and bravely in the face-and prefer hardships abroad, with rude plenty for their children, to straits and precarious prospects at home. They have therefore gathered up their little all, and propose to turn farmers on the edge of the wilderness. They voluntarily descend to quasi-barbarism, that their young brood may flourish. They are wise in this, that they go in time. Their children are too young to feel the change much; they will not have many habits to unlearn, and will scarcely know that their adopted, is not their native, country. A more miserable spectacle can hardly be imagined than a grown-up emigrant family, born to better prospects, resorting to such a life-the sons embarrassed with a "polite" education, and the daughters with the usual quota of accomplishments; both the one and the other being of about as much use in such a situation as silk stockings and cambric shirts. A father, a mother, may be capable of submitting without a murmur to the sacrifices enforced by such a change, rather than see their children starve. But where else can we find the heroism or the patience necessary to face

Thank you very heartily for the gift of the version of the New Testament in the "Pushtoo or Affghan" language. I look on it with great reverence, though, when I open it, I am not quite sure whether or not I am looking at it upside down! But it will, I hope, speak to others, though it is dumb to me; at all events it

is a curiosity, as we say. What an uncouth-looking character it is!

Though I can no more make use of the volume than a monkey of a watch, I can honour the faith and patience of those who for so many years, amidst the neglect or contempt of the world, have been silently employed in mastering the Babel of this world's dialects, for the purpose of making the Bible the present polyglot of one hundred and fifty tongues! But courage; this task is in a great measure accomplished; and it was one of the most arduous and essential of all. It has been a long work, and it will be yet many years before it is perfectly accomplished.

This and all other labours of you and your devoted brotherhood, have been but the preparation for the great battle between the gospel and heathenism; it has been the scaffolding for the building. But, if I mistake not, things will proceed henceforth at a greatly accelerated pace. Not that the results, even now, are such as to disappoint any reasonable expectation, as one decisive fact fully shows. I see by the recent Reports of all our great missionary organisations, that a very appreciable portion of the funds in one as much as a fifth-has come from the missionary communities themselves; from Polynesians, Hottentots, Hindoos, and Caffres! This fact is most significant, and speaks for itself in language which cannot be mistaken: for men will give their words for nothing, but when they give their money, they are infallibly in earnest. When, in addition to such facts as these, I consider that the word of God is in almost every dialect of man; that the world no longer frowns on your enterprise, but condescends to take an interest in it; that the most powerful governments, but especially our own, are no longer hostile, but favourable; when I consider, further, that God seems giving such an immeasurable superiority in power, wealth, science, and art to the community of Christian nations as cannot but insure them the moral mastery of the world, an indirect, but most momentous advantage, as you justly say, it is impossible not to anticipate a bright futurity for you.

One of the most hopeful symptoms is the attempt you and

other missionaries are making, to qualify native converts to be teachers of their countrymen. I wonder that it should not have been made from the very first. This was the primitive, and is the only rational method of evangelisation. Till this be adopted, not only must missionary operations be most expensive, and lavish of life, for the agents must be supported at a great distance and exposed to unfriendly climates; but, for both reasons, the number of such agents will be utterly inadequate. And, at best, the agents themselves must always work at an immense disadvantage as compared with native teachers. It is not in human nature to listen attentively to truth from lips that utter it in stammering accents; and it must be years before the missionary can speak his adopted language with fluency and accuracy. I sometimes image to myself the unconscious blunders, doubt, often ludicrous enough, nay, the downright, though most innocent errors, heresies, and blasphemies, which have fallen from the missionary's lips in his early efforts. I am afraid the Gospel, if we were heathens, would stand but a poor chance of being listened to with attention if a foreigner came to preach it to us in broken English, with a foreign pronunciation and a foreign idiom; if one told us, with the Frenchman, "Dat de evangile was come from heaven to be a book of revelation of the will Divine, and to cause to repent a man of all his sins;" or with the German," Dat it vos a melancholy ever-by-man-to-be-remembered fact dat we vos all but cucumbers of de ground!

no

Come now, confess the truth. Do you not fancy that many a young Christian missionary, with more zeal than knowledge, has thus acquired, without inspiration, a gift of speaking unknown tongues?

The immense advantage of the native teacher is that he has no such difficulties; and if a true convert, and intelligently convinced of the essential truths of Christianity, he would in all probability more than make amends for his partial ignorance by his possession. of the vehicle of communication. Of course there is a period during which a missionary colony, like other colonies, must be supported by the "mother country;" but it is my sincere belief

that, in many cases, the system of nursing has been continued too long. In many fields of missionary enterprise, if we may trust Reports (and as to some of the Polynesian islands we know it is so), the converts have been very numerous for many years. Surely the object of the missionaries should have been to train some of them to teach the Gospel they had received - to dismiss them to their work - to leave just a sufficient staff of missionaries to aid in training other converts, and then at once to break new ground. This, at all events, was the Apostolic method. To supply the Christian colonies, which consist of these converts, with teachers from the other side of the world for thirty or forty years together, seems to me as needless as it is inexpedient; likely to keep them always cripples, and to rob still untaught heathen of the benevolence to which these last have equal claims. I am rejoiced therefore to find that you are training, at once, the first converts on whom you can depend for sincerity and sense, to the work of teaching their countrymen; and, in short, that you are resolved to be, in a modest way, the head of a College as well as a minister of the Gospel. I heartily wish all our great societies would set up a college for this purpose in every considerable field of enterprise.

Well, go on and prosper; it is a noble career in which you are engaged and so it ought to be when I reflect on the ties it rends asunder, and the sacrifices it involves. Ah! my friend, I shall never see you more in this world; and as I think of the days never to return of the walks and talks of our early years tears involuntarily fill my eyes. How strange it seems that the besotted world was so long in seeing that no man would choose such things as a Missionary encounters, and that such sacrifices as yours are at least entitled to grateful and reverent mention, even if judged to be the effect of an erring enthusiasm!

Ever yours,

R. E. H G.

My dear Friend,

LETTER LAI.

To Alfred West, Esq

Great Barr, Thursday, April 4, 1850.

I have looked into the bulky volumes you were so obliging as to send me, - for my amusement, as you facetiously say! I would as soon eat sawdust as read them. Even if it were not a dishonest book, a vain parade of erudition; if the author's learning were as profuse as he would have his quotations imply, its perusal would still be intolerable to a man of sense. Here are two huge volumes of more than five hundred pages each, and nearly half those pages contain only some ten lines of text, the rest made up of closely printed notes in double columns, bristling with citations and references! Each page reminds me of Ichabod Crane, with his diminutive head resting on a pair of stilt-like shanks. I calculate there are at least five thousand references which purport to be the result of independent investigation. Now in looking at a few pages only, I see a great many that must have been merely copied from previous writers; many others that really are nothing to the purpose, and many more which remit us to authors so inaccessible, obscure, or worthless, that they could only have been introduced for ostentation's sake, or because the author was sure they would never be hunted up. But it was enough that they would appear to have weight though they had none, or at least evince the author's learning, when they really show nothing but his pedantic vanity. Those authors who have a simple desire to establish their point, never needlessly accumulate citations or references. When the thesis is such that authority is essential, or auxiliary to it, they will, even then, content themselves with the minimum of citations that will answer the purpose. They will reckon them by weight, not by number; by the scales, not by the bushel. Indeed when one has cited two or three names, which so far as authority can effect anything at all, are instar omnium,