Africa are small compared with those inflicted upon her through the slave trade, all other obstacles to the progress of the Gospel are slight compared with those which from this quarter oppose it. This is the universal testimony of all our Missionaries, that Missions and the slave trade cannot exist together; and how sad to think that the slave trade has excluded Missions from so many districts, but Missions the slave trade from not one. Surely good ought to be mightier than evil. How humiliating is it for us to see the deadly energy with which this accursed traffic is carried on. Think, brethren, if some European nation had determined to put down African Missions, and had attempted to carry out its impious purpose as heartily as England has sought to put down the slave trade, and with the same means at its disposal-is it not to be feared that it would long ago have succeeded? Meanwhile this trade still lives and is strong, the devil's martyrs running to hell so much more eagerly than God's martyrs to heaven.

And yet even here, in this darkest quarter of Africa's spiritual horizon, there are streaks of light, glimpses of hope. What the righteous endeavours of England have failed to accomplish, (and may these be remembered for her, as they will, in the day of her visitation,) the terrible judgments of God will one day accomplish, and I believe, that soon. There are two nations, and, thank God, only two, that are now coining the blood of Afric's sons into gold but if any thing be true, if from the past we can read any thing of the future, this is true, that they are heaping up treasure "in the last times," that out of their sin shall come their punishment,

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When the ungodly are green as the grass, and when all the workers of wickedness do flourish, then (even at that very moment) shall they be destroyed for ever; suddenly shall they consume, perish, and come to a fearful end. What St. Domingo has seen, Cuba and Brazils shall surely one day see; and on that day, so dreadful and yet so righteous, the slave trade, according to all human hope, may be numbered with the abominations that have been.

But there are some, who tell us of a mightier obstacle than any of these: they make an objection to our undertaking so serious, that if there were any truth in it, it would indeed be fatal to all our plans throughout the greater part of this quarter of the world. They tell us that the negro race, (meaning thereby, the whole population of central Africa,) and if the negro, much more the Hottentot and the Bushman, are incapable of receiving the blessings, because incapable of apprehending the doctrines, of Christianity, that this religion of the Spirit is not for all men, but only for the superior tribes or races of the world.

The objection is capable of a double refutation. We might refuse to allow it, even had the experiment as yet never been tried of bringing the Gospel to bear on the African mind. We might reply to this objector, that his objections spring from an entire misunderstanding of what the nature of the Gospel is. If it be the profoundest, it is also the plainest, thing in the world. It is not doctrines, but facts; or only doctrines, as they are the necessary deductions from the facts. And men do not live by the doctrines, but by the facts. The life, and death, and rising again of Christ—that is the Gos

pel. The first ambassadors of the Word, we are told, preached Jesus and the resurrection. It is a life, the life of the Lord Jesus, by which we are to live; it is a death, His death, in the strength and faith of which we are to die, looking for another life through death. And these truths of a life and death are in the reach and compass of all. God meant His Gospel for all, and He adapted it for all.

I mean not, of course, hereby to slight or overlook the peculiar difficulties which beset the missionary, in bringing the word of life to bear upon savage tribes, or generally upon races deficient in all previous moral and intellectual training. How hard he finds it to fix their attention, even for a few minutes together. How does it oftentimes appear as though he has not merely to bring the seed, but to form the very soil in which that seed is to take root. What a miserable organ is the language of the savage, (with almost no words, save those that express the barest needs, or the vilest doings, of the animal man,) for the communicating of spiritual truths! How often must the missionary tremble, lest he should be utterly degrading and debasing the divine truth, stripping it of all its glory, to make it intelligible to his hearers; losing it in the very attempt to communicate it; so miserable are the only channels by which he can attempt to con

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it. All this we must often have read of, I trust with a deep sympathy, with hearts stirred up to livelier prayer than before, for them whose faith must in all this be so sorely tried, whose work is so infinitely harder and more discouraging than our own.

But what I say is, that these difficulties are not insuperable-that they may be overcome-that they

have been overcome. Even had they been neveryet, we should be bound by all that we hold most sacred to believe that they might be. What were the Incarnation, if Christ did not therein become every man's brother? if he did not take the nature of our whole race? if any were of necessity shut out from the benefits of His death and passion? if the Spirit were not poured out, or ready to be poured out, upon all flesh? Truly the savage, this withered leaf torn violently from the stem and stock of humanity, this out-cast child of man's royal race, wandering so far from his home, with almost nothing now to tell that he too is come of the blood-royal of creation, truly he well may be, and ought to be, to us, the object, not as some have made him, of sentimental admiration; but, as we learn to know him, and all his guilt and his degradation, aright, of the deepest pity, of the most inward bleeding compassion.

But miserable as he is, he is not so miserable as those who speak this language would make him. Dark-he yet is not incapable of light; impureof being purified; bloody and hateful-yet not incapable of unlearning his hate, and of learning quite another lesson in the school of Christ. So we should be bound to say beforehand; so now we say, with a thousand witnesses in the records of grace setting their seal to our word. That extreme intellectual feebleness which marks many of the tribes of Southern Africa, is the consequence, as experience has shewn, of faculties not exercised,. rather than of faculties not existing. Pritchard affirms, (and there could be no higher authority,) that the negro race, wherever it has existed under conditions tolerably favourable for its development.

(and as yet how rarely has it done so,) has shewn that its intellectual powers are great-I will not say so great, or that they ever would be so great, as those of the Caucasian man; for in the same family there are brothers with different powers and different endowments; and thus I believe that God has willed it in the great family of man. But the negro has shewn his capacities to be great. There exists in America a library, and that of no inconsiderable bulk, consisting entirely of books composed and written by men of the black race-books, as I have been told, in almost every branch of science and literature and art, displaying most of them respectable, and some of them eminent, proficiency in all. And Oldendorp, that admirable early Moravian missionary in Africa, has published a series of brief homilies, addressed by negro assistant preachers to congregations of their countrymen; displaying, not indeed the beauty of language, the precision of expression, of a Fenelon or a Leighton; but bearing such witness as no Christian man could mistake, of hearts touched and quickened by the same grace which had quickened them, of men who had been enabled and enlightened by that grace to be no mean interpreters to their brethren, of the truths which had blessed and saved themselves.

And what need I to quote these? the records of our own Society are full of testimonies of like kind. Let us away, then, with this dishonourable thought, that there are any people for whom the reception of the Word of Life is an impossible thing. If man was made for the gospel, the gospel also was madeand adapted for man. Amid the countless myriads that shall stand before the throne with white robes.