MRS. OPIE'S ODE ON HEBER.

439

the humblest of his flock. He had scarcely put off the sacred robes with which he served at the altar of his God on earth, when he was suddenly admitted to his sanctuary on high, and clothed in the garments of immortality."*

From the best information I can command, I am inclined to think that among the many noble efforts which have been put forth by missionaries from England and America, the labors of the Baptists, and the missionaries sent out by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, have been attended with almost unprecedented zeal and success so far as their means and numbers have extended. Some of the most prominent examples of Christian heroism and firm endurance have been exhibited by American women, missionaries' wives and relatives, who have gone to aid in evangelizing that great continent. Who does not remember the beautiful life of Mrs. Judson?

XII.

ZEALOUS, generous, and unfaltering, however, as have been

the efforts of all Christian missionaries who have gone to India, they have often found their labors more or less paralyzed by the unrighteous and characteristic system of despotism and iniquity everywhere inflicted by the British East India Company, and too often by the officers of the British Crown itself. Until 1812 the East India Company not only gave no encouragement to the missionaries to labor in India, but actually opposed their

* During one of the evenings that I spent in the society of that most charming woman, Mrs. Opie, I ascertained that the following tribute to Heber's memory was written by that lady:

"Here hush'd be my lay for a far sweeter verse;

Thy requiem I'll breathe in thy numbers alone,
For the bard's votive offering, to hang on thy hearse,

Shall be form'd of no language less sweet than thy own.

"Thou art gone to the grave, but we will not deplore thee,
Since God was thy refuge, thy ransom, thy guide;
He gave thee, he took thee, and he will restore thee,
And death has no sting, since the Saviour has died."

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BARRIERS TO CHRISTIANIZING INDIA.

efforts. They knew that the Hindu and Mohammedan superstitions, which had existed for ages, would not suddenly give way at the appearance of Christianity; and fearful of everything that might disturb in any degree the quiet of their empire, were careful not to arouse the inveterate prejudices of the natives by any interference with their religion; indeed, in many instances, heavy taxes have been imposed on the Indians by the Company, for the support of heathen temples and even Juggernaut, for the purpose of strengthening the British rule. Nor were the cases few in which the Company united with idolaters in undermining the influence of the missionaries. There was great hostility manifested by the Company towards Christianity. Bishop Heber said of the character of the Company's servants, "many of the adventurers who go thither from Europe are the greatest profligates the world ever saw; men whom nothing but despotism can manage, and who, unless they were under a despotic rule, would insult, beat and plunder the natives without shame or pity; even now many instances of insult and misconduct occur.'

The very existence of such unjust and cruel despotism as the Company reared, proved a perpetual and inseparable barrier to the Christianizing of India. How little likely are the natives to adopt our religion-that of the Holy One of Calvary— when the representatives of a Christian nation among them show so little regard to morality or justice. No heathen conqueror ever brought in his train a more oppressive, if indeed a more bloody government, than that of the Company. Besides, it does not require the keen-sighted perception of the Hindu to discover the glaring contradiction between the lives of Englishmen there, and the pure and benevolent spirit of the missionary and his faith. These considerations would alone have accounted for the slow progress of Christianity in India, without imputing to Christian missionaries of any sect any dereliction of duty, or lack of zeal in the execution of their mission.

Many noble men have become known for eminent services in

HOW ENGLAND TREATS HEATHEN.

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India who have gone as missionaries of the Established Church of England. There have been good bishops and ministers at their missionary stations, but the influence of their doctrine is greatly impaired by denying the validity of all other ordinations or forms of the Christian Church. They tell the heathen everywhere that the Scotch or the American Presbyterian, or Baptist, or Methodist missionary is no minister-no ambassador of Christ-has no right to administer the sacred ordinances of Christianity. It makes the heart sick to think of such things—the Pagan looks on and clings more firmly to his idols. How can it be expected either that the heathen will perceive any beauty or divinity in a religion which, by the practice of Christian nations, must appear to them as one of the highest crimes and abuses ever perpetrated on earth. Christ commanded his followers to love their enemies. Christians destroy their enemics by war, and gibbet them on the gallows. says all souls are mine.*

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God

* In an able article in the August number of the Church Missionary Society Intelligencer, on the late catastrophe at Opitiki, in New Zealand, the writer says of the Maori race, who had barbarously massacred one of the missionaries of the Church Missionary Society: They have cast off their Christianity because, thoroughly alienated, and disliking everything English, they disliked the religion they had received from us. Such a result we ought to have been prepared for. They were disposed at one time to English rule, and to fraternization with the English colonists. They became THE VICTIMS, as is admitted now by the colonial authorities themselves, of an UNJUST WAR. They found that Christianity had not taught England to be just in her administrative action towards inferior races; that might was counted as right, and, if resisted, then the resistance was denounced as rebellion; and now from England, and the Christianity of Eng land, this section of the native race is utterly averted.

