plying a nation with religious instruction, and of carrying out and extending the principles of the spiritual kingdom of the Messiah. In the estimate to which we are now directing the attention of our readers, we have no wish to amuse by descanting on the gigantic proportions of the transatlantic colossus: neither the magnitude of the territory, the rapidly increasing ratio of population, the extent of commercial enterprise, the magic growth of the western cities of this vast empire,-neither any nor all of these have engaged for her our sympathies. The consideration of her moral and religious phenomena, and of the influence she is now exerting, and is enabled by Divine Providence to exert in a still more ample and beneficial degree in meliorating the spiritual condition of the human family, by giving to them the blessings of knowledge and civilization, thus realizing the designs of an ever merciful Providence in bringing again a fallen and degraded world to God and to holiness, is the alone ground of our admiration. Whether national welfare be best secured by the gorgeous trappings of a monarchy, or by the Doric plainness of republican simplicity, is a problem, towards the solution of which we shall offer no attempt; whether the advantages of social intercommunion are rendered more efficient by the suavity of aristocratic mannerism or by the inartificial rusticity of plebean familiarity; whether the sum of human happiness be greater in the land whose citizens enjoy a sober uniformity of possession equally remote from poverty and from excessive wealth, or in that where the extremes of both are met with in immediate contiguity, are beside the range of our present design; but the anticipated instrumentality of this great republic in evangelizing the nations, in pouring out the flood of light which is to scatter the thick darkness now covering the world in its three great divisions of Heathen, Mahometan, and Anti-christian delusions, is to us, and we trust will be to all, a subject of deep and thrilling interest. It is evident to all the true disciples of our blessed Master, that the old world has hitherto failed in the design of evangelizing the nations, if, indeed, that can be called a failure which has never been seriously enterprised: she has either faithlessly betrayed the cause, or proved herself utterly inadequate to the task. The only country which is now using any legitimate effort in its furtherance is itself deplorably and utterly destitute, as to the vast majority of its inhabitants, of that very evangelization which it is the will and the command of the Founder of our religion should pervade every land and regulate every conscience: its millions of baptized heathens in the savage ignorance of their mind, and the ferocious sensuality of their moral character, their drunkenness, their oaths, their pollution, and their depredations on property, testifying too plainly to the inadequacy of the existing system to Christianize its own advocates; and speaking in terms not to be

misunderstood, of the utter hopelessness that such a system will ever even attempt the conversion of the world. Praiseworthy exertions have been made, and with much success, by different Christian sects of this country, who have adopted a system of religious operation more in accordance with the genius of religion itself, and the recorded proceedings of its Founder, and even by a section of the dominant party, who in acting in their missionary exertions on the principles of others, have practically acknowledged the inadequacy of their own; but the system which the nation has adopted, has utterly failed even to make its own supporters Christians. Its legislators have, indeed, made Christianity the law of the land, but as to its being the law of obedience to the people, --the only way in which it can possibly accomplish the great ends for which it is designed,-such an object is now as far from being effected as in the days of its primitive conveyance to these shores. In this highly privileged kingdom a professedly reformed system of our common faith has been established and endowed, at a higher expense to the public than perhaps any other existing form of religion. For upwards of two hundred and fifty years it has tried by all possible means, by the banishment, the civil disqualification, and occasionally by the putting to death those of a different opinion, to keep its machinery in exclusive operation, and by pecuniary mulets to make even its opponents contribute towards the sluggish motion of the unwieldy engine and now let the results of this so lauded instrumentality be seen in the fact, that the overwhelming mass of the community is fearfully ignorant of the spiritual and regenerating influence of the great truths of Christianity, that even as regards a rational comprehension of the system of biblical knowledge no inconsiderable number are perfectly and fatally uninformed, and that the debauchery of the operatives of our cities and manufacturing towns, and the sensuality, ignorance, and superstition of our peasantry are such as to make them ripe for sedition, incendiarism, and open infidelity, from which latter state they are preserved by the fearful alternative, that they never exercise their thoughts on any subject higher than the mere gratification of appetite: safe only from the easy seduction of socialism, or the daring wickedness of the system of Thomas Paine, by the one defence of a total destitution of any mental effort.

When, in order to form a just opinion of the relative advantages of both systems, we turn our eyes to the American continent, and observe the operation of the voluntary system in the northern and middle states, especially where alone it has been tried for a sufficient time to enable us to form a correct judgment; when we listen to the testimony of unprejudiced, and to the still more important testimony of prejudiced travellers, acknowledging that there is scarcely an uneducated adult in these provinces, asserting the de

