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duce as many barrels. The whole coast abounds besides with hair and fur seals; the trade in which, either for the London or China markets, might be worth attention.

The ship, from the crew of which this information has been obtained,

was unfortunately wrecked whilst pursuing a profitable traffic on the coast. She was the only English vessel remembered there, although about twenty ships annually resort thither, a few of them French, but the greater number Americans.

*

A DISCOURSE ON MISSIONS, BY JOHN FOSTER. In the first part of this most eloquent and powerful composition, the Preacher observes, that there is a certain principle of correspondence to religion throughout the economy of the world. Things bearing an apparent analogy to its truths, sometimes more prominently, sometimes more abstractly, present themselves on all sides to a thoughtful mind. This lofty view of God and nature, he illustrates with a splendour and magnificence of thought and language, perhaps beyond the reach of any other writer of our dayexhibiting all things as a great system of emblems, reflecting or shadowing the will of the Almighty, and "religion standing up in grand parallel to an infinity of objects, receiving their testimony and homage, and speaking with a voice which is echoed by the creation."

imagined scene of real conflict; and they shall feel a proud elation in rising from the stale and sleepy notion of a spiritual warfare, to the magnificence of the combats which are

own

In many parts of this sermon we are strongly reminded of our Chalmers and we know of none but "these brethren in power," who could have written the passages we are now about to quote. Mr Foster is enforcing on our minds this great truth, that in the character of servants of God, we are all placed under the necessity of an intense moral warfare against the powers of evil, as real and palpable as ever were encountered in the field of battle.

It is striking to observe, at the same time, in what manner many of the persons who are thus tired to loathing of these images in their moral and spiritual application, shall be all energy when the same forms of thought come in literal representation of war. Most of the excitable animated class of spirits, whether in youth or much more advanced in life, can be kindled to enthusiasm by the grand imagery of battles and heroic achievements. Those very terms of martial metaphor, under the spiritual import of which they are beginning, perhaps amidst some religious service, to sink in dulness, may relieve them by a sudden diversion of the mind away to some

displayed in fire and blood to the eyes, and
in thunder to the ears. The imagination
shall follow some magnanimous mortal, of
history or fiction, through scenes of tumult,
and terror, and noble daring, and shall
adore him as beheld exulting unhurt in vic-
tory, or breathing out his soul as a hero
should die. The enthusiast while sitting
still and abstracted, may at moments be
almost beguiled in fancy into a personation
of this favourite hero. And the scenes of
destruction, thus fervidly imagined, shall
really be deemed the sublimest exhibitions
of man, in which human energy approaches
the nearest to a rivalry with the immortals,
his mind, perhaps, silently pronouncing
this very term, conformably to that last per-
versity of human madness by which an
epithet expressing negation of all relation to
death, has been selected in special prefer-
ence to be applied to men whose very busi-
ness has been to deal in death, both as
givers and receivers. If, in this enflamed
state of the mind, the idea were again pre-
sented of the Christian warfare, of a con-
test against principalities and powers, and
spiritual wickedness, it would be repelled
with disdain of the impertinence or arro-
gance which could assume for such matters
any of the lofty terms belonging, and, (it
would be proudly said), deservedly applied,
to the transactions of Trafalgar and Water-
loo. This contempt may be inspired by the
but
imagination alone of the glories of war,
it would be felt in a still stronger degree by
most of the men who have actually witness-
ed and shared the terrors and triumphs of
martial exploit, if it could happen that they
should hear the figurative language in ques-
tion, and lend for a moment attention
enough to understand what it should mean.
In short, between distaste for its insipidity,
and almost resentful scorn of its imperti-
nence of pretension, the metaphor would
be, by the greatest number of men of spi-
rit and imagination, flung back on the weak
and dreaming religionists, as an idle fancy
Let these wars,
just fit for their jargon.
enemies, and heroes of vapour, they would
say, busy the feeble souls to which they can
have the effect of realities.

* Printed for Josiah Conder, St Paul's Church Yard, London.

