all this rhetoric of liberality is exerted to avert from those people? Has the government ever meditated any general sweeping measure against the privileges of their priesthood, against the rites of their temples, against the fantastic observances interwoven with their whole economy of life, or against the laws of their casts? The government never thought of any such thing. It has not even interfered with the female sacrifice, with their exhibitions of self-torture, nor with their regaling the sharks and crocodiles with the warm living bodies of their children, till the prohibitory regulation of Marquis Wellesley was called forth by accounts of the excess to which this festival of Hindoo charity was carried at Gonga Saugor. Is it this act of "interference" which has caused the alarm with which our priests of the crocodile have begun to preach, in such pious fervour, against injustice, illiberality, and intolerance? But if so, why do they not try to preserve some appearance of discrimination in fixing the criminal charge? Why are the missionaries brought into the question? It was not their fault that the Marquis had the presumption to perpetrate this crime against the adored demons of India. Let the Marquis bear his own guilt; let him even be impeached in the British Parliament for this act of rebellion against the Pandemonium, the ancient paramount government of Hindostan, under which he ought to have known his place and duty better than to interfere with any of its sacred appointments; but let not the missionaries be brought in for any share of his guilt or punishment.

Or do these writers, in their deprecations of intolerance and interference, mean to refer to such proceedings as those forced changes in the military exterior which provoked the mutiny of Vellore? Why then do they not speak to the point; and, in protesting against the continuance or repetition of such measures, arraign the Madras government, or the commander of the army, or whatever higher power authorized the one or the other in the unfortunate experiment, for a most wanton and dangerous insult on their soldiers. If they are too sneaking to do this, for fear perhaps of having on their hands a number of what are called affairs of honour, let them not spend their wrath on the harmless messengers of religion, who had no more to do in any way with that sanguinary business, than we have while writing these remarks on their noble-spirited accusers. Assuredly, to fall foul of the caps, and whiskers, and red-streaked foreheads of sepoys, was the very last thing that would ever have come into the heads of the missionaries, even though they had been in the Christianizing company of the officers at Vellore; they would have been about very different work, and might have pro

secuted it till the arrival of the tenth Avatar, before mutiny or massacre would have been the consequence. There would have been some reasonable quantity of difference, very perceptible to these barbarian soldiers, though it does not seem to be so to the English advocates of their superstition, between the orders and operators of personal violence, and two or three, or ten missionaries, explaining the contents of the four gospels. And even su posing the extreme case, that the spirit of Moloch had entered into them, their victims would have been obvious, few, and unconnected with any others; those victims would have been ready, and there the sacrifice to the dii inferi would have ended. From how many deadly griefs, such a sacrifice, especially had it involved all the missionaries, might have saved our philanthropists!

If this author should say, that his homilies against intolerance are chiefly intended against Dr. Buchanan's proposal for the government to abolish the Hindoo holidays, the excessive polygamy of the Koolin Brahmins, and the privileges of the monstrous swarm of mendicants, to restrain in a measure the female sacrifices, together with other abominations, and to curb the excesses of the 700,000 pilgrims to Jaggernaut; we would ask, once more, what all this has to do with the missionaries? These are suggestions for the solemn consideration of the government, which we are to presume does not like all these outrages of superstition on the good order of society; as but few of them are authorized by the sacred books of the Hindoos themselves, and the government has probably sufficient power to put them down in part without any hazard, we think, notwithstanding this author, that Dr. Buchanan is right in recommending it to be done. But meanwhile, whether it is done or not, or whether it ought to be done or not, the missions will no more interfere with this whole concern, or with any part of it, than they will with the sowing of the rice-grounds. If they should happen to detain two or three dozen persons from the orgies of Jaggernaut, we suppose the 700,000 may possibly not be aware of this deficiency in their numbers, or will hardiy think of taking their revenge by driving all the Europeans into the sea. It is not so much, forsooth, that thier "religion" teaches them to care about one another; nor will the magazines of grain in the neighbourhood of the god be in the least want of additional consumers.

But in truth, all these remarks, levelled to the purpose of getting a precise answer to the inquiry, what it is exactly that the charge of interference and intolerance is to be fixed upon,are very needless. The obnoxious suggestions held out by Dr. Buchanan, with their imaginary or exaggerated ill consequences, the Vellore mutiny, excursive episodes to the distance

of Rosetta, Buenos Ayres, and even Mexico, in Messrs. Twining and Scott Waring and in the article now before us, retrospects so far back as the crusades, St. Bartholomew, and the crimes of superstition recorded in our own blood-stained annals," as they are justly called, whimsically jumbled with some ponderous buffoonery in misrepresentation of the proceedings and hazards of the Methodists itinerating among the Irish Catholics,-are all of most excellent use in varying and distending the reader's view, to a vast compass of alarming vision, while there is still one precise point to which the effect of all this is meant to converge. To that one point the author frequently reverts, in order to preserve in the reader's mind the due bearing of all his exhibitions; but does not stop long there, lest he should lose the effect of his scattered topics of intimidation, and be reduced in the reader's view to the bare exclusive resource of impiety. The object is, by assembling a number of frightful histories, and enlarging on the possible mischief of this or that measure which in fact has not the smallest connexion with the missionary system, and by taking care continually to associate these various representations with references to the missions,-to make the missions take all the portentous colours of these associated shapes of evil, and stand forward to view as the embodied concentration of all real and imaginable perils. It is not military innovation, or the prevention of sacrificing children at Saugor, or the castigation of the gymnosophist Saniassis into a little decency and clothing, or the suppression or allowance of Hindoo holidays or polygamy, that these men really care about; it is precisely the attempt to introduce pure Christianity, as contained in the New Testament, into India, that excites their anger; and it is this very attempt, made in a manner as peaceful, and disconnected from all shadow or even possibility of force or constraint, as that in which any good thing ever attempted to enter any country,that these men wish to brand with the names of illiberality, interference, and intolerance. The missionaries ask of the government just the permission, the mere permission and no more, to pursue their own undertaking, of course by the sole means of persuasion and Christian books; and this permission, if granted, is the intolerance to the Hindoos. It is intolerance to fifty millions of idolaters, that a few Christian instructors should be allowed to tell them that they are guilty and deluded beings, that there is a Redeemer of sinful mortals, that the true God has revealed himself, that idolatry is absurd and wicked, and that women should not be burnt, nor children exposed. It is intolerance to the pagans, to suffer a single word to be said to them in condemnation of any thing which, on the ground of - their superstition, they do wrong, or in contradiction of any

