interesting; who feels a pleasure in bringing men to God, proportioned to the extent of their previous wanderings; who can endure the coarse (perhaps fanatical) piety of the ignorant and vulgar, and listen with joy to the homely prayers of men long strangers to the power of religion; who can do this, without himself giving way to a vain enthusiasm; and whose good sense, sound knowledge, and practical piety, can restrain and reclaim the enthusiasm of others to the due limits of reason and scripture; to him, above all, who can give his few leisure hours to fields of usefulness beyond his immediate duty; and who, without neglecting the European penitent, can aspire to the further extension of Christ's kingdom among the heathen; to such a man as Martyn was, and as some still are, (whom may the Lord of the harvest long continue to His Church!) I can promise no common usefulness and enjoyment in the situation of an Indian chaplain.

I can promise him, in any station to which he may be assigned, an educated society and an audience peculiarly qualified to exercise and strengthen his powers of argument and eloquence. I can promise him, generally speaking, the favour of his superiors, the friendship of his equals, and affection, strong as death, from those whose wanderings he corrects, whose distresses he consoles, and by whose sick and dying bed he stands as a ministering angel! Are further inducements needful? I yet can promise more. I can promise to such a man

the esteem, the regard, the veneration of the surrounding Gentiles; the consolation, at least, of having removed from their minds, by his blameless life and winning manners, some of the most inveterate and most injurious prejudices which oppose, with them, the reception of the Gospel; and the honour, it may be, (of which examples are not wanting among you,) of planting the cross of Christ in the wilderness of a heathen heart, and extending the frontiers of the visible Church amid the hills of darkness and the strong holds of errour and idolatry.

In what I have said, I feel that I have expressed, almost without intending it, my opinion as to what manner of man an Indian chaplain ought to be; and to such of you, my brethren, as fill that honourable rank, any further pastoral advice seems scarcely necessary. If there be any thing more, it must relate to matters of detail and local expediency, which may be left to every man for himself, according to his personal and particular experience.

Two such points there are, however, which I would generally press on the notice of all, because I can hardly conceive a situation in this country, where an attention to both will not be both necessary and blessed.

The first is, a continued and earnest furtherance of and attention to those powerful aids in your spiritual work, by the bounty of individuals, the parental care of government, and the pious munificence of the venerable Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, in regimental or station schools,

wherever they exist or can be established; in the dissemination of religious tracts, of our excellent Liturgy, and the Holy Scriptures; and in the arrangement and conduct of those lending libraries, which should more particularly fall under the chaplain's care, and which I hope, by God's blessing, to see established throughout this land, wherever there is a barrack to receive, or an European soldier or invalid to use them.

The second point which I would recommend to every chaplain who is preparing himself for India, or who yet looks forward to a lengthened residence here, is the attentive and grammatical study of some one of the native languages. I mean not merely that jargon which a few weeks will bestow; which is picked up in our intercourse with the meanest of the people, and which suffices, perhaps, to order bread to be placed on our table, or to expedite our journey from stage to stage. Nor do I recommend, as a general measure, what is to most impracticable, and useful, perhaps, to few, an investigation of the abstruse elegancies and intricate machinery of the learned language of the brahmins. But I do earnestly recommend some further attention than the majority of chaplains in India are accustomed to pay, to those dialects which are intelligible to the great body of the Indian people, and which well-born and well-educated men employ in conversing with each other.

The duty, indeed, of endeavouring the conversion of his heathen neighbours, is to a chaplain, I

readily admit, an incidental duty only. It is a duty, nevertheless, expressly contemplated in those laws which send him hither; and the times may yet return in which it may be expedient to remind the opponents of Gentile conversion, that to acquire the languages and instruct the natives of India is declared in the charter of these colonies, to be a legitimate and necessary part of the labours of every chaplain whom the East India Company shall employ. I allow, nevertheless, that a Chaplain has other and more immediate cares. His vocation is, in the first instance, to the scattered flock of Christ in these lands, to the conversion and renewal of all who are already named after our Lord and Saviour. But God forbid that any among us should forget that it is his duty, as occasion offers, to labour after the good of all men; that he has no commission from God but that which commands him to preach the Gospel to every creature; and that there are patterns before him, of men abundantly and exemplarily zealous in their duty to their European charge, who have found leisure, nevertheless, for conveying the word of salvation to those without these limits, and, to the praise of presbyter, have added that of evangelist.

But this is not all. Even if you found no opportunity, or possessed no talent for convincing the professed unbeliever, yet in every city, and almost every cantonment of British India, a numerous and increasing population is found, the children of Europeans, and too often the monuments

of their vices, who, notwithstanding their English descent, are accessible to instruction through the languages of India alone, and who, though divested of the pride of caste, and, not a few of them nominally Christians, have as much need to be instructed in the first rudiments of Christianity as the inhabitants of Polynesia or Japan. On these your labours must often be bestowed, for they are an integral and essential part of that European and military population for whose immediate benefit you are sent out hither. And, when the many other ways are called to mind, in which a knowledge of the native languages will enable you to forward the cause of Christ; by superintending versions of the Scriptures and the Common Prayer, by tracts, by schools, and by similar gradual and peaceful methods of acquiring influence over the Indian mind, and diffusing through the warm and ripening mass an unseen leaven of godliness, it will appear that this method of employing a clergyman's few leisure hours, is one of the most effectual means by which those hours may be made a source of blessing.

Thus far, my reverend brethren, I have addressed myself to those of your number who may be regarded in a peculiar degree as the parochial and beneficed clergy of British India: but there are others not comprehended under this description, and it is with no common thankfulness to God, that I see the episcopal chair of Calcutta now first surrounded by those who are mission