"There is nothing new in this. The same series of events occurred in Ireland; and there, too, land feuds, wars between the natives and the intruding race, in which the more powerful prevailed, and then confiscation on a wide scale, laid the foundations of a deep-rooted disaffection to the English power and the English faith, which from generation to generation has been perpetuated to this day. This is the reason why Scriptural Christianity makes such slow progress in the sister country; it is because it is regarded as English. A powerful nation can, of course, deal harshly with inferior races, but she must accept the consequences, in the turbulence of a disaffected people, and their reluctancy to the yoke. We

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THE CURSES-SLAVERY AND RUM.

XIII.

(HRISTIANS have trafficked in the souls of men, no less than

CHR

the Heathen World. The Bible declares that no drunkard shall inherit the kingdom of God; intemperance costs England and America several hundred millions every yearhundreds of thousands of lost bodies and souls of men—the peace of tens of thousands of families-all over the British empire and the American Republic to-day, the career of the conqueror Rum is marked with an unbroken chain of corpses.

It is not too much to say, that slavery and intoxicating liquors have, till within the past year, been the two great curses of the Anglo-Saxon race. Everlasting thanks be to the God of eternal freedom, that, from one of these curses our Republic is at last redeemed. But a mightier redemption than from slavery is yet to be achieved, before we can go forward victoriously to scatter the Gospel of Christ, and sow the seeds of Republican Institutions through the world: We must become a sober nation. This is the great revolution we have now before us. It will cost a longer, larder and mightier struggle than at last overthrew American slavery. If America could become a sober nation to-day, she would achieve the political and spiritual salvation of the whole human race inside of a century. God send, that towards that goal every Christian effort, every Christian heart, and every aspiration of every lover of the human race, may be directed with resistless energy.

regard the Pai Marire as a banner of disaffection to the English rule, and to Christianity as identified with that rule.” . . . . .

The writer then asks, "What is to be done under these circumstances?' The savage can never be socially amalgamated with the white man, but must disappear before him.' So says the Times. We deny the impossibility, provided only that the native be dealt with according to those great principles which Christianity inculcates. This has been done. We load him with the conjoined weight

of European and native faults, and then, pronouncing him irreclaimable, doom him to extermination. But does God approve of this procedure? Has He given authority to Englishmen to tread down native races and appropriate their land? No!"

LORD CLIVE AND WARREN HASTINGS.

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XIV.

ORD CLIVE and Warren Hastings deserve special notice. Clive is acknowledged by Macaulay to have utterly discarded every principle of honor, integrity and good faith, in his dealings with the princes and the people of India. But he justified himself, and was justified by others, by the perfidy and base cunning of the men and the communities whom he was determined to subjugate. "In other parts of his life an honorable English gentleman and a soldier, he was no sooner matched against an Indian intrigue, than he descended without scruple to falsehood, to hypocritical caresses, to the substitution of documents and to the counterfeiting of hands." In like manner most English writers and statesmen justify the long catalogue of wrongs inflicted on Ireland, on the ground that the first British invasion found the Irish nation in a state of semi-barbarism-and the foreign tyrant still rules her, because she can no longer rule herself.

The fruit of Clive's infamous policy is summed up by Macaulay: "Clive walked between heaps of gold and silver, crowned with rubies and diamonds, and was at liberty to help himself. He accepted between two and three hundred thousand pounds." No limits have ever been set to the rapacity of the servants of the East India Company, or of the British Government itself. Nobody ever went to India in an official capacity except to make money-and generally without scruples as to the means. "Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while thirty millions of human beings were reduced to the extremity of wretchedness. They had been accustomed to live under tyranny, but never under tyranny like this. They found the little finger of the Company thicker than the loins of Surjah Dowlah. Under their old masters they had at least one recourse; when the evil became unsupportable, the people rose and pulled down the government. But the English Government was not to be so shaken off. That