lad to serious consequences. would manifestly be very unfortunate for the interests of the mission. Such a result hopes, is given entire and in simple language to this whole people. It is to visit them at their rude homes, and lie beside them in their daily employments. This is a work which cannot die. We may all pass away; and much that we have done, may be neglected or forgot You are already aware that the government has instituted proceedings against Mar Yoosuph, one of the Nestorian Bishops of Oroomiah. He is charged ten. But we believe that this Bible, in with favoring the political interests of the Russians in a treasonable manner, and endeavoring to introduce among the Nestorians the religion of the Greek church. A few weeks since he was carried as a prisoner to Tabreez; and we have since learned that the government was disposed to push the matter to extremities. If, however, the intercession in his behalf of powerful friends can avail, he will ultimately be released, or his punishment will be mitigated. Schools-The Bible accessible to all. Notwithstanding the disorders occasioned by the political state of Persia, Mr. Stoddard says that the schools have increased more than in any previous year, there being at present between sixty and seventy of them. "Though by no means so efficient and useful," he remarks, "as we hope they will ultimately become, they are doing much to secure the permanent influence of the gospel among the people. As young men and women go out from our seminaries better furnished for their work, and are introduced as teachers into the schools, these are improved in their character, and in their turn react healthfully on the seminaries." The careful superintendence of so many teachers, scattered over so wide a field, it is justly observed, involves a vast amount of labor; but it is well expended, especially when connected, as it often is, with the preaching of the gospel. We have repeatedly told you of the satisfaction which we feel in being able to give the whole Bible to this people in their spoken language. It is only a few years since there was hardly an entire copy of the Bible to be found in any village, either here or in Koordistan. The few manuscripts in existence were regarded with such superstitious veneration, that they were wrapped up carefully, and placed out of sight, to moulder in their dark and damp churches. And had they been ever so numerous, and ever so freely circulated, not one in a thousand could have deciphered their meaning. What a blessed change for the Nestorians has taken place. That Bible which we clasp so joyfully to our hearts, which we make the basis of our heavenly the spoken Syriac, will live and preach to young and old, in the house and by the way, on the plain and in the mountains, and bring forth the fruits of righteousness, long after we slumber in the dust. Had the American churches conferred on the Nestorians no other blessing, how amply would this one thing repay their efforts. It animates us to think that in these lands, so long under the dominion of Satan, and to this ancient people, so long wanderers from the right way of the Lord, David and Isaiah and Paul, and above all the Savior himself, are hereafter to preach the glad tidings of redemption. To the Bible Society, Mr. Stoddard says, the sincere thanks of the mission are due for the funds so liberally granted for this noble work. The Seminaries. Our seminaries are as flourishing this season as usual. Every year they are brought under a closer discipline, and aim at a higher standard of scholarship. About twenty of the young men in the male seminary are hopefully pious; and some of them give high promise of future usefulness. We have at present one boy, who is designed to succeed Mar Gabriel as bishop of the largest diocese in Oroomiah. We have also several from different mountain districts, and one from Boohtan, the extreme western portion of our field. And we have this winter received a Jew, who professes to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and expresses a longing desire to know the way of life more perfectly. He is a young man of good talents, and the son of one of the most respectable Jews in the city. He encounters much odium among his people, because of his connection with us; and the probability is that his wife, whom he has recently married, and who still adheres to the religion of her fathers, will be forcibly taken from him. This is the first Jew in Persia, so far as we know, who has received the New Testament as his rule of faith; and his case is peculiarly interesting on that account. When shall the day dawn, and the day-star arise, on that scattered and oppressed people? In the female seminary the number of pupils has been increased from forty to fifty. The scholars are in an interesting religious state; but there is by no means that intensity of feeling which has been manifested in some former years. In deed our whole field is suffering very much from a comparative withdrawal of the Spirit's influences; and we need, above all things else, to pray for a shower of divine grace. We are painfully conscious that without