FREFATOR Y LETTER. lxxxiii 



own threshold. In that condition he would morally be little 

 better than the beasts of the field. It is of the very essence 

 of Christian love that it is expansive, and that it gains new 

 strength by its social exercise. For sentiments of true love 

 are not barren, but have a goodly progeny, which bring back 

 to the heart a most abundant recompense. 



There has however appeared in our times another argument 

 (alluded to before, p. viii) against missions to the heathen, which 

 starts with an hypothesis that some Tribes of men have been 

 created only to be destroyed — that when a Race is once sunk 

 low in the scale of humanity it is absolutely irrecoverable — and 

 that all efforts to raise it to a higher moral grade are a worthless 

 w T aste of time, and therefore a mischievous application of our 

 labour. I do not stop to ask by what law of faith or reason 

 we dare to define the bounds of divine benevolence; and by what 

 right we strive to draw within our narrow limitation those 

 large religious hopes which animate a good man, who is wil- 

 ling to devote his life to a work for which he believes he has 

 God's sanction; and who works well because he trusts that 

 he shall continue to have God's help. The hypothesis gives 

 us a gloomy, cheerless view of our Maker's dealings with His 

 creatures. There is darkness enough in the world without our 

 hypothetical colouring to make it darker still. The argument, 

 when sifted, is but a miserable apology for our own short- 

 comings ; and a profane readiness to throw, on the unfathom- 

 able decrees of Providence, a blame for evils, which, in obedi- 

 ence to His commands and in full trust in His help, it was 

 our bounden duty to remedy. But have we done this? 

 Nay, have we not — in the case of Africa — fostered and engen- 

 dered these evils by most intrepid and cruel deeds of wicked- 

 ness — continued and upheld for centuries, without remorse or 

 shame? To such an argument — when urged by men with 

 little hope, with frigid benevolence, and it may be in selfish 

 feincerity — we can reply by an appeal to the conversions 

 wrought, with God's help, by the Missionaries to the Islands 



