him to their homes and their hearts, as one whom none must harm. Even in their bosoms we find a principle which reveres his character and mission of peace, and renders him far safer than he would be with all the bayonets of Christendom to guard him. We grant that missionaries have sometimes been persecuted, and have occasionally fallen victims; but we believe this has always resulted from some misapprehension of their real character and intentions. When these have been fully understood, the heralds of the cross, in the simple panoply of the gospel, have been safe. like those saints of old who passed unharmed through the fiery furnace. God has been their protector; and even in the lion's den have his Egedes and Eliots, his Brainerds and Martyns, walked fearless and secure, not merely because his providence guarded them, but because his hand had planted in men a principle which makes them spontaneously yield to the charms of goodness, to the welcome power of peace and love.

Let us look at some instances of providential protection. The natives of the South Sea Islands once came down upon the missionaries, with the intention of killing them, for the sole purpose of seizing their property, which they coveted. The missionaries expostulated with them in vain; they still persisted in their bloody design, and seemed on the point of carrying it into effect. God was the only resort; and the missionaries, turning towards each other, knelt in prayer, and expected every moment the warclub to dash out their brains. They rose at length from their knees; and the natives were gone! They feared an ambush, or some other stratagem, and searched for them with care, but could discover no traces of their assailants. They went to the seashore; but the natives were not there. At length they met a little boy, of whom they inquired, where are all the people?' "Why," said he, "don't you know? They are gone to the other side of the island,to hide themselves in the wood." 'And how came they to do that?" "When they saw you praying," replied the boy, "and heard you call on your God, and knew that he is a great and mighty God, they were afraid he would come down and kill them all, and so they all ran away to hide themsevles."

A case still more remarkable occurred at the siege of Copenhagen under Lord Nelson. An officer in the fleet says, "I was particularly impressed with an object which I saw three or four days after the terrific bombardment of that place. For several nights before the surrender, the darkness was ushered in with a

tremendous roar of guns and mortars, accompanied by the whizzing of those destructive and burning engines of warfare, Congreve rockets. The dreadful effects were soon visible in the brilliant lights through the city. The blazing houses of the rich, and the burning cottages of the poor, illuminated the heavens: and the wide-spreading flames, reflecting on the water, showed a forest of ships assembled round the city for its destruction. This work of conflagration went on for several nights; but the Danes at length surrendered; and on walking some days after among the ruins, consisting of the cottages of the poor, houses of the rich, manufactories, lofty steeples, and humble meeting-houses, I descried amid this barren field of desolation, a solitary house unharmed; all around it a burnt mass, this alone untouched by the fire, a monument of mercy. Whose house is that? I asked. 'That,' said the interpreter, 'belongs to a Quaker. He would neither fight, nor leave his house; but remained in prayer with his family during the whole bombardment.' Surely, thought I, is is well with the righteous. God has been a shield to thee in battle, a wall of fire round about thee, a very present help in time of need."

II. Such is God's care of the peace-maker; but let us glance at the natural tendency of his principles. Their power is peculiar and universal. They address some of the deepest, strongest elements in the nature of man. There is in innocence and love, in meekness, forbearance and forgiveness, in the spirit of self-sacrifice for others, in the principle of returning only good for evil, a charm which few can resist. Even the maniac, the beast of the forest, the very reptile at our feet, all feel its power. It allays passion; it disarms hatred; it checks revenge; it subdues the felon and the savage. From every heart does it call back echoes of its own sweet and soothing voice. Like begets like; and whatever spirit we breