wisdom and strength, and honour and glory and blessing. His prayer for his brethren, wherever dispersed, will be, like that of his blessed Lord, that they may be delivered from the evil.

Full of brotherly love, grounded on similar principles, the Missionary himself proceeds to his charitable labour. What is it that strengthens him to endure hardships, as a good soldier of Christ? and to go out, like faithful Abraham, not knowing whither he goeth? What weans him from things present, subdues the selfishness and native indolence of his heart, enables him to postpone natural to spiritual affections, cheers in desertion and distress, sustains under mental conflict, and in the absence of human consolations? What teaches him to hope against hope, in that hour of disappointment when the love of many waxeth cold? What to rejoice with trembling, when his prayers are heard, and sinners at the voice of his warning are turned from the error of their ways and live? That same Spirit which wrought so powerfully on the heart of Paul works within him, and imbues him with a zealous desire of winning souls to Christ. He rests not in simple compassion, nor sits down satisfied with bidding his perishing brethren Depart in peace; be ye warmed and filled. He goes out in full assurance of faith, and preaches Jesus and the resurrection on the precedent of apostolical authority. He calls on the world, to come and see the man who told him all things that ever he did. He casts his bread on the waters; he sows the good

seed on the stony ground, or on the rock, or among thorns; nothing doubting but that he that soweth in tears shall reap in joy.

In tears, indeed, so far as earthly consolations are considered, the Missionary must expect to sow. It will be grievous to his spirit to see how the form of man, being without God in the world, is utterly debased and degraded. Like his Master, whose badge he bears, he must know how to endure the contradiction of sinners, to bear with the scorn of the proud, the contumely of the ignorant, the neglect of the careless, the hate of the profligate and sensual man. He must be content to be debarred from holding communion with some familiar and like-minded spirit, from taking sweet counsel at the lips of some father and master in Israel, from confirming his own hope by experience of the success of others, or moderating his too sanguine expectations by the example of their failure. He must know how to possess his soul in patience, and to commit his way unto the Lord, who will accomplish that which He pleases, and prosper him in the thing whereto he is sent.

And yet, amidst the tears in which the Missionary is constrained to sow, a source of joy, peculiar to himself, is opened-refreshing as the well of water to Hagar in the wilderness, or as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. He sees heaven opened; and before him, Jesus, the author and finisher of his faith. He hears those encouraging promises,

I will not leave you comfortless.-Behold, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.-My grace is sufficient for you. True it is, he is not cheered by the applause or admiration of men: but his motives are not influenced-I had almost said debased-by their praise. His soul may faint within him at the remembrance that he is one of a little band of fewer than fifty Christian men, on whom it rests to convey the name of the Gospel among more than one hundred millions of idolaters, scattered over a country of fifteen hundred thousand square miles. Yet at the sight of these immense fields, already whitening, by God's Providence, unto the harvest, his mind is filled with a sense of thankfulness, and with a joy with which the stranger intermeddleth not. Though it may not be given to him to turn many to righteousness, and the world may perhaps think, in the severity of its judgment, that God has not set His seal to his ministry and has disowned his feeble labours, there are still the faithful few whom he has been permitted to rescue from the god of this world, his crowns of rejoicing and exceeding great reward, his own sons in the faith, on whose foreheads his Father's name is written, members of one body in Christ, who know their shepherd, and are known of Him. It is enough for him if but one stony heart is melted into love, or one listless eye awakened into intelligence, and taught to look stedfastly on the mercies of Heaven. He hails with humble thankfulness the soul that has been given to his prayers; and counts it as an earnest of that

glorious season, when the Lord will famish all the gods of the earth, and men shall worship Him every one from his place, even all the isles of the heathen.

How, then, it is time to ask, is the consummation of prophecy, humanly speaking, to be accomplished? Some insight into the divine counsels may perhaps be gained by looking back to the gradual increase of those MINISTERS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT, through whom the Lord has been adding to the Church daily such as should be saved, during the ages past. First was heard a single voice in the solitude of the wilderness, preaching repentance, for the kingdom of heaven was at hand. Next were sent forth the Twelve, on a special mission, and commanded to go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Then other Seventy also, whose message was to every city and place whither the Lord would come. Then followed the Elders, and Saints, and Martyrs of the primitive ages, men whose praise is in all the churches, who counted not their lives dear unto themselves, so that they might finish their course with joy, and the ministry which they had received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the Gospel of the grace of God. And still as from time to time, during the lapse of many centuries, some bright candlestick has been removed out of its place, by those inscrutable dispensations which seem intended to remind us that the Lord needs not the agency of a Paul or an Apollos to work His purposes, other men of God have entered successively into the field of labour, bent on doing the work

of evangelists, and on giving, if permitted, full proof of their ministry. The time has not been in the history of missions, when God has left Himself without witness and though it cannot yet be said that great is the company of the Preachers, yet on this very day, aye, and at this very hour, many a teacher of Truth, whose tent is pitched among the heathen in every quarter of the globe, is remembering with joy how his brethren here are occupied; and is present with them in spirit, though not in the flesh; and is bending the knee in unity of devotion to the Lord of the harvest, that he will raise up many helpers, and send forth more labourers into the vineyard.

There is indeed, in the signs of the present times, that which would have stirred the spirit of a Paul within him. Never was there a period, since the veil was rent which shut out the Gentiles from the sight of the Holiest, when the bow has been seen so plainly in the clouds, denoting that God has not forgotten His covenant with man. The leaven is clearly at work among the nations; a spirit of inquiry has gone forth; the spell is dissolving day by day; the darkness becomes less gross; the sun of righteousness shines over a wider horizon. It may be that the time is at hand when this Gospel of the Kingdom shall be no longer preached among a handful of the people, on the house-top, or upon the mountains, secretly and by stealth, by sufferance or connivance; but in all the world, for a witness to all nations.. A great door and effectual is open to us; and though