opportunity allowed to mortal men to work in the eternal scheme of Providence! It is past! Such amplitude of the glory of goodness can never again be put at one moment into the reach of the human will. God's providence is working out its undoubted design in this magnificent revelation of

That maiden world, twin-sister to the old ;-Montgomery. But they who should have worked with it in the benignity and benevolence of that Saviour whose name they bore, have left to all futurity the awful spectacle of their infamy!

Had the Europeans really at this eventful crisis been instructed in genuine Christianity, and imbued with its spirit, what a signal career of improvement and happiness must have commenced throughout the vast American continent! What a source of pure, guiltless, and enduring wealth must have been opened up to Europe itself! Only let any one imagine the natives of America meeting the Europeans as they did, with the simple faith of children, and the reverence inspired by an idea of something divine in their visitors; let any one imagine them thus meeting them, and finding them, instead of what they actually were, spirits base and desperate as hell could have possibly thrown up from her most malignant regions finding them men of peace instead of men of blood, men of integrity instead of men of deceit, men of love and generosity instead of men of cruelty and avarice-wise, enlightened, and just! Let any one imagine that, and he has before him such a series of grand and delightful consequences as can only be exhibited when Christianity shall really become the actuating spirit of nations; and they shall as the direct

consequence, "beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks." Imagine the Spaniards and the Portuguese to have been merely what they pretended to be,-men who had been taught in the divine law of the New Testament, that "God made of one blood all the nations of the earth;" men who, while they burned to "plant the Cross,' actually meant by it to plant in every new land the command, "thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself;" and the doctrine, that the religion of the Christian is, to "do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly before God." Imagine that these men came amongst the simple people of the New World, clothed in all the dignity of Christian wisdom, the purity of Christian sentiment, and the sacred beauty of Christian benevolence; and what a contrast to the crimes and the horrors with which they devastated and depopulated that hapless continent! The historian would not then have had to say-"The bloodshed and attendant miseries which the unparalleled rapine and cruelty of the Spaniards spread over the New World, indeed disgrace human nature. The great and flourishing empires of Mexico and Peru, steeped in the blood of FORTY MILLIONS of their sons, present a melancholy prospect, which must excite the indignation of every good heart."* If, instead of that lust of gold which had hardened them into actual demons, they had worn the benign graces of true Christians, the natives would have found in them a higher image of divinity than any which they had before conceived, and the whole immense continent would have been laid open to them as a field of unexampled and limitless glory and

* Mickle.

felicity. They might have introduced their arts and sciences-have taught the wonders and the charms of household enjoyments and refinements-have shewn the beauty and benefit of cultivated fields and gardens ; their faith would have created them confidence in the hearts of the natives, and the advantages resulting from their friendly tuition would have won their love. What a triumphant progress for civilization and Christianity! There was no wealth nor advantage of that great continent which might not have become legitimately and worthily theirs. They would have walked amongst the swarming millions of the south as the greatest of benefactors; and under their enlightened guidance, every species of useful produce, and every article of commercial wealth would have sprung up. Spain need not have been blasted, as it were, by the retributive hand of Divine punishment, into the melancholy object which she is this day. That sudden stream of gold which made her a second Tantalus, reaching to her very lips yet never quenching her thirst, and leaving her at length the poorest and most distracted realm in Europe, might have been hers from a thousand unpolluted sources, and bearing along with it God's blessing instead of his curse: and mighty nations, rivalling Europe in social arts and political power, might have been now, instead of many centuries hence, objects of our admiration, and grateful repayers of our benefits.

But I seem to hear many voices exclaiming, "Yes! these things might have been, had men been what they are not, nor ever were!" Precisely so!-that is the point I wish expressly to illustrate before I proceed to my narrative. These things might have been,

and would have been, had men been merely what they professed. They called themselves Christians, and I merely state what Christians would and must, as a matter of course, have done. The Spaniards professed to be, and probably really believed that they were, Christians. They professed zealously that one of their most ardent desires was to bring the newlydiscovered hemisphere under the cross of Christ. Columbus returned thanks to God for having made him a sort of modern apostle to the vast tribes of the West. Ferdinand and Isabella, when he returned and related to them the wonderful story of his discovery, fell on their knees before their throne, and thanked God too! They expressed an earnest anxiety to establish the empire of the Cross throughout their new and splendid dominions. The very Spanish adventurers, with their hands heavy with the plundered gold, and clotted with the blood of the unhappy Americans, were zealous for the spread of their faith. They were not more barbarous than they were selfdeluded; and I shall presently shew whence had sprung, and how had grown to such a blinding thickness, that delusion upon them. But the truth which I am now attempting to elucidate and establish, is of far higher and wider concernment than as exemplified in the early adventurers of Spain and Portugal. This grand delusion has rested on Europe for a thousand years; and from the days of the Spaniards to the present moment, has gone on propagating crimes and miseries without end. For the last three hundred years, Europe has been boasting of its Christianity, and perpetrating throughout the vast extent of territories in every quarter of the globe subjected to

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its power, every violence and abomination at which Christianity revolts. There is no nation of Europe that is free from the guilt of colonial blood and oppression. God knows what an awful share rests upon this country! It remains therefore for us simply to consider whether we will abandon our national crimes or our Christian name. Whether Europe shall continue so to act towards what it pleases to term "savage" nations, as that it must seem to be the very ground and stronghold of some infernal superstition, or so as to promote, what a large portion of the British public at least, now sincerely desires,-the Christianization, and with it the civilization, of the heathen.

I shall now pass in rapid review, the treatment which the natives of the greater portion of the regions discovered since the days of Columbus and Gama, have received at the hands of the nations styling themselves Christian, that every one may see what has been, and still is, the actual system of these nations; and I shall first follow Columbus and his immediate successors to the Western world, because it was first, though only by so brief a period, reached by the ships of the adventurers.