and those natives, especially the heathens, receive it with joy and veneration, as a gift sent down from heaven to them. Soon shall those heathen lands, which until now have been unfruitful deserts, blossom as the rose; soon, very soon, shall holy churches be established, and their light begin to shine before the throne of God, in the places of the extinguished lights of former churches! O what a sublime spectacle will be displayed, when the whole earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God; and when, from the east to the west, songs of praise, in honour of the conqueror, shall be heard, in honour of the Lamb that has redeemed us unto God by his blood, out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation. Brethren! though we are not likely to live till this desirable period, yet we can hasten its approach by uniting with the Bible Society, and diligently scattering abroad the seed of the divine word, in full confidence that the Lord will not leave it to perish, when it falls on good ground, but will cause it to grow through the gracious influences of his spirit. O! eternal and hypostatic word of the Father, rend from our hearts the murdering word of the evil one, and the captivating word of this world; and then shall thy sacred word become vivifying and effectual unto our regeneration, sanctification, and salvation. Amen. From the Religious Intelligencer. POLYNESIA. SANDWICH MISSION. Letter from TAMOREE, King of Atooi, to his son George. Mr. WHITING-A letter directed to George P. Tamoree, by his father, King of Atooi, has recently been received at the Foreign Mission School. As the departure of this youth, with other natives of the Sandwich Islands to their own country, and the important mission to their countrymen by Messrs. Thurston, Bingham, and others, have excited much interest among the friends of Christ, the publication of this letter, will no doubt furnish much pleasure to very many, as they will receive additional evidence of the astonishing change in those islands, in the abolition of idolatry, and of the preparation of God's providence for those missionaries who were sent, as we should suppose, at the exact time that they were needed. The genuineness of the letter, of which the enclosed is an exact copy, cannot be reasonably doubted. I am respectfully yours, Cornwall, August 26, 1820. TIMOTHY STONE. Island of Atooi, Nov. 27th, 1819. SON GEORGE-Your long absence from me and your friends makes me very solicitous concerning your health and welfare, though I trust you dwell in safety, and hope your time is better 313 occupied than if you were at home with us, I want to see you once more before I die, and hope you will not miss the opportunity of coming home next year in the brig which I have agreed to purchase of Capt. Dixy Wilds, of Boston, or in one of those ships intended for these islands.- received your letters dated Oct. 8, and Nov. 1816, and was very much pleased to hear you were so pleasantly situated and so kindly treated by the Americans. I was a little displeased at your opinion concerning my religious ceremonies, and speaking so disdainfully of my wooden idols, but I am at last convinced of my error, have left all my taboos, and have this day renounced all my wooden gods, and soon intend to make firewood of my churches and idols; and I hope you will soon be among us to show us the way we should walk. I don't wish you to send me any more letters, as I cannot I sometimes read them, neither do I know whether they are wrote by you or some other person in your name, to deceive me. have great fears that you are dead, and the white men send me But I trust that if you are alive I such letters to deceive me. shall have the pleasure of seeing you in 15 months. If you prefer America to your own native land for a residence for life, I hope you will at least come and make me a visit, and then return, and I will pay for your passage; for I want to see you face little or no trust know are alive, for I to face, that I may in written letters. you put So wishing you all the blessings that this world can afford, TAMOREE, (his mark) King of Atooi. UNITED STATES. AMERICAN BIBLE SOCIETY. Speech delivered at the Fourth Anniversary. The motion of thanks to the Treasurer and Secretaries was made by the Rev. Mr. Stansbury of Albany, and seconded by the Rev. Lyman Beecher, D. D. of Litchfield, Connecticut. Mr. Stansbury made the following remarks: Mr. PRESIDENT, We are perpetually receiving blessings from God, but none surely that may be compared with the privilege of blessing others. This exalted power associates us (if the expression may be allowed me) with God himself, whose glorious prerogative it is to be the greatest of all givers. There