454

But while this is their feeling, what shall we think of the state of their perception? Alas, for the condition of the senses of the souls that have so little cognisance of a most fearful reality which exists on every How deside and presses upon them! plorable to see men exercising their faculties, in observation, and interest, and caution, on the elements and agents around them, and yet scarcely apprehending the presence of the worst of them all, and, excepting the Divinity, the mightiest; and to see them "sporting themselves with their own deceivings," while they are turning away with slight or scorn from the representations by which divine or human admonition is attempting to alarm them to a sense of their danger from this grand enemy, Moral Evil. And then to observe that among creatures so insensible there is, the while, a quick and ardent recognition of enemies, a martial spirit, and all the pomp and pride of wars, battles, victories! Truly it is a spectacle for the most malignant intelligences in the creation to exult over, that such creatures should be seeking glory in destructive conflicts with one another, while their most dreadful foe is invading them all. It is a spectacle of still darker character than that which would have been presented by opposed armed parties or legions, gallantly maintaining battle on the yet uncovered spaces of ground, while the universal deluge was rising.

He soon afterwards proceeds still more eloquently in the same strain.

mour.

Sometimes we contemplate, perhaps, the mighty progress of destruction, as carried over a large tract of the earth by some of the memorable instruments of the divine wrath, such as Attila, Zingis Khan, or TiWe behold a wide spreading terror preceding, to be soon followed by the realisation of every dreadful presage in resistless The doomed ravage and extermination. countless multitudes crowd tumultuously on our view, in all the forms of dismay, and vain effort, and suffering, and death; a world of ghastly countenances, desperate struggles, lamentable cries, streaming blood, and expiring agonies; with the corresponding circumstances of fury and triumph, and the appropriate scenery of habitations burning and the land made a desert.

The fancied forms of individual sufferers, incessantly marked forth from the confused aggregate, and presented to the mind in momentary glimpses, preserve the vividness of our perception of the misery, unconfounded in the view of its immensity, while that immensity throws over all the more distinct impressions a general character of hor

ror.

When a man of ardent imagination has dwelt upon such a scene till it almost glows into reality in his view, let him be assured it is the language of truth and soberness that affirms this spectacle to form

but a faint and inadequate comparison for
representing that other invasion, which is
made upon the spirits of all mankind, that
invasion of which, indeed, all these horrors
are themselves but a few of the exterior cir-
And yet creatures
cumstances and results.
assailed and in danger of destruction by this
more awful calamity, surveying in imagi-
nation, and shuddering while they survey,
these furies and miseries of remote times or
regions, shall bless their good fortune that
they are not exposed to any agency of evil a
thousandth part so formidable!

In following in thought those perpetrators
of devastation and carnage, we have the
consolation of foreseeing its end. The
Cæsars and Attilas were as mortal as the
millions who expired to give them fame.
Of Timour, the language of the Historian
kindling into poetry, relates that," he
pitched his last camp at Otrar, where he
was expected by the Angel of Death." But
the power that wages war immediately on
the souls of men, the power of delusion and
depravity, has continued to live and destroy
while all these renowned exterminators have
yielded to the decree that sent them after
their victims. It is perpetually invigorated
by the very destruction which it works; as
if it fed upon the slain to strengthen itself
for new slaughter, immortal by the very
means of death. For the operations of sin
on human beings are of a nature to facili-
tate its renewed and prolonged operations.
The effects are continually reflected back on
the cause, with which they unite, and im-
part an indefinite augmentation to its force;
the main principle of its strength, all the
while, being in the natural aptitude of its
unhappy subjects to receive the mischief
which it applies. The beings therefore un-
der the predominant power of sin are be-
coming, without intermission, more and
more absolutely sinners; so that each step
in the advance gives stronger assurance of
their maintaining that character in the next.
But what an awful scene is a world with a
vast multitude of inhabitants of whom the
great majority are incessantly growing
worse! And to what dreadful perfection of
evil might not such a race attain but for
death, that cuts the term of individuals so
short, and but for the Spirit of God, that
converts some, and puts a degree of res-
traint on the rest.