cent propriety of the moral conduct of the great body of the people; when we see these statements corroborated by statistical documents of the criminal and penal annals of those states; when we hear of the prevalence of vital and scriptural Christianity in most districts, and observe the influence which it exercises on the national institutions, the habits of society, and, in some instances, on the public and political dealings of this republic with other nations, and especially of late with heathen nations, we look at her with a kind of reverence, and feel an honest pride at reflecting that these are the genuine effects of the principles we advocate. To New England, we repeat, to the valleys irrigated by the Connecticut river, would we refer the philosophical and philanthropic inquirer into the relative efficiency of different forms of religion, on the formation of the human character; there let him learn that religion in its purity, in its moralizing efficiency on the human heart, in all that it imparts of sanctity in this world, and of preparation for another, is best secured and established when it is left to the spontaneous and hearty affection of those who feel its value. Let the inquirer observe facts, and trace them to their principles. Let him observe that the Christian religion has hitherto, with very few exceptions, been supported in America on the same system in which it was originally left by its divine Master and his inspired apostles, and on which it depended for the first three hundred years of its existence, when its growth was stopped and its vigor manacled by the cumbrous armour of a state alliance. Let him institute a comparison between its state in the two different countries which we have purposely chosen to contrast together, as being confessedly the portions of the world where Christianity is most known, and whence its blessings are to be poured forth in the expected regeneration of the world. Let him observe the progress of education in the American republic, the paucity of crime, the tone of moral feeling pervading her community; let him remember that societies formed on the principle of a total abstinence from all intoxicating liquors, are now almost general through the length and breadth of the land, that there are several states wherein, except for medicinal purposes, these provocatives cannot easily be procured even in houses of public refreshment, and that this example is likely to be followed throughout the Union; and, finally, that according to the statement of a respectable minister of that country lately on a visit of brotherly affection to the Dissenting churches of England, were not the number of dissolute foreigners an obstacle to the design, there is a great probability that alcoholic mixtures would be effectually banished from the whole republic, as they are already from a great portion of that class of its subjects who were once supposed to need them most, the sailors and operatives. These are facts that speak too plainly of the moral state of America to be silenced

by the suspicions of Tory prejudice, or the insinuations of hierarchical intolerance. We know well, that the force of this evidence is attempted to be avoided by the statement of a great destitution of ministerial instruction in many sections of this great country, and that this statement is considered by uncandid men as supplying an argument against the validity of the voluntary principle. If we could hope to bind down our opponents to follow the results of a full examination of this point, we should be happy to rest the weight of the argument on this very fact. Could we expect candor to have any room in the mind of the person who puts forth this statement, we should ask him, before he adventure on any numerical experiment, to make allowance first for the fact, that the several states of that great republic were originally colonized by very different races, and by companies of the same nation of very different and opposite views in politics and in religion, and that sufficient time has not yet elapsed for the several states to combine in the formation of one national character, but that each province yet preserves, in a great degree, the feelings, the prejudices, and the intellectual features of the country and the sect from whence their ancestors sprung. The high aristocratic Episcopalian of Somerset and Devon is still to be found in Virginia and Carolina, the Quaker in Pennsylvania, the Baptist in Rhode Island, the Independent of Lincolnshire, and Suffolk, and Essex, in Connecticut and Massachussets. In the provinces of New England, peopled originally by the Presbyterians, and Independents, and Baptists, there is a supply of ministerial agency fully adequate to the population, and certainly equal in relative proportion to the number of the same class in England, as appears by undoubted statistical documents. And be it remembered, that these states are the Goshen of America, and that even English Tory prejudice has been constrained to acknowledge, in a late tour through Connecticut, that in the villages of that province the principles of morality and religion are better practised than perhaps in any other part of the world. The states of Virginia and the Carolinas were colonized by Episcopal aristocrats and Tories, and Maryland very principally by the English Roman Catholics. It can not surprise any one who reflects on the unvarying character of Toryism in every age, and in every clime, to find that dissoluteness of manners yet characterizes this section of the republic, and that it should walk hand in hand in these states with the support of slavery. And if the observer will further remember, that this part of the United States is distinguished also by a manifest inferiority in the numerical proportion of ministers to the more favored regions of the north, he will be assisted, perhaps, in accounting for the defect by the remembrance, that the ancestors of the present planters being principally Episcopalians of the English Church, had been educated in the habit of looking to the government for the supply of their reli

gious wants. Ifthe admirers of the coercive system will point out these provinces of America as affording an instance of what they call the failure of the voluntary principle, let them remember that Virginia and Carolina were the only provinces of America where the English Episcopacy was ever established by law; that the slave provinces of the south were precisely the very sections of the country which were first colonized by the zealous defenders of Toryism and Episcopacy; that these principles yet prevail in these states more than in any other section of the Union, and that what has been done there for religion has been principally effected by a healthy importation of more enlightened and more liberal measures and men from the northern states. The southern and Tory states of America are as remarkable for a low state of education and morals, as the children of the Puritans are for the contrary. The western and trans-Alleghany sections of this republic can scarcely be said to be yet settled; but a few years ago they were either an impervious forest where the axe of civilization had never resounded, or waste prairies, the range of the wild bison, or of the wilder Indian. To expect a supply of ministers in these districts adequate to the geographical dimensions of the land, or even to the numbers of its widely scattered inhabitants, is what no candid, no fair inquirer into the relative capabilities of the different systems could pretend to justify, especially when he remembers that a considerable portion of these people are dissolute natives of Britain, unaccustomed from educational habits to any feeling of concern about their destitution of religious instruction; whilst others, especially in Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana, are Irish papists, who have felt too acutely the oppression of a national clergy distinct in religion and manners from the inhabitants, and forced upon them, and supported by the aid of Protestant bayonets, to entertain any great affection to Protestantism. Such an inquirer will also remember, that the supposed deficiency in the proportion of ministerial agency which is presumed to characterize the western states, is built on the inaccurate, and, indeed, now obsolete statistical report of Dr. Dwight, who, though an excellent man, was, let it be remembered, a bigoted Congregationalist; for, alas, bigotry is not confined to England, nor to Episcopacy; and as a proof of his bigotry, in the various religious statistics he has inserted in his otherwise excellent book of travels, he takes no account of any ministers but those who were regularly educated in the theological colleges, and recognized by the ceremony of ordination, omitting altogether that class so common in the western provinces especially, who are in the constant habit of imparting religious instruction without the previous reception of ordination, in consequence either of some scruple at the rite, or their distance from brethren of their own faith and order. This class is very numerous amongst the different sections