of Directors shall take place at Philadelphia, on the Third Wednesday in November instant. ART. XII. It is recommended to every Member of this Society, to pray to Almighty God, for His blessing upon its designs; under the full conviction, that unless He direct us in all our doings with His most gracious favour, and further us with his continual help, we cannot reasonably hope, either to procure suitable persons to act as Missionaries, or expect that their endeavours will be successful. Extracts from an Address issued WE refer, for a development of the views of the Convention, to the Constitution of the Society, from which it will appear, that there are two objects, of Domestic and Foreign Missions. Had no other than the former been attempted, there would have been a wide range for the display of zeal and of endeavour. It is probably known to those who will be the readers of this Address, that there was a time within the memory of many living, when, in consequence of the troubles of the Revolutionary War, concurring with the want of the means of continuing the Ministry among ourselves, the far greater number of our Congregations were destitute of Pastors, and, indeed, in a state approaching to annihilation. Although, under the blessing of God, there has been a gradual revival of the administration of the Ordinances; yet, to this day, in the Atlantic States, there are numerous districts, in which a considerable proportion of the people is Episcopal, while yet an Episcopal Ministry is unknown among them: owing partly to the circumstance, that the number of the Ordained is unequal to the demand; but, principally, to their being a scattered people, not likely to be benefitted by any other than a Missionary Ministry, until, by excitement thus made and by consequent increase, the inhabitants shall be competent to the supporting of a Ministry of their own. This has been found, in many instances, to be the effect of the occasional visits of a zealous Missionary. by the Board of Directors. It adds immensely to the necessity of the present call on your beneficence, that, while the active Members of our Church have been occupied in repairing the decayed ways and renewing the dilapidated buildings of our Zion, new prospects have been opening on them westward, in immense territories, in which the Church is to be reared, if at all, from its foundation. It has been distressing to the hearts of those prominent in our Ecclesiastical Concerns, that, for some years past, they have received continual and earnest requests for Ministerial Supplies, which there were no means of meeting. Some aid bas been afforded; it has been very small; but the thankfulness with which it was received, the excitement consequent on it among those destitute Members of our Communion, and its efficiency beyond proportion to what was bestowed, present pleasing presages of what may be expected from the combined energies of our Church throughout the Union, prudently directed, and sustained by the liberality of its Members generally. We stand in a relation to our Brethren in the New States, not unlike to that in which, before the Revolution, the Episcopal Population in the Atlantic Provinces stood to their Parent Church in England. What was then the conduct of that Church toward the forefathers of those, who are now invited to imitate them in their beneficence? It was, that she extended her fostering care to her Sons, in their migration to the then-uncultivated wilderness of the New World; and that she organized a Society, in which the Prelates took the lead, being sustained by the most distinguished of the Clergy and of the Laity over the whole realm. Although their aids were discontinued with the acknowledgment of the Independence of this country-a limitation to which they were restricted by the conditions of their Charter; yet the good achieved by them is felt in its consequences to the present day. To provinces plant ed by Members of the Established Church, they extended no aid; nor was there occasion for any, there being provision made in them by legislative assessments: but, in the provinces in which the Episcopal portion of the population was thin, and other forms of profession prevalent, we should at this time be destitute of the means of worship. ping God agreeably to the dictates of our consciences, or rather there would have been long since lost all the traces of the peculiar institutions of our Apostolic Church, had it not been for the fostering care of the said Venerable Body, and for the expense to which the Members of our Communion in the Parent Land voluntarily subjected themselves. The time is come, when gratitude and honour, in concurrence with zeal for what we conceive to be the Truths of Scripture, urge us to repay the benefit: not to the bestowers of it, who neither claim nor stand in need of a return; but by the supply of the spiritual wants of those who have migrated from our soil, as our forefathers migrated from the land of their nativity; and who would doubtless have been objects of the beneficence of the Church which is our Common Parent, but for the severance which has taken place in the course of Divine Providence. While we represent in this imporlant point of view the wants of the Members of our own Church, we do not overlook the other branch of our trust; from which it may be gathered, that the Convention contemplated the giving of a beginning to efforts simultaneous with those of other denominations of Christians, for the extending of the light of the Gospel to the benighted Heathen. There is no fact more remarkable on the face of the Bible, than that the Gospel is to be preached to all nations-this having been announced by the Saviour in person, and by His Apostles after His crucifixion. Judging from what we know of the course of Providence, operating through the intervention of second causes, we are led to conclude, that these predictions will be fulfilled by human endeavours, under the government of divine grace. Here opens on us a subject, which cannot be contemplated without grief, on account of the inefficiency of measures formerly pursued for the extending of the Kingdom of the Redeemer; and especially their contrariety to the beneficent spirit which it breathes. The Sword and the Cross have been displayed, in unnatural alliance; in wars, professedly made for the subjecting of nations to the sceptre of the Prince of Peace: the effect has been, either the generating of enmity against a religion attempted to be