this all our labors will be of no avail. Miscellanies. ORIGIN OF AMERICAN MISSIONS. THE American Missionary Memorial,— -a work which deserves to be generally known, and thoughtfully read,-contains a very interesting account of the early efforts of our fathers in behalf of the pagan world. It is from the pen of Rev. Samuel M. Worcester, D. D., who has shown himself, in his life of the first Secretary of the American Board, fully equal to such an undertaking. The following extract forms a part of this sketch : For a long period, America was to Christians of Europe the great field of missionary effort. It is even maintained that the inspiring idea of Columbus was derived from the prophecies; and that Isabella, his patron, made the conversion of the heathen an object "paramount to all the rest." When our fathers came hither, these were all "foreign parts;" it was all heathen ground. Long after their coming, the churches in England were accustomed to pray in their songs, "Dark America convert, And every pagan land." And in some places, these lines are still sung. strangely as they sound to the ear of a New England man who may chance to hear them. So vast is the change; so accustomed are we to our Christian institutions, that we are all in danger of forgetting that we live upon the soil that has been rescued from paganism. Never, never should it be forgotten! And never should it be forgotten that the settlement of New England was in reality, though not in name, a missionary enterprise. Or, if any prefer to call it by other terms, it may be called a mission of evangelical colonization; and it may be proclaimed in every language, as the sublimest mission of modern times. Aims of the Pilgrims. Those persecuted and exiled Puritans had no such purpose in coming hither, as has often been ascribed to them, even by some of their favored descendants. It was not for political immunities nor republican institutions. In the "love of Christ constraining" them, it was for the advancement of that Reformation, which, a century after it had moved all Christendom, was still but in part accomplished; for they were not satisfed that the "Prince of Life" should only be acknowledged by the church in his prophetical and priestly offices. It was that, as "the Lord's freemen," they might give him him, which is the Head of all principality his kingly right, and thus be complete in and power." It was that, in the "liberty" "wherewith the Son makes free," they might enjoy the gospel, without "human mixtures and temptations," and worship in peace while worshiping in spirit and in truth." It was for the holier and surer training of a consecrated progeny, at the distance of a "nine hundred league ocean' from the corruptions of the old world. And not least of all in their desires and hopes was the salvation of the benighted heathen, pared before them they would toil and pray while in every way which should be prefor the enlargement of the kingdom of "the Lord of all." These were their motives and ends in separating themselves from the Church of England, which originally adopted the Reformation from paramount purposes of state policy. Above all things, it was in their hearts to call no man master, but to obey Him as their King, whose inspired word was their sun, and whose atoning blood was their eternal life. For this it was that, in the pure and undying "love of their espousals," they "went after him in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown." And in their own graphic expression, it was in a "wilderness world" that they built their habitations and their sanctuaries. For an object holy and sublime as ever angels celebrated, they lived here in hunger and in cold, and toiled and watched in weariness and in painfulness; where, when the bullock lowed, the wild beast answered him; and where, at the rustling of a leaf, the fond mother clasped her infant closer to her bosom. All the charters enjoined upon the colonists the duty of instructing and christianizing the pagan aborigines. The seal of the Massachusetts Colony is a true exponent of the aims and aspirations of our fathers. In expressive harmony with their benignant desires, they adopted the figure of an abo Early Efforts for the Indians. If the venerated Robinson had occasion to write to the Governor of Plymouth, "Oh that you had converted some before you had killed any," it was not because these were wantonly destroyed, or hunted down as "tawny and bloody salvages;" nor because their moral ignorance and wretchedness were not distinct objects of early and intense solicitude. In less than two years, one of the Plymouth settlers was specially designated to promote the conversion of the Indians; and as early as December, 1621, Elder Robert Cushman made an appeal to his friends in England in behalf of "those poor heathen." In 1636, the Plymouth Colony provided by law for the "preaching of the gospel among them." sachusetts passed an act for the propagation of the gospel among the Indians. From that day onward more or less of legislative provision has been made for their religious instruction, as well as their social comfort. And with all the