And now, if there is really thus in action, against the souls of our race, such an enemy as all these epithets and images can but faintly represent, can a professed servant of

God look round and felicitate himself on

having an extremely easy test of his fideliground of immunity and indulgence, while ty? Where does he find his privileged this mighty force of evil drives and sweeps and rages, against God and truth, against goodness and happiness, and his own spirit and all men's spirits, as really as an infernal legion could do? In seeking such

• Gibbon.

exemption he must abandon all the objects and interests against which this hostility is directed; must therefore, in effect, co-operate with the enemy. Let him consider what scheme it is possible to conceive of true service to the King of heaven in this bad world which should not commit him in conflict, at every point of its execution. Against every good he can think of he will find an appropriate antagonist evil already in full action, an action that will not remit and sink into quiet when he approaches to effect the intended good. Nay, indeed, in what way is it that the servant of God the most promptly apprehends the nature of his vocation but in that of seeing what it is against? And when he puts the matter to experimental proof, does he ever find that those apprehended adversaries are nothing but menacing shadows? Let him that has made the most determined, protracted, and extensive trial, tell whether it is idle common-place and extravagance when we say,

that all Christian exhortation is in truth a summons to war."

Mr Foster then remarks, that there are many powers and agencies of the grand enemy, Moral Evil, which press so immediately on a man's own personal economy, that a habitual conflict with them is an essential condition of the Christian character. But others again there are of great power and hatefulness, which do not so directly force themselves into the question of his being a Christian or not. The sphere of their malignant operation lies, perhaps, at a greater distance, and they may seem from their magnitude and consolidated establishment, to bid defiance to the efforts of individuals. Mr Foster accordingly admits freely, that the exhortation to a Christian, to exert a share of his force in this direction, may be considered as partly an appeal to those higher sentiments of the religious spirit, which aspire to the full magnanimity and zeal of the Christian character. "It is an incitement to their ambition, that it may never again be said, with respect to any part of the operations of God against evil among men, that he trod the winepress alone, and that of the people there was none with him."

When animated to this high and enterprising spirit, a good man may wonder that the heathenism prevailing over large tracts of the world, should so little, in this country, or other protestant nations, till a comparatively recent time, have been accounted as comprehended within the sphere of required Christian exertion. The VOL. V

friends of religion seem to have regarded those dreadful maladies of the moral world, the delusions and abominations of paganism, with a sort of submissive awe, as if almost they had established a prescriptive right to their place on earth-" as if they were an unchangeable, uncontroulable part of the great system of things, like the destructive climates of certain portions of the globe, and the liability of others to the terrors of earthquakes."

Within a later period, however, within that chiefly which has shewn, on so vast a scale, the availableness of human agency for overturning things of ancient, and wide, and commanding establishment in the world, Mr Foster remarks, that men have begun to regard, with less prostration of feeling, those gigantic dominations which have for so many ages held so many nations in the debasement of superstition. Indeed what man who has been a philosophical observer of the events of modern history, would dare to affirm what must be the durability of any human establishments? Even truth, righteousness, and wisdom are not immortal on earth; and shall it be asserted, without awakening, in all thoughtful hearts, indignation and scorn, that any system, formed, built, and cemented by the most hideous superstition, must of necessity be everlasting on the land which it darkens ? It is somewhat singular that those persons who first argued against all attempts to christianize India, on the ground of the essential immortality of the Hindoo Superstition, were those who, in an especial manner, arrogated to themselves the title of philosophers, while they were thus advancing a proposition which was belied by all history, both sacred and profane. While they tried to cover, with ridicule and shame, the ignorance and the fanaticism of all missionaries they themselves were standing on ground which shelved away, and crumbled beneath their feet. They were the ignorant fanatics of a false philosophy, and scoffingly preaching in their darkness to those who were walking in the sunshine. So little did they know of human nature, that they believed the fetters of fear to be stronger than the links of love; and that the human soul would cling, with more inseparable passion, to the grim idols unto whose worship it approached through