is a bliss about its exercise which makes its way into the deadest and coldest of bosoms. Even the miser feels it, when he has, by some happy fortuity, broken through the dull monotony of getting and hoarding, and has ventured for once to give. All men feel it when the call of some blessed charity brings heart to heart and hand to hand: when a purse is to be made up for the widow, or the little orphan is to be 2 R VOL. VII. fed, orclad, or schooled. But, sir, to day this bliss of heaven, (I may justly call it such, for nothing less than heaven sent it into the heart. of man, nor is any thing wanting but enough of this to make a heaven below,) this heavenly bliss of giving takes a higher form and exerts a more elevating power. Were we met to provide no better thing for our fellow-men than a perishing weed to cover his flesh, or the perishing food that sustains its life, we might rejoice indeed, but it would be with none of that mixture of sublime emotion that is thrilling at this moment through so many hearts in this assembly. No, sir: ours is a higher charity. We meet to make a gift to the immortal mind: to give to sorrow a more than mortal solace, and to want a more than earthly supply. We are met to spread the Bible of God: a book it is now too late to eulogize. There was indeed a day, sir, (we have none of us forgotten it) when those who yet held fast their belief in that book were called to contend for its value and to vindicate its truth: but that day is past; past, sir, I trust for ever. A day has succeeded it, such as neither you, sir, nor any of us ever expected to see; in which the honouring of this book has become the employment of nations and the strife of kings. No, sir, I will not attempt to praise it. The culogy of the Bible is in the tears of the penitent whom it has subdued; in the ardent vow of the profligate it has reclaimed; in the meek fortitude of the suffering, whom it has sustained; in the triumphant songs of the dying it has saved. Its monuments are in the laws, whose spirit it has enlightened and purified: in the national sentiment which it has raised and refined; in the national light which it has sent down to the habitation of the lowest poor; in the national morals, whose tone it has elevated and establishcd; in the national institutions, whose genius it has pervaded with equity and freedom; in the national charities, which owe their very being to its power. The hand of culture cannot be more distinctly traced on the face of wild and desert nature than the effect of this book on the moral condition of man. Look at man without it. Look, sir, at those immortal republics, the glory and perfection of the pagan world. What were morals there? Morals? where the most rigid of exactors suffers me to to steal, and com'mends me if I cover the theft by falsehood; where the highest public authority tells me if my child is feeble or deformed, to bring it to the public officer, that it may be destroyed; where another instructor allows me to murder my mother when she is old; where another permits me to marry my daughter or my sister; and another informs me it is a virtue to become my own destroyer. From morals do we turn to religion? The darkness deepens. I ask the same masters of reason what I must worship? And one tells me to worship the sun and moon; another sends me to deified men and heroes; another builds me an altar to winds and storms; another to famine and pestilence; deities multiply at every step, and take new forms at every turn, till at length they start from every bush, and swarm in every pool, and I am bowed down to apes and crocodiles, to dogs and serpents, to "birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things." I ask them once more, How I must worship? and a priestess of Diana brings me a naked boy, and binding the little trembler to the altar, puts a Scourge into my hand and tells me to whip him to death; the Druid brings me a hurdle of reeds, and inclosed within a fellow-man made in my own image: he takes the scourge out of my hand and supplies its place with a torch: another shows me Moloch sculptured in brass and surrounded with flames, and asks me to take the babe out of my bosom and lay it within those outstretched and fiery Such, sir, after all the boasts of infidels, and all the charitable hopes of weak and mistaken Christians, was the pagan world. And has it changed? What then means that infant's shriek as it is dropped, by a mother's hand, into the gaping jaws of that often fed, and almost tamed alligator? What means that column of smoke, that horrid din of drums and brazen cymbals, that heartappalling pile where life lies interlocked and wedded with putrid death, where outraged nature struggles and upbraids