pinion do you cross the Arabian Desert to Mecca and El Medina, and see the caravans from every part of the dominions of Islam assembling to honour the false prophet? Have you ever thought of the Moors and Berbers, the ferocious Moslems of Constantine, and the high-spirited Bedouin of the Desert, the Persian, the Turk, the Hindu, and the Cingalese, the Syrian Pasha and the Egyptian Fellah, all worshipping, revelling, dancing together about the prophet's birthplace and his grave? Oh! those interminable processions, those long strings of camels, those dromedaries of Midian and Ephah, those living lines that stretch across the deserts of Araby the Blest! Can you image to yourselves those multitudes of evildoers?

Then can you sweep on your hasty wing away, to follow the track of Livingstone, and Speke, and Burton, among the tribes of Central Africa, and complete your review with the hundreds of thousands of men who seem there to be removed but a few sad steps above the brutes that perish, or with the naked Fuegian savages, living under the pitiless rains of the south polar seas, feeding on raw fish and carrion, with no idea of God, no hope, no law, no virtue, no sense of truth or shame-our vain but strongest hope about whom is, that they have no souls? However this may be, there they are, cursing the earth, and humbling man's image to the dust. Have you completed your survey yet? Think of the slave countries, and of the dwellers in the thousand islands of the

seas. Alas! our hearts sicken at the recital. The multitudinousness, whatever may be the character, of those who are denying the sovereignty of God, and resisting or utterly ignoring the love of Christ, is inconceivably appalling; but it is by no means the most solemn consideration.

(2) Let us add to this enumeration some conception of the variety of the evildoers. They differ almost infinitely from each other, and there are broad lines of distinction among them which shew that their opposition to God is not the result of some one physical condition, but that it proceeds from totally different causes, and that our treatment of them must be regulated by entirely different considerations. The white man and the Christian, when he presses into the interior of China, is regarded as a mean interloper, "a foreign devil," something scarcely fit to be spit upon, so utterly is he, in the estimation of the people, below the dignity and sublimity of the Chinese nation. On the contrary, when the Christian finds his way to the heart of Africa, in the person of some Moffat or Livingstone, he has great difficulty in preventing the impression that he is something more than human. The differences of race, of climate, of prejudices, of traditions, are almost infinite. If the evildoers are to be reduced, if the human race is to be modified in those faiths and practices which now give it an awful intensity of evil, which are the millstones round its neck dragging it down to perdition, how varied must be

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the operations of those who would fain become the saviours of the world!

In one place there is subtle speculation, in another gross vice; here utter indifference, there wild fanaticism; in one tribe crushing ignorance, in another daring philosophy and luxuriant imagination. Some there are, who under the stimulus of history and myth are virtual adorers of humanity, as the Confucianist and the Northern Buddhist; others, without traditions, or love, or duty, cherish no reverence, and fear no evil. The regiments of the prince of this world wear various uniforms; the mutineers in God's army are widespread and bear divers colours: they speak a hundred dialects or tongues, and are scattered over the whole world. Amid the varieties that we have to contend against, and the sins that we know to be grieving the heart of Immanuel, let us not forget to characterize the sympathizers with evil who are in our homes and at our side. Let us not omit to notice the men who find in the variety of the mutineers some arguments against the legitimacy of the Great King, who give to these forms of evil-doing gentle names, who are hopeless about the work of their reduction, and give it up in despair. There is, indeed, an utter worldliness which seems regaled with the idea of the inefficiency of all missionary operations, which covers its hatred to Christ under the form of philosophic and judicious disapproval of Christian missions; which never loses an opportunity of instilling prejudices against their

claims, of impugning their usefulness, and sneering at their work.

(3) It may be observed in reference to these evildoers, that they are closely organized. The differences of which we have spoken in race, position, language, religion, philosophical character, take great leading types, and have prominent characteristics. There are millions of dogmatic atheists, whose religion and whose law ignore the Creator, who believe in the eternity of matter, the perpetual recurrence of physical changes, the endless transmigration of souls, and the great blessedness of final extinction; whose ideal of excellence is a simply human ideal, whose law is moral in theory but powerless as a motive, and whose melancholy dogmas, after spreading over one-third of the human race, are losing their hold on the masses who profess to believe in them. Whatever might affect powerfully the Fohist of the Celestial Empire would before long strike deep into the heart of the Burmese, and the inhabitant of Nepaul, of Ceylon, and Japan. There are subtle links of faith that bind the millions of the East, and move them in vast masses. In China the devotees of Confucius and the sect of the believers in Laotse, though differing widely from the Buddhist in their metaphysical position, come practically to the same ignoring of all spiritual truth, and to a virtual man-worship. Educated on one type, influenced by the same traditions, moulded by the same general system of government and science, there is abundant organization and much.

coincidence of action. They have traditions that rival ours in antiquity, they have philosophical speculations that exceed ours in subtlety, they have a floating idea of right approximating ours in theoretic purity. It is profoundly difficult to make way against the tremendous tide of opinion, practice, and reverence that flows in upon us from all the generations of the past, when we rise up against those who in the name of their religion and their philosophy resist the authority, laugh at the promises, despise the law, and trample on the blood of Christ. Again; in India, with all the varieties of faith that prevail on that Continent of nations, now subject to the sway of Victoria, there are great and startling signs of combination against God and His Christ. Caste is not an opinion which may be shewn here and once for all to be an absurdity, but it is a great social condition, which penetrates every relationship of life, which being sanctified in the later religious books is a subtle and vast enrolment of Hindus against the personal responsibility, the equality and brotherhood of man; which raises at every point of the social scale a whole army, compact in its phalanx and determined in its spirit against all the broadest, noblest, most spiritual teaching of Christ. Take away caste from the Brahmin, and you deprive him of his birthright. Take away caste from the mind of the Hindu, and you take away his living God. The most acute minds, and the best educated of the native populations, fight against all that we believe to be