changes that have passed over the "fathers" and the "children's children," there never has been a time when they have not furnished some laborers in the heathen part of this western world. For almost two hundred years, the condition of our country and the state of the world at large very naturally defined, and, it may not be too much to say, very properly circumscribed the missionary field of these churches. They were poor, and there were " many adversaries." They may not have "done what they could," but they did a great and marvelous work. And the spread of the gospel throughout the earth was ever in the minds and the supplications of many "faithful men in Christ Jesus." To pray for the conversion of the whole world, in the concert of prayer recommended, the year previous, by the churches of Scotland, was, in 1747, the dying injunetion of David Brainerd to his beloved In the labors of Eliot, the Mayhews, and Christian Indians. But the time had not others of no less renown, it may be, in really come, until the last generation, when heaven, and in the contributions and per- a Gordon Hall could reasonably be expectsonal sacrifices of those who, out of their ed to take up the mantle of Brainerd, and, deep poverty," sustained them, the first leaving the heathen of our own territories, generation of New England furnished ex-go forth to the far distant Gentiles. And it amples of as pure missionary zeal as has ever yet found a record or a grateful notice in the uninspired annals of redemption. And to all human appearances, far distant is the day when the "thousand" of thousands shall "become" as the "little one was, and the "strong nation" as "the small one," in the all-pervading and ennobling power of such zeal for the salvation of the perishing. The honor of the first plan in England for sending missionaries to the heathen has by mistake been given to that wonderful man, whose character is now at last receiving a just and brilliant vindication against the atrocious calumnies which have prevailed for two centuries. But the magnificent design of Cromwell, which contemplated the establishment of a council for the Protestant religion, in opposition to the Jesuitical combination at Rome, and which was intended to embrace the East and West Indies in its fourth department of operation, was more than thirty years later than the manifesto of the Pilgrims, declaratory of the "great hope and inward zeal they had of laying some good foundation for the propagation and advancement of the gospel in these remote parts of the world!" A society had been formed in England, and collections had been taken, in aid of the missions of Eliot and his associates. It is beyond a doubt that the first settlers of New England were the first Englishmen who devised and executed a mission to the heathen! As early as 1646, the legislature of Mas is very wide from the truth, to assume or believe that any who first went from these shores to the heathen of the oriental continent and islands, or that any others, who, like Nettleton and Mills, so ardently and early desired, without ever enjoying, a foreign field of personal toil and trial, are entitled to an emblazoned remembrance; as if the conception of the arduous and glorious work to which so many are now consecrated had never entered the minds of the fathers, who had not yet fallen asleep, or of brethren in the Lord, who, in some domestic locality, were bearing the burden and heat of the day. Modern Missions. In the midst of the alarms occasioned by the French Revolution of 1789, "they that feared the Lord spake often one to another," and on both sides of the Atlantic there was a concert of supplication for the outpouring of the Spirit, the discomfiture of the foes of the gospel, and the enlargement of Zion over all the earth, even to "the uttermost parts of the sea.' As early as 1792, there was a cheering earnest of the extensive revivals of religion, which, at the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, exerted a powerful influence, and gave an extraordinary though legitimate impulse to the work of American missions. After the London Missionary Society was formed in 1795, the movements and appeals of Christians in England had an electrical effect upon our churches. Missionary publications awakened an inter est which, in our present circumstances, it is difficult to appreciate. New settlements were now rapidly extending in Western New York, the valley of the Ohio, and the Mississippi. The religious privations and moral dangers of the emigrating children of the Pilgrims and Puritans of New England were regarded by their friends at home as but little less than those of the heathen tribes, whose wigwams and manifold abominations were, in some places of the wilderness, not distant from them "a Sabbath-day's journey." Hence plans for new evangelical exertions, and for new organizations adapted to the exigencies of the times, were anxiously and devoutly considered. First Organizations in this Country. Before the independence of the colonies, there were several attempts to form missionary societies that should be independent of those in