in vain, and children's hands are set to burn the living palpitating breasts that gave them suck? What means that moving mountain of all obscene things, that mis-shapen abomination on its top, or those maniac worshippers crushed beneath the slow-moving wheels below? Does this look like saving light? and are these the proofs that the Bible is not needed? No, sir, I turn my eyes in vain over the wide spreading waste. From the mysteries of the Edda beneath the pole, to the mysteries of the Vedas beneath the line; from the attenuated refinement of Athens to the grossest barbarism of the Tartar descrt, from remotest Thule to the Indus and the Ganges, there is neither knowledge of God, practice of holiness, nor hope of heaven; it is one vast Zahara, where neither raindrop falls, nor dew exhales, nor wholesome herb, nor fragrant flowret lifts its head. And oh! Mr. President, when we reflect how appalling a proportion that moral desert bears to the little. verdant spot around Siloam's well, can we want either gratitude for our own distinguished blessedness, or motives of exertion to dispense it to others? True, indeed, the sending forth of the Bible does not secure, as a consequence of course, the saving of those who receive it: but, sir, does not the whole history of the Bible cause, docs not the whole history of the world demonstrate that where that Bible comes, some men are always its happy converts? Can you point me, sir, to a single land in all the world that possesses the Bible where there are no believers? Sending then the Bible, is, on a broad and general calculation, and according to all the known analogies of providence, sending salvation. And is this a thought that can go through a Christian bosom without effect? No, sir, it is like the electric stream. If that is to be the issue-if in the judgment we are to meet, from our frontiers, from the depths of the forest, from every district of this wide-spread continent, men, immortal men, saved from eternal death by the Bibles we have sent them, what toil is arduous, or what sacrifice can be accounted great? But, sir, where is the toil? and what is the sacrifice? I behold, instead, nothing but pleasures. Surely, sir, it is a pleasure thus to meet, surrounded by all that is venerable and all that is lovely, to witness the triumphs of a heaven-born charity, and to aid them with our prayers. As certainly is it a pleasure to contribute to this fund of the heathens hope, to cast into this treasury of pity and love. And sure I am it is not less a pleasure to be the almoner of a beneficence so truly divine-to enter the hut of poverty to visit the lonely pallet of dejection and wo, and, like Jesus, who sends us, to bring to the abodes of guilt and sorrow the peaceful message of the skies. All this, sir, is pleasure, and pleasure only. If there be any thing that deserves the name of labour, it falls upon those who, with so much assiduity and faithfulness, have watched over the concerns of this growing institution, and counselled, with so much wisdom, for the sacred interests of the Bible cause. Let them accept the tribute of a grateful country; and while they continue their high and holy task, let them lift their eyes to that day that is approaching, when from the rock on which the pilgrims landed, to the farthest promontory on the shores of the Pacific, from the pole to the Isthmus, and from the Isthmus to Cape Horn, this book of God which they distribute shall spread its pure light over the greatest and the happiest land that morn ing ever visits or spring adorns. From the American Missionary Register. UNION. OSAGE MISSION. Letter from the Superintendent and Assistant. Little Rock, (Ark.) July 29, 1820. Dear Sir-From this place, to us who survive, a scene of affliction, and a season of gratitude, we address you. We sent on a communication from the Post of Arkansas. Since that time, a kind and righteous Providence has been pleased to visit us. Sister Hoyt we buried on the bank of this river on the 21st inst. She died the evening before, after a sickness of about 17 days. Sister Lines we buried on the 25th, in this place. Dear sir, we could here drop our pen, and pour out our tears. Our hearts are full when we tell you the loss we have sustained. These beloved sisters are not with us, but our loss is their gain; they have gone to be with Christ. Sister Johnson was taken sick about the same time with sister Hoyt she is gaining strength. Several of the brethren and sisters have been visited with the fever. Our situation became so unpromising and alarming, and our boats so unhealthy, in consequence of the heat and their crowded state, that we thought it r duty to stop at this place, unload our boats, and give our sick |