thing they believe erroneously. It is intolerance to them and to their idols, to suffer a few verses of the Bible to be read in the neighbourhood of one of their houses, even with their own consent, or a prayer to be made to the Almighty for their salvation, if it is where they can hear that prayer; so that, according to this latest improvement in the theory of civilization, to tolerate any mode of faith and worship, is to establish it, and that too with all the rigour of popery in the dark ages, insomuch that it shall be a crime for any one of a different persuasion to attempt to make a proselyte from it, or even offer a written statement of his opinions, and the reasons and authority of them. A Hindoo, it seems, lives under an intolerant government, unless that government shail give him a solemn pledge that no Christian shall ever insult him with the remark, that the ugly piece of wood he is worshipping cannot give him rain, or harvest, or health, or pardon of his guilt. This is verily a new notion of toleration and its opposite, and would help to place many celebrated characters in a new light. Nero and Diocletian had an enlarged liberality, to which no historian has had the sense to do justice. They went, to be sure, a little too far in favour of their heathen subjects, as they sometimes did even more than enjoin the total silence of the Christians; but they are amply excused for that slight excess, by the consideration that they were themselves really of the pagan faith. Henry the Fourth committed an inexpiable outrage of intolerance against his popish subjects by the Edict of Nantes ; and therefore Lewis the Fourteenth shewed himself the paragon of tolerant princes, by revoking it. But even his merit might be eclipsed, if there were a protestant king of a country chiefly inhabited by papists, and if he were to compliment their faith by a law of banishment against any one of his protestant subjects that should presume to attempt making a proselyte, or but offer a copy of a reformed catechism. If his present Majesty, as sovereign of the Indian provinces, should be induced to extend this latest improvement of toleration to his heathen subjects in that quarter, there will be other reforms to be adopted nearer home. It must be enacted, in the way of toleration to the Irish catholics, that no protestant shall presume to pray or preach in their hearing, or offer them a tract against image-worship or transubstantiation. Now, in sober sadness, would not any thing like this be the last excess of impious absurdity? But what then would it be to make an enactment-not against the attempt to gain converts from a corrupted to the true mode of Christian faith, but against converting to that faith any of the miserable slaves of the vilest paganism! Let it be added, that this toleration would be the very rivet of their slavery, though the word sounds, and is em

ployed as meaning, something like liberty. In this manner to tolerate these heathens, is to deprive them by force of any means or chance of the benefit of ever becoming Christians; for the force which restrains the agent of any good, is equally a force employed against the subject that might have received it.

As to the alarm, pretended by this writer, as well as the others, to have been excited in India by the missionaries, creating a necessity, on the ground of safety and true policy, of suppressing them, it is totally and incontestably false. They know perfectly well, that if nothing is done to excite the fears or anger of the natives, but what is done by the missionaries, the English gentlemen may continue to sleep in their open bungalows, just as safely as they have done before; they may all, for any thing the Hindoos will do to prevent, live to make their fortunes, and come home to proclaim their irreligion.

Though we do not, however, believe a word of what is reiterated to hoarseness by these men, about the alarming effect of attempting to teach Christianity in Hindostan, we may be allowed to admire the felicity with which the point is argued in such a passage as the following.

It is likewise known, that the disaffection at Palamcottah, somewhat excited by recent alterations in dress, and other (apprehended) changes of Asiatic costume, was highly aggravated by an unhappy report in circulation, that five hundred Europeans were on their way from Madras, for the purpose of enforcing the conversion to Christianity, of all the Mahomedans in the garrison. This single fact should satisfy Mr. Buchanan, of the impolicy and manifest danger of agitating religious questions among the natives of India.' p. 150.

The logic of it appears to stand thus: The troops were alarıned and enraged at the supposed approach of 500 soldiers to drive them into Christianity, or Christianity into them, with their bayonets; the missionaries are no soldiers, have no bayonets, and are not a twentieth part of 500; therefore the troops must be alarmed and euraged at the attempts of the missionaries. Or if the passage would evasively be explained to mean, that the proceedings of the Christian reformers would be sure to give occasion for such false reports, and that such reports would always be sure to excite indignation and commotion,-it has not the smallest force. For if the troops to whom such reports have been carried, have uniformly found them to prove false, and that no such operators or implements of conversion have been ever brought into their sight, they must be incomparably more stupid than their English friends will allow their race to be represented, if their indignation does not, at the second time, turn on the