Finally How is it that the cause of our opponents should be favoured in most of the Socinian publications, and that they should be so happily united in their wishes for government not to tolerate evangelical religion? One submits "A Plan, to his Majesty's Ministers, the East India Company, and the Legislature," proposing to "recall every English Missionary;" another suggests" Hints to the Public and the Legislature, on the Nature and Effect of Evangelical Preaching." The language of both is, 'We know not what to do with these evangelical men, and therefore humbly request GOVERNMENT to take them in hand!' Yet these are the men who would be thought the friends, and almost the only friends of reason and toleration!

If the Major and his new ally have been accused of dealing too much in reason, we answer with Dr. Owen, They have been unjustly treated; as much so as poor St. Hierome, when beaten by an angel for preaching in a Ciceronean style.

No

So much for the motto. As to the Letter itself, it contains little more than a repetition of things which have no foundation in truth, and which, I trust, have been already answered. The Major having been so ably repulsed in his first object of attack, The British and Foreign Bible Society, may be expected to direct his force somewhat more pointedly against the Missionaries. We have his whole strength, however, in his former Preface. new facts are adduced, nor new arguments from the old ones: almost all is repetition. Thus he repeats the base calumnies, of our bribing beggars to become Christians; and of our sending out thousands a year to support them; of our not having made one good convert; of the converts having lost cast before they were baptised, &c. (pp. 32. 87.) And thus, seven times over, he has repeated the words of Mr. Marshman, on an alarm being excited in a bigoted city by the appearance of an European Missionary," which, after all, respects him not as a Missionary, but merely as a European. The scope of Mr. Marshman's argument proves this: for he is recommending native Missionaries, who, in conversing with their own countrymen, are listened to

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with attention, and excite none of that fear and reserve which are produced by the appearance of a foreigner.*

If the reviling conduct of the inhabitants of a certain village, towards the Missionaries or native converts, (who bore all without resistance,) proves the fault to have been with them, it will prove the same of other Missionaries whom our author professes to respect, and of other native converts. If he will look into the Report of The Society for promoting Christian Knowledge, for 1804, he will see an account "an extraordinary conversion of several thousands, and of an extraordinary and unexpected persecution of the converts from their heathen neighbours, and particularly from some men in office under the Collector." (p. 145.) Moreover, it will prove that the apostle Paul and our Saviour were accountable for the uneasiness which their preaching excited among the Jews, and for the persecutions which they met with on account of it. We may be told, indeed that we ought not to compare ourselves with Christ and his apostles; and it is true, that in various respects, it would be highly improper to do so but in things which are common to Christ and his followers, it is very proper. Now this is the case in the present instance. The disciples of Christ were given to expect that their doctrine would draw upon them the displeasure of unbelievers, in the same manner as that of Christ had done before them. Remember the word that I said unto you, The servant is not greater than his Lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you: if they have kept my saying, they will keep yours also. If Major Scott Waring had known any thing of the gospel, and of its opposition to the vicious inclinations of the human heart, he could not have stumbled in the manner he has, at Mr. Ward's application of the words of cur Saviour, in Luke vii. 51. He had introduced them before, and now he introduces them again and again. (pp. 80. 99.) Suppose ye that I am come to send peace on the earth? I tell you, Nay. "These words," he says, "most evidently considered with their context, apply to the destruction of Jerusalem, which our blessed Saviour predicted would happen before the generation then existing had

* See Periodical Accounts, No. XVI. p. 170.

+ John xv. 20.

passed away." So then, Christ came to set fire to Jerusalem! But how was it already kindled. Almost any commentator would have taught him that these words have no reference to Jewish wars, but to Christian persecutions, which were predicted to take place at the same time. Neither do they express, as I have said before, what was the direct tendency of the gospel, which is doubtless to produce love and peace, but that of which, through man's depravity, it would be the occasion. In this sense Mr. Ward applied the text, in order to account for the persecution which the native converts met with; and I should not have supposed that a man of Major Scott Waring's age and talents could have construed it into a suggestion that the natural tendency of the gospel is to produce division.

The Major proposes to the Rev. Mr. Owen, that they should "preserve the manners of gentlemen in arguing the question." (p. 4.) Is it then becoming to the pen of a gentlemen to write as he has done of Mr. Thomas, and the other Missionaries ?* Or

* Having lately received a letter from a gentleman of respectability in Scotland, concerning the calumny on the memory of Mr. Thomas, I shall take the liberty of introducing it in this place, as a farther vindication of this injured character.

