Missionary Duty. 3 
the glory of His name, they will seek their good. Obedience 
and Love to Christ, then, are the chief grounds and motives of 
missionary duty. 
Men who decline the authority of Christ will, of course, act 
on a very different principle. The heathen are nothing to them 
beyond what they can get from them in the way of pleasure or 
trade; and as their persons are more valuable than their pro- 
ductions, they will buy and sell them—kidnap and kill them 
as it suits them to do so. 
And if we believed that they were less than men—that they 
had no part in man’s sin and no share in Christ’s salvation, if 
they had been exempted from His Possession and excluded 
from our Commission, we would not feel that we had any serious 
duty toward them. But they are under the empire of Sin and 
Death, even as we are—and by special grant have been in- 
cluded in the Kingdom of Christ. Therefore, of whatever 
character or condition they may be—lovely or unlovely—a 
noble race or a very contemptible one—because Christ does 
not despise them we dare not; because He says “ Go to all na- 
tions,” and ‘Preach the Gospel to every creature,” we cannot 
rest till we have finished that work given us to do. 
And although the faults and shortcomings which are laid at 
the door of Christian missionaries were true, and although they 
were multiplied a thousandfold, that would not alter our duty, 
nor affect our determination to do it by God’s help. 
But these charges (charges chiefly of indolence and useless- 
ness, and hypocritical washing black men white) are not true. 
They are not true to any appreciable extent. I feel bound to 
speak on this subject. Am having had long acquaintance with 
the missionaries of the present generation—beginning with John 
Williams and Alexander Duff—I must be permitted to offer 
them the tribute of a humble but very sincere admiration. They 
are among the Church’s foremost men.—They are among her 
greatest benefactors; for while they have been advancing the 
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