England, Scotland, and elsewhere, to which the colonial churches were accustomed to make liberal contributions. But such attempts were discouraged in the mother country. Missionary organizations in Massachusetts, for example, were denied the royal seal of approval or consent. This was doubtless owing to the desire and policy of preventing an increase, both of Congregational and Presbyterian elements of antag. onism to Episcopacy. great revivals, to which allusion has been made, carried forward and signalized the work of missions in our churches far beyond what many among us, at this day, appear to have ever known or imagined; although the knowledge is quite essential to any just view of the origin of our present foreign missionary organizations. The first address of the Massachusetts Missionary Society breathes the genuine spirit of the charge from Mount Olivet. The society was at once brought into fellowship and correspondence with the London Missionary Society, and others in Great Britain. Among the founders were the worthy and honored men who afterward had the leading influence in the formation and establishment of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions; and it was while laboring in the Massachusetts Missionary Society that they were trained for their higher responsibilities and more memorable services. For twenty years before the first missionaries went from America to Asia, the good hand of God had been wonderfully working in the churches of New England and the Middle States, and all over the country, hastening and completing the fullness of time for their consecration and departure. Establishments precisely similar to those which we now sustain in foreign lands might have been undertaken by the MassaIn 1787, a "Society for Propagating the chusetts Missionary Society. But as some Gospel among the Indians and others in of the members wished to leave no room for North America" was incorporated by the a doubt of their constitutional powers to legislature of Massachusetts. In 1789, the extend their operations to any other land, it General Assembly of the Presbyterian was explicitly voted, in May, 1804, that Church "passed an order requiring the "the object of the Society is to diffuse the churches under their care to take up collec- gospel among the people of the newly settions for a missionary fund." A mission tled and remote parts of our country, among from this church to África had been con- the Indians of the country, and through templated in 1774, the same year in which more distant regions of the earth, as circum the Connecticut General Association restances shall invite and the ability of the solved to send missionaries to the northern society shall admit." The constitution was. and western wilderness. In 1798, this asso-amended accordingly. If the men, thereciation became the Missionary Society of fore, could have been obtained, and the Connecticut. The New York Missionary Society, for "sending the gospel to the frontier settlements, and among the Indian tribes in the United States," was formed a little earlier, November 1, 1796. Massachusetts Missionary Society. After much consultation, in 1797 and 1798, and not without much opposition from various causes, the Massachusetts Missionary Society was formally instituted, May 28, 1799. The object was "to diffuse the knowledge of the gospel among the heathens, as well as other people in the remote parts of our country, where Christ is seldom or never preached.' money secured, missionaries could have been sent to Bombay, Ceylon, and the Sandwich Islands, as they were afterward by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Dr. Griffin. After the formation of the Massachusetts Missionary Society in 1799, there was a con-stant progress of the spirit of missions. In the annual missionary sermon before the General Assembly in Philadelphia, preached in May, 1805, Dr. Griffin said, "The Christian world, after long contenting itself with prayers for the heathen, and with saying,. Be ye warmed and filled,' is awakening to more charitable views. Men, warmed with This society, like those which had already apostolic zeal, have abandoned the comforts begun to operate with auspicious tokens of of civilized life, and are gone to the ends of the divine blessing, may be said to have the earth to bear to benighted nations the been born and baptized of the Holy Spirit; first tidings of a precious Savior. Numewhile thousands of new converts to right-rous societies have risen into existence on eousness were animating the hopes of the both sides of the Atlantic, under whose tried and faithful in Christ Jesus. Those patronage missionaries are now employed VOL. XLIX. 10 DISCOVERIES IN SOUTH AFRICA. A CAPE TOWN paper, of January 26, has the following paragraph in regard to certain recently explored districts in Southern Africa: from India to the American wilderness, | with the life of some of these in particular from Greenland to the Southern Ocean. not only begins a new chapter, but a new Some of the first-fruits of their labors, I volume in the history of American mishope, are already gathered into the heaven- sions. ly