America;" nor has he perhaps any violent exclusive attachment to the sacred blocks of stone and timber godship in India; but he thinks they have all their respective claims, and that the world is large enough for many gods, as it is for many kings; and he is very anxious to establish among them a balance of power, interdicting each, but above all the only Sovereign of the universe, to transgress the line of demarcation. For once the public has before it a man, who knows well all the abominations of the Hindoo superstition, who knows what multitudes of children are sacrificed to Gonga, what a number are hung up in trees to be devoured by birds of prey, what an amazing number of women are annually burned with the bodies of their husbands, by what a variety of tortures their superstition punishes its votaries with a selfinflicted hell, what a downright prostration to absolute stocks and bricks prevails among the multitude, what a garbage of the most silly and loathsome absurdities fills the greater part of their sacred books, what a debasement of all that might be generous in human nature is perpetuated by the casts, and what a general destitution of the morals that constitute the decency of a community displays the natural result of all these abominations; there is a man before the public that knows all this, and yet is bursting with indignation that a Christian missionary should have the presumption to imagine himself authorised by the God of Heaven to expostulate with the deluded creatures, and to offer, in their native language," the revelations of the gospel, and the Christian code of mo.