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what every man things of himself in reality, till" taught of God." Is not every person's conversion to God, described in Scripture as a new creation, the word of Almighty power? If" the carnal mind be enmity against God," of course if left to itself, it will never return to him. But let Him who "caused the light to shine out of darkness, shine into the heart" of ten thousand brahmuns, to give them the light of the knowledge of God in the face of Jesus Christ, and they will instantly cast there idols to the moles and the bats. With this agrees the experience of the Serampore missionaries. While among the brahmuns who have embraced Christianity, they have found one or two whom they fear, were really bad men; they have found others as eminent for piety, as most European christians.

Our Author must have forgotten himself when he added after having declared the Hindoos to be characterized by St. Paul in his first chapter to the Romans, "I now leave it to every candid and unprejudiced observer,-whether we may entertain the remotest hope of Christianity's gaining ground among a people so circumstanced?" What if the Hindoos be precisely characterized in that chapter? Are those whom St. Paul there characterizes, by himself left to perish? Are they not the very persons to whom he accounted himself bound to preach the gospel? yea and those among whom he had already reaped "some fruit" of his ministry? Could our Author have been awake while he read these chapters? The very reason he assigns for deserting the Hindoos, is the reason our Apostle assigns for giving them the gospel! Indeed had he not preached to the Gentiles, characterized in this chapter, to whom could he have preached? To the Jews described in the next? But he declares that "there is no difference; for

all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." It happens too that it was against the Jews that he shook off the dust of his feet at Iconium, a step we do not recollect his having ever taken relative to the Gentiles. How strange that our Author, a missionary, should be so grossly ignorant of the Scriptures?

The proofs of his ignorance even of what he himself writes indeed, are truly distressing. In p. 105 he says, "That God will have all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth, &c. are truths acknowledged by all sorts of Christians, if we except perhaps a few who maintain the gloomy tenet that God is willing to save only the elect or predestinated." Now at p. 109 he says, "The ways of God in his gratuitous election of only a part of his creatures, are to us, (as I observed in a former letter), an unfathomable mystery, a hidden secret, which may never be revealed to us in this life." Then it is he himself who holds that "gloomy tenet!"But would any man have characterized himself as a "gloomy" bigot, had he compared his own ideas with each other? Further, if this be a "hidden secret," how could he fanatically place the Hindoos and their unborn race without this secret decree, and under an everlasting anathema? Has he then known the mind of the Lord? or being his counsellor hath he taught him?

Another instance of his ignorance of scripture, (occurring p. 105,) a school boy might reprove. We beg him to inform us in what chapter of Genesis we shall find that "the antediluvian race had run headlong into the deepest abyss of Idolatry!" We do not wonder at his withholding the Scriptures from his flock. Had he not, his ignorance of them could scarcely have been concealed even from his own proselytes. His asking, "Who hath told us that Christianity shall not remain

stationary to the end of the world?” has been already an- : swered in the former part of the work, to which we refer our readers; as we do for a reply to his placing the Hindoos in a state of reprobation.

While we by no means admire the leading precept of the Brahmun, and other Hindoos, (p. 113,) "Thou shalt love brutes like thyself," we have no idea that the Father of mercies, who "heareth the young ravens when they cry," will for ever exclude them from the blessings of the gospel, because of this silly tenderness. And although the Hindoos may have "robbed all the virtues of their intrinsical merits by the most selfish motives the most childish vanity;" yet had “selfish vanity” excluded men from the possibility of obtaining mercy through the Redeemer, what must have become of the Pharisees, who "did all their works to be seen of men;" and particularly of Saul, who" after the straitest sect of their religion lived a Pharisee ?"

We quite approve of all the expressions of pious thankfulness our Author uses for the blessings of Divine Revelation, particularly that of the prophet king; "Blessed is the man whom thou chastenest and teachest out of thy law;"-nor do we less approve his thankful 'reminiscence of his fore-fathers' bowing down to gods of wood and stone. But we should have had a far deeper impression of the sincerity of these expressions, had he given this Written Law, this Divine Revelation, to the heathen. We cannot persuade ourselves that the most genuine token of love to Divine Revelation, is, that of keeping it from others, as misers shew their love to their gold by hoarding it and rendering it useless.

Our Author, (p. 115,) introduces some one as supposing that the extensive intercourse of the natives with Europeans will be of avail with respect to their religious

improvement. We must beg to add, that our expectations are from a far different source, even from Jehovah who made heaven and earth, who will not suffer his word to return to him void, but will hasten its univer-! sal spread in its time.-While we do not defend Europeans supplying the savages with "fermented poisonous liquors," and their doing all the other evil things our Author lays to their charge, we think the Hindoos in Bengal have already begun to "copy" something "from the Europeans, beside their vices," and that they have imbibed some faint taste of the liberality and benevolence so evident in Europeans around them; although our Author says, these virtues have not even been noticed by the Hindoos in general. Nor do we think a sensible Hindoo could be readily found in Calcutta who would say to a European, (p. 119,) “If you are my superior in physical force, I am yours in education and every intellectual endowment." Should' nothing else prevent him, we think the dread of the ridicule he might expect from his countrymen, would prevent his using language so silly and so untrue.

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Our Author says, (p. 120,) that as long as a Native Christian and a rogue be synonymous terms,-mission-" aries be branded with the appellation of fanatics and idiots, and the Hindoos hear the Europeans themselves making their own religion and its sacred records the subject of their paltry sarcasms, and railleries, it will be "perfect nonsense to flatter ourselves with the hope of religion's gaining any solid footing in the country." Now although years ago there was something of this to be found even in this metropolis, there is now so much respect shewn to a Native Christian who evinces himself to be a man of probity and piety, (and these alone deserve respect;) so much esteem for mission

aries who really seek the salvation of the heathen, and so little disposition to make either religion or the Sacred Records the subject of paltry sarcasms, that might we rely on the Abbé as a prophet, and understand this vice versa, the hope of the Hindoos' receiv ing the gospel would appear to be nearer than we have been accustomed to expect. Of this consolation however, we are completely deprived by our entire want of confidence in his prophetic powers.

He thinks (p. 121,) that "we are too much disposed to overrate the effects that we fancy the naked divine word ought to produce on the mind of an ill-disposed heathen nation; and that to start in the work of proselytism by exhibiting at once to the view of the pagans of any nation whatever, our holy books; is, to commence our labors where we ought to finish them.” We beg here to remind him that his own example with that of his predecessors, is wholly against his position. His predecessors had been laboring for three centuries, and he, their successor and representative, has now finished his labors, without at all giving them the Sacred Scriptures. Indeed he has devoted them for ever with their unborn race to" worship no less culpable than that of Belphegor,-no less nefarious than that of Moloch!" Surely nothing worse than this could have hap◄ pened to these poor Hindoos, had these "brahmuns from the west" given them the Sacred Scriptures in their purity, in the first seven years of their mission.

To illustrate his idea however, he (p. 122) adds a me taphor; "To give them the scriptures thus early is, to call on a savage, whom we would wish to make a perfect mechanic, and to whom after shewing a model composed of a great number of complicated wheels and springs, we should say, Here is your model; learn your trade

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