garner." "In the awful hour when you, and I, and all the pagan nations, shall be called from our graves to stand before the bar of Christ, what comparison will these objects bear to the salvation of a single soul? Eternal mercy! Let not the blood of heathen millions in that hour be found in our skirts. Standing as I now do, in the sight of a dissolving universe, beholding the dead arise, the world in flames, the heavens fleeing away, all nations convulsed with terror, or rapt in the vision of the Lamb, I pronounce the conversion of a single pagan of more value than all the wealth that ever Omnipotence produced. On such an awful subject it becomes me to speak with caution; but I solemnly aver, that were there but one heathen in the world, and he in the remotest corner of Asia, if no greater duty confined us at home, it would be worth the pains of all the people in America to embark together to carry the gospel to him." Dr. Worcester. In his sermon before the Massachusetts Missionary Society in May, 1809, Dr. Worcester affirmed, that "the extensive dissemination of the word of God, the unlocking of the treasures of divine truth to all the families of the earth, the general diffusion and nurture of a missionary spirit, and the establishment over all the world of missionary stations, are most important preparations for the glorious scene in due time to ensue. Ere long the Lord will give the word, and great will be the company of the publishers. Light will break forth in all directions, and the whole earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God." "Yes, my brethren, the oracles of God are sure, and the expanding hopes of the Church are not vain. The Lord is on his way; and the day, the long-expected, prayed-for day of his promise, is at hand." an Yesterday's post from the Orange River Sovereignty brings some intelligence from a party who have ascertained the boundaries and extent of the great lake. Its length is computed at sixty, and its average breadth at twelve miles, giving a sheet of fresh water equal to about seven hundred square miles. Connected with this inland sea, the largest yet discovered in Africa, there is at least one noble river, navigable to unknown extent. The surrounding tribes or nations are in constant communication with the Portuguese settlements on the coast, with whom they trade in copper and other produce, with a little smuggling and some piracy in slaves, of course contraband and unknown to the Portuguese authorities. The travelers appear to have been everywhere well received by the native chiefs and people. The Friend of the Sovereignty, January 13, states that Messrs. C. and F. Green have just returned from the interior; and we also note the arrival of the Chief Sechele. The above party, accompanied from the lake by Messrs. Wilson, Edwards and Campbell, have traveled round the great lake. They find the extreme length to be sixty-five miles, and the average breadth twelve. Their journey has been on the River Teougha, with the view of elephant shooting. In this they were disappointed, having killed but a few, in consequence of their having got into the tsetse, (a fly destroying cattle, horses, dogs, &c.) They have had much difficulty in getting out, by reason of the loss of oxen, both by the fly and the Boers in their late attack on Sechéle. The River Teougha is of great magnitude. It was only approachable at two places in a distance of one hundred and thirty miles, in consequence of the overflow of water flooding the country for many miles on either side of its banks. The longitude west was computed by Messrs. Green and party to be twenty-two degrees, having made an almost due west course from the great lake. The above party have endeavored to reach De Babi, the chief of a very pow erful Macobo tribe, living on the Teougha River. A mountain of considerable height points out his whereabouts. This mountain is reported by the natives to be covered for many months with snow. The natives Before the expiration of another year of that country carry on a considerable from the time of Dr. Worcester's Sermon in traffic in copper, having extensive mines, May, 1809, there were, as it is now known, and also deal largely in slaves with the about twenty young men who had been ex-Portuguese, from whom they get in return, amining the question of duty in regard to cloth, guns, powder, &c. &c. Sebetuane preaching the gospel to the heathen of purchases the greater part of his copper Asia, Africa, or the islands of the sea. And ornaments from this tribe. Others, also, were at this same time intently watching the indications of Providence, and devoutly praying that laborers might soon be furnished and sent forth to the perishing Pagans of other continents. Indeed, the days had now nearly arrived when the American churches should send forth to the "uttermost parts of the earth," not their sympathies, supplications, and supplies only, but their servants for Jesus' sake, to gather sheaves of glory to the Son of God. The young men were ready, and the hour at hand for the fathers to give them the guidance of their wisdom, and the guardianship of their care. |