Christian Missions 5

IV. I shall now excite your diligence, and urge forward your zeal, in this cause, by the application of a few appropriate and cogent MOTIVES.

1. Consider the nature of the cause itself. It is the greatest work in the universe, and involves everything that is grand and beneficial in the destiny of man. It is the cause of the human intellect. In assisting the work of Christian missions, you are lending your assistance to raise the human mind from the lowest degradation. The heathen nations of the present day are a mighty wilderness of mind, a great desert in the moral world, where even the partial but deceptive beauty once thrown over the scene by the wild flowers of genius and taste, as they appeared in the classic mythology and in the philosophical systems of the Greeks, is no longer to be seen, and where nothing presents itself but an immense extent, as it were, of sand or swamp, where millions and millions of minds are perpetually coming into existence and going out of it again, without putting forth a single intellectual energy for good, where whole generations of rational minds are continuously perishing amidst the gloom of barbarism and the dreary desolation of utter ignorance. Melancholy spectacle!

But yours is the task, the glorious, the immortal work of enclosing, and draining, and cultivating this mental waste, of sowing it with the seeds of thought, and causing it to bring forth and blossom, and of adding it to the territory of mind, from which it now seems almost entirely cut off. Your object is compassionate.

In supporting this cause, you lend your aid, to break the fetter of the captive; to raise women from their degradation, and restore them to their just rank in society; to convert the bloody tyrant into the nursing father; to give sanctity to the marriage bond; to suppress infanticide, and tie up the broken thread of maternal tenderness; to save the widow, willing or unwilling, from the flaming pile; to put an end to the self-inflicted tortures of the conscience-stricken devotee; to sever the chain of caste, which binds whole tribes to insult, oppression, and misery; in short, to terminate the reign of evil for the universal empire of mercy, and to transform the habitations of cruelty into the dwellings of love. But your highest and holiest object is the spread of true religion.

Its great end is to make known the living and true God to those who are without God in the world, and the Lord Jesus Christ as the only mediator between God and man, to those who are without him; to proclaim the obligations of the moral law to those who are without law, and the glad tidings of salvation to those who are without hope; to introduce the Scriptures and the institutes of religion where nothing is now to be seen but orgies in which lust and cruelty struggle for pre-eminence; to spread the light, and joys, and glories of immortality over the region of the shadow of death. All the importance which attaches to religion in any single case of a fallen but never-dying creature, belongs, of course, to the cause of missions, multiplied by as many times as there are hundreds of millions of pagans in existence.

By a singular delusion, and an injurious and ungenerous sophism, this cause has been represented as a mere abstraction of religion, which has little or no direct bearing on the present interests of mankind. We admit, indeed, that the religious part of its design is its noblest and its most beneficent purpose; but while from this source it derives a dazzling sanctity, which the diseased vision of its foes is too weak to bear, yet has it, at the same time, in relation to other things, a comprehension which neither its friends nor its foes often grasp. It includes all other schemes of beneficence in itself, or draws them along in the magnificent retinue of its benefits. It is a Bible society; for to translate, and print, and circulate the Scriptures, is its first labor.

It is a Tract society; for the circulation of short addresses to the understanding, heart, and conscience, is one of its principal operations. It is a Sunday-school society; for wherever it establishes itself, it sets up these useful institutions. It is an auxiliary to the British and Foreign School Society, by extending education over the face of the whole earth. It is a Home Missionary society; for wherever it fixes itself, it sends out its agents into its own neighborhood to preach the gospel. It is a society for the Conversion of the Jews; for wherever our missionaries find the seed of Abraham, they seek their conversion. It is a Peace society; for its very message is an echo of the angels' song, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace and good will to men."

It is an Anti-slavery society; for it diffuses that religion which teaches the principles of justice and universal benevolence. It is a Civilization society, and a Mechanics' institute; for it is introducing all the common arts of life into the dreary wilds of barbarism. It is mercy of the most comprehensive kind, and gathers up into itself all that ingenuity has invented, or that benevolence can employ, for the numerous interests of the human race; it stands amidst the wants and woes of the teeming millions of the earth's population, a lucid, and intelligible, and noble comment upon the apostle's words, "Godliness is profitable for all things, having the promise of the life that now is, as well as of that which is to come."

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