obtruded by violence; or, the establishing of the same religion in name, but disfigured by corruptions subversive of the spirit of its institu tions. It was not thus, that the Faith in Christ had been propagated, when, within a few years after the Apostles, its apologists appealed to the known fact, that, independently on human policy or force, it had reached the utmost limits of the then-known world. Without the din of war for the extension of the Christian Cause, there have been Settlements made in the neighbourhoods of Heathen Nations, apparently opening avenues for the entrance of the truths of the Gospel; while, the object being gain and the increase of commerce, there has been inefficiency as to the other object, which became a matter of little or of no concern with the Settlers. Even when a mass of people, of whom a considerable proportion were consistent Christians, have been seated in like vicinities of the Heathen, their position to one another has been such, that the latter have known little of the other, besides the vices, and especially the frauds, of those who bore the name, and to whom, from circumstances connected with the arrangement of civil life, their intercourses were confined. This is especially discernible in our own country; in the relation in which, from the infancy of our Settlements, we have stood to the Indian Tribes on our frontier. For, although efforts have been made, and not altogether with out effect, as well by the Church of England as by other Denominations, for the evangelizing of these tribes; yet the good has been greatly overbalanced by the mass of vice generated by our commercial communications, which our public counsels have not hitherto been able to regu late or to restrain. of a rescue of the inhabitants of our western wilderness, from the atroci. ties of their savage state; and of opening their eyes to a due esteem of the Arts and of the enjoyments of civilized life; under no circumstances, however, without a proportionate esteem for those truths, those precepts, and those promises, which can be learned only from the Bible. It is a remarkable fact, tending to sustain the sentiments which have been delivered, that there has lately appeared, in various countries, a zeal for Missionary Labours, beyond any thing of the same spirit since the age of the first preaching of the Gospel. Many and great are the dangers to be encountered, and many and great are the privations to be submitted to, in the prosecution of such designs; and yet the ardour, far from being damped by discouragment of this sort, is on the increase. In the beginning, there may have been no unreasonable apprehensions, that the fire would expire after a transient blaze; but many years have attested, not only the sincerity, but the perseverance of the men, who had thus devoted themselves to the going out into the highways and hedges of Pagan Idolatry, at the cost of encountering any hardships, and of being for ever separate in this world from the endearing intercourse of kindred and early attachments. Is there not, in this, what may not improbably be an indication of the approach of the time, when there shall be a verifying of the promise-from the rising of the sun, even unto the going down of the same, my Name shall be great among the Gentiles? Of late years, under very different circumstances, and generally in a very different spirit from the above, there have been put forth endeavours for the conveying of the Gospel to Heathen Nations. It has been by presenting the Books of Scripture in their different languages; and by sending to them Missionaries, whose views are detached from all the concerns, alike of temporal sovereignties, and of spiritual domination interfering with civil duties; and who cannot have any other object, than that of making their converts the subjects of a kingdom not of this world. Who can calculate the effects of this new plan for the evangelizing of the world? Already the peaceful preaching of the Gospel has made inroads on the superstitions of Brah-viction of the preponderance of the ma and of Budhu in Asia, Already, in Africa, many of her sable children are assembled under Pastors, who break to them the bread of life. And already, the uniting of religion and civilization has made the beginning In comparing the claims of the great fields of labour, within the bounds of our Federal Compact, and of those exterior to it, there was felt the con former; because of the more imme- petuating the knowledge of revealed truth, where, although on the decline, it is not absolutely lost, than where it is to be begun-and the less expense in the sending and the maintaining of Missionaries, in the former case than in the latter. Nevertheless, as it appears that the good Providence of God is opening new prospects of the bringing of Heathen People within the pale of the Church of Christ; and as pious persons, among ourselves, have declared their ardent wishes in favour of an opening of this channel for their liberality, the Convention have complied with so pious a motion; at the same time, judging it a dictate of religious prudence, to leave to every Subscriber to choose, if he should entertain a choice, between the two purposes defined. We conclude, in the spirit of the conclusion of the Constitution, by inviting all the Members of our Church to put up the prayer there suggested, for the blessing of God on the concern committed to our trust; not doubting that the effect of such a prayer, habitually put up to the Throne of Grace, will so interest the affections of the supplicants, as to insure their contributing of reasonable portions of their substance, for the accomplishing of so estimable an object of their desire. Especially, if such persons should have felt the check of the admonitions of the Gospel on their consciences, of its consolations under the various vicissitudes of life, and of the bright prospects which it opens beyond the darkness of the grave; they will cheerfully bestow their proportionate aids, for the extending of those benefits to regions where they are now unknown— to the retaining of them in districts, in which they are in danger of being lost in an increasing dissoluteness of manners; in short, in contributing to the reign of Truth and Righteousness, and thus leading on to the accomplishment of the object of the petition enjoined on us for daily use the doing of the will of God onearth, as it is done in heaven. By order of the Board of Directors, WM. WHITE, President. |