2 M

misery and blood, than it has ever been known to cling to the altar built by faith, and illuminated by revelation. What then was the advice given to christians by those philosophers who believed in the invincible power of wickedness and falsehood? It was to leave the Hindoo Superstition to itself, for that it was a rock against which the vain efforts of Christianity would be flung back like the idle foam of the sea. It would not be difficult to shew that the philosophers of whom we are now speaking, have not succeeded in giving the solution of any one of those moral problems, which, in our own time, have been forced upon the minds of men meditating on their own grand and melancholy destinies. They have uniformly shewn themselves ignorant of the elements of human nature, and hence, in spite of all their powers of ratiocination, they have never arrived at the truth. We would not give such a man as Foster or Chalmers for them all; and, in saying so, we speak the sentiments of Britain, for while our modern philosophers are talked of with that wavering and dubious admiration which mere exhibitions of intellect excite, they, and others such as they, are partakers of that deep, profound, affectionate, and grateful reverence, with which men regard the wise and benign benefactors of their species.

While the philosophers have been satisfied with the simple affirmation that Christianity can never be introduced among the natives of India, Foster has, in this discourse, entered into an examination of the causes constituting the power and the weakness of their horrid superstition. Our next extract shall be a long one, but we do not fear to say that it is not surpassed, either in eloquence or philosophy, by any composition of our time.

"There is much in the Hindoo system that is strikingly peculiar; but as it is the substantial greatness of the evil, rather than its specific discriminations, that requires to be presented to the view of Chris tian zeal, our brief notices will mainly place the emphasis on qualities common to this with the other principal modes of paganism. Our object is rather to exhibit the system in its strength of pernicious operation than in any explanatory statement of its form and materials. There needs no great length of description, since the communications of missionaries, and various works in common

circulation, have made all who take the least interest in the subject familiarly acquainted with the prominent features of the For the atheathenism of central Asia. tainment of any thing like a complete which faculty besides, if it might search the knowledge it may defy all human faculty, universe for choice of subjects, could find nothing less worth its efforts for knowledge. The system, if it is to be so called, is an utter chaos, without top, or bottom, or cenre, or any dimension or proportion belonging either to matter or mind, and consisting of what deserves no better order. It gives is not of the value of an atom. one the idea of immensity filled with what It is the most remarkable exemplification of the possibility of making the grandest ideas contemptible, for that of infinity is here combined with the very abstract of worthless

ness.

"But, deserving of all contempt as it is, regarded merely as a farrago of notions and fantasies, it becomes a thing for detestation practical light, as the governing scheme of and earnest hostility when viewed in its principles and rites to a large portion of our race. Consider that there is thus acting upon them, as religion, a system which is in nearly all its properties, that which the true religion is not, and in many of them the exact reverse. Look at your religion, presented in its bright attributes before you, realise to your minds as far as you can, the reflecting those of its Author; and then condition of so many millions of human spirits receiving, without intermission, from infancy to the hour of death, the full influence of the direct opposites to these divine principles,-a contrast of condition but faintly typified by that between the Israelites and the Egyptians in beholding, on the different sides, the pillar in its appearance

over the Red sea.

the intellectual and moral systems under Consider in comparison which we and they are passing forward to another world. While ours has, as its solar light and glory, the doctrine of One Being in whom all perfections are united and infinite, theirs scatters that which is the most precious and vital sentiment of the human soul, and indeed of any created intelligence, to an indefinite multitude and diversity of adored objects; the one system carrying the spirit downward to utter debasement through that very element of feeling in which it should be exalted, while the other, when in full influence, bears it upward in spite of a thousand things combining to degrade it. The relation subsisting between man and the divinity, as unfolded to view in the true religion, is of a simple and solemn character; whereas the Brahminical theory exhibits this relation in an infinitely confounded, fantastic, vexatious, and ludicrous complexity of form. While in the Christian system the future state of man is declared with the same dignified simplicity, the opposed paganism,