"Dear Sir,

"An anonymous pamphlet has this day fallen into my hands, which is ascribed to a gentleman who formerly held a high rank in the East India Com. pany's military service, and of which it is the principal object to induce the East India Company to expel every Protestant Missionary from the possessions, and to prevent the circulation of the scriptures in the native languages. "Among the numerous and virulent misrepresentations which this work contains, there is a most false and scandalous aspersion of the character of the late M. Thomas, who was the first Missionary of your Society in India, which, from my personal acquaintance with that gentleman, I am enabled to contradict in the most positive manner, and which, from my regard for his memory, I deem it my duty so to contradict.

"The author asserts, in p. 46, and again in p. 51, of the preface, that Mr. Thomas died raving mad in Bengal. It is indeed true, that Mr. Thomas was once afflicted with a temporary derangement; but it was a considerable time before his death. From the summer of 1796, till May 1801, I held an official

* Major Scott Waring's Observations, &c.

does he think himself at liberty, when dealing with them, to put off that character? If his own motives be arraigned, or his Christianity suspected, he thinks himself rudely treated; yet, when speaking of men who secede from the Established Church, he can allow himself to insinuate that they do not act from principle. (p. 58.)

situation in the Company's civil service at Dinagepore; and during the last six months of this period, I had very frequent intercourse with Mr. Thomas, and heard him preach almost every Sunday: and i most solemnly affirm, that I never saw the least symptom of derangement in any part of his behaviour or conversation. On the contrary, I considered him as a man of good understanding, uncommon benevolence, and solid piety.

"In May 1801, I quitted Dinagepore, and never again saw Mr. Thomas; but I had more than one letter from him, between that time and his death, which happened, I think, in October, the same year. These letters, which are still in my possession, exhibit no signs whatever of mental derangement. In the last of them he wrote (with the calmness and hope of a Christian) of his own dissolution; an event which he thought was near at hand, as he felt some internal symptoms of the formation of a polypus in his heart.

"After Mr. Thomas's decease, I had an opportunity of learning the circumstances of it, from the late Mr. Samuel Powel, a person whose veracity none who knew him could question; and I never had the smallest reason to believe or suspect that Mr. Thomas was, in any degree whatever, deranged in mind at the time of his death. On the contrary, I always understood that he died in possession of his faculties, and of that hope which nothing but an unshaken faith in the gospel of Christ can give.

"It is not my present purpose to vindicate the living, from the coarse and vulgar abuse of this anonymous author. This you have undertaken, and are well qualified to do: but, as he has thought it necessary to insult the character of the dead, and wound the feelings of surviving friends; and as I am, per. haps, the only person now in Great Britain, who can, from personal acquaintance with Mr. Thomas during the last year of his life, do any thing to rescue his memory from this unmerited insult, I should think it criminal to have remained silent on this occasion. And I am happy thus to make some return for the instructions I received from Mr. Thomas as a minister of Christ, and the pleasure I frequently enjoyed in his society and conversation. "You are at liberty to make any use of this letter that you may think proper. "Believe me to be,

"Dear Sir, very sincerely yours,

Glasgow, Jan. 15, 1808.

"WILLIAM CUNINGHAME."

As to the charges of "ignorance and bigotry," which he is continually ringing in our ears, I refer to the answers already given in my Strictures. It is allowed, that "Mr. Carey may be a good oriental scholar, and a good man; but he is narrow-minded and intemperate." (p. 33.) The proof of this is taken from the conduct of his son at Dacca. The mistake as to the person is excusable: but what was there in the conduct of either of the young men on that occasion, which showed them to be narrow-minded or intemperate? They felt, though they were not apostles, for a great city wholly given to idolatry; for they had read in their Bibles that "idolators cannot enter the kingdom of God." This was narrowness! But when Major Scott Waring proposes to exclude all denominations of Christian Missionaries from India, except those of the Established Church, I suppose he reckons this consistent with liberality.

With regard to intemperateness, I know of nothing like it in the conduct of these junior Missionaries. They gave away tracts to those who came to their boat for them, and wished to have taken a stand in the city for the like purpose: but, being interrupted, they retured home; not declining, however, to do that which had been done for years without offence, during the administration of Marquis Wellesley; namely, to distribute tracts in the villages. As to the Marquis Cornwallis, or any other person, being absent from Calcutta, it had just as much influence in causing their journey, as Major Scott Waring's being at the same time, perchance, at Peterborough House.

But their language is cant. The Major, however, might find plenty of such cant in the communications of Schwartz and his colleagues, to The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, if he would only look over the East India Intelligence in their Reports. These, he tells us, were Missionaries in his time, and of them be approves: yet if their letters were printed in our accounts, they

*Such is the notion of liberality and toleration which I ventured to denounce in my Letter to the Chairman of the East India Company; and I wish I were able to draw the serious attention of every friend to religious liberty in Brit ain to the subject. These men talk of liberty, while they are razing it to its foundation.