inhabitants as besotted with superstition, because they did not look on them as angels! People have wondered at the slow progress, and in many countries, the almost hopeless labours of the missionaries;-why should they wonder? The missionaries had Christianity to teach-and their countrymen had been there before them, and called themselves Christians! That was enough: what recommendations could a religion have, to men who had seen its professors for generations in the sole characters of thieves, murderers, and oppressors? The missionaries told them that in Christianity lay their salvation;—they shook their heads, they had already found it their destruction! They told them they were come to comfort and enlighten them;—they had already been comforted by the seizure of their lands, the violation of their ancient rights, the kidnapping of their persons; and they had been enlightened by the midnight flames of their own dwellings! Is there any mystery in the difficulties of the missionaries? Is there any in the apathy of simple nations towards Christianity? The barbarities and desperate outrages of the socalled Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every people that they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught, and however reckless of mercy and of shame, in any age of the earth. Is it fit that this horrible blending of the names of Christianity and outrage should continue? Yet it does continue, and must continue, till the genuine spirit of Christianity in this kingdom shall arouse itself, and determine that these villanies shall cease, or they who perpetrate them shall be If stripped of the honoured name of Christian! foul deeds are to be done, let them be done in their own foul name; and let robbery of lands, seizure of cattle, violence committed on the liberties or the lives of men, be branded as the deeds of devils and not of Christians. The spirit of Christianity, in the shape of missions, and in the teaching and beneficent acts of the missionaries, is now sensibly, in many countries, undoing the evil which wolves in the sheep's clothing of the Christian name had before done. And of late another glorious symptom of the growth of this divine spirit has shown itself, in the strong feeling exhibited in this country towards the natives of our colonies. To fan that genuine flame of love, is the object of this work. To comprehend the full extent of atrocities done in the Christian name, we must look the whole wide evil sternly in the face. We must not suffer ourselves to aim merely at the redress of this or that grievance; but, gathering all the scattered rays of aboriginal oppression into one burning focus, and thus enabling ourselves to feel its entire force, we shall be less than Englishmen and Christians if we do not stamp the whole system of colonial usage towards the natives, with that general and indignant odium which must demolish it at once and for ever. CHAPTER II. THE DISCOVERY OF THE NEW WORLD. The spoilers are come upon all high places through the wilderness. Jeremiah xii. 12. Forth rush the fiends as with the torrent's sweep, We have thus in our first chapter glanced at the scene of crime and abomination which Europe through long ages presented, still daring to clothe itself in the fair majesty of the Christian name. It is a melancholy field of speculation-but our business is not there just now; we must hasten from it, to that other field of sorrow and shame at which we also glanced. For fifteen centuries, during which Christianity had been promulgated, Europe had become little aware of its genuine nature, though boastful of its profession; but during the latter portion of that period its nations had progressed rapidly in population, in strength, and in the arts of social life. They had, amid all their bickerings and butcherings, found sufficient leisure to become commercial, speculative, and ambitious of still greater wealth and power. Would to God, in their B 2 improvements, they could have numbered that of religious knowledge! Their absurd crusades, nevertheless, by which they had attempted to wrest the Holy City from the infidels to put it into the possession of mere nominal Christians, whose very act of seizing on the Holy Land proclaimed their ignorance of the very first principles of the divine religion in whose cause they assumed to go forth—these crusades, immediately scandalous and disastrous as they were, introduced them to the East; gave them knowledge of more refined and immensely wealthy nations; and at once raised their notions of domestic luxury and embellishment; gave them means of extended knowledge; and inspired them with a boundless thirst for the riches of which they had got glimpses of astonishment. The Venetians and Genoese alternately grew great by commerce with that East of which Marco Polo brought home such marvellous accounts; and at length, Henry of Portugal appeared, one of the noblest and most remarkable princes in earth's annals! He devoted all the energies of his mind and the resources of his fortune to discovery! Fixing his abode by the ocean, he sent across it not merely the eyes of desire, but the far-glances of dawning science. Step by step, year by year, spite of all natural difficulties, disasters and discouragements, he threw back the cloud that had for ages veiled the vast sea; his ships brought home news of isle after isle-spots on the wide waste of waters, fairer and more sunny than the fabled Hesperides; and crept along the vast line of the African coast to the very Cape of Hope. He died; but his spirit was shed abroad in an inextinguishable zeal, guided and made invincible by the Magnet, -- "the spirit of the stone," the adoption of which he had suggested.*--At once arose Gama and Columbus, and as it were at once for there were but five years and a few months between one splendid event and the other, the East and the West Indies by the sea-path, and America, till then undreamed of, were discovered! Worlds of What an era of amazement was that! vast extent and wonderful character, starting as it were into sudden creation before the eyes of growing, inquisitive, and ambitious Europe! Day after day, some news, astounding in its very infinitude of goodness, was breaking upon their excited minds; news which overturned old theories of philosophy and geography, and opened prospects for the future equally confounding by their strange magnificence! No single Paradise discovered; but countless Edens, scattered through the glittering seas of summer climes, and populous realms, stretching far and wide beneath new heavens, from pole to pole Another nature, and a new mankind.-Rogers. Since the day of Creation, but two events of superior influence on the destinies of the human race had occurred-the Announcement of God's Law on Sinai, and the Advent of his Son! Providence had drawn aside the veil of a mighty part of his world, and submitted the lives and happiness of millions of his creatures to the arbitrium of that European race, which now boasted of superior civilization-and far more, of being the regenerated followers of his Christ. Never was so awful a test of sincerity presented to the professors of a heavenly creed !-never was such Mickle's Camoens. |