between some inane dream of an aspiring mysticism on the one hand, and the paltriest conceits of a reptile invention on the other, presents, we might say sports, this sublime doctrine and fact in the shapes of whimsey and riddle. Ours is an economy according to which religion, considered as in its human subjects, consists in a state of the mind instead of exterior formalities; the institutes of the Hindoos make it chiefly consist in a miraculously multiplied and ramified set of ritual fooleries. It is almost superfluous to notice in the comparison, that while the one enjoins and promotes a perfect morality, the other essentially favours, and even formally sanctions, the worst vices. It may suffice to add, that while the true religion knows nothing of any precedence in the Divine estimate and regard, of one class of human creatures before another, in virtue of nativity or any mere natural distinction, the superstition we are describing has rested very much of its power upon a classification according to which one considerable proportion of the people are, by the very circumstance of their birth, morally distinguished as holy and venerable, and another more numerous proportion, as base and contemptible, sprung from the feet of the creating god, that they might be slaves to the tribe which had the luck and honour to spring from his head.

"Such is this aggregate of perversions of all thought, and feeling, and practice. And yet, the system, being religion, acts on its subjects with that kind of power which is appropriate and peculiar to religion. The sense which man, by the very constitution of his nature, has of the existence of some super-human power, is one of the strongest principles of that nature; whatever, therefore, takes effectual hold of this sense will go far toward acquiring the regency of his moral being. This conjunction of so many delusions does take possession of this sense in the minds of the Hindoos, with a mightier force than probably we see in any other exhibition of the occupancy of religion, on a wide scale, in the world. But to the power which the superstition has in thus taking hold of the religious sense, is to be added that which it acquires by another and a dreadful adaptation; for it takes hold also, as with more numerous hands than those given to some of the deities, of all the corrupt principles of the heart. What an awful phenomenon, that among a race of rational creatures a religion should be mighty almost to omnipotence by means, in a great measure, of its favourableness to evil!

"Observe, again, the power possessed by this stupendous delusion in having direct hold on the Senses, in so many ways, even exclusively of the grosser means, (the grossest possible, as you are apprised) of which it avails itself to please them. It comes out in manifestation upon the view

of its devotees in a visible striking imagery, which meets them on all sides. All their vanities of doctrine stand, as it were, embodied before them, and occupy their faculties sooner than they can think, more constantly than they think, and in a mode of possession stronger than mere thought. Indeed it is a mode of possession which, (after faith has grown into the habit of the mind), may be effectual on the feelings though thought be wanting; for we may presume that in India, as in other regions, when external forms and shows have been admitted as symbols of subjects of belief, they may preserve in the people much of the moral habitude appropriate to that belief, even at times when there is no strictly intellectual apprehension of the matter. The Hindoo is under the influence of this enchantment upon his senses, almost wherever the Christian remonstrant against the dreams and rites of his superstition can approach him, seeking access to his reason and conscience. The man thus attempting may have read idle fictions of magical spells, which obstruct the passing of some line, or preclude entrance at a gate; but here he may perceive a real intervening magic, between the truth he brings, and the intellectual and moral faculties into which he wishes to introduce it. In his missionary progress among the people, perhaps he shall address them for the first time where there is in sight some votive object, some consecrated relic, or the tomb of some revered impostor; things which, connected, in their apprehension, as closely with religion as their garments are with their persons, must needs be indicative that that which they belong to is there; they are felt as pledges of it reality, and signs of its authority impending over them. A very firm association has not only the effect of our being reminded by the less object of the greater, but of our having an aggravated sense of the reality of that greater.

"His next address may be uttered in the vicinity of a temple, which, if in ruins, seems to tell but so much the more emphatically, by that image and sign of antiquity, at what a remote and solemn distance of time that was the religion which is the religion still; if undilapidated and continuing in its appropriate use, overawes their minds with the mysterious solemnities of its inviolable sanctuary; while the sculptured shapes and actions of divinities, overspreading the exterior of the structure, have nothing in their impotent and monstrous device and clumsy execution, to abate the reverence of Hindoo devotion toward the objects expressed in this visible language. The missionary, if an acute observer, might perceive how rays of malignant but imperative influence strike from such objects upon the faculties of his auditors, to be as it were reflected in their looks of disbelief and disdain upon the preacher of the new doctrine. What a strength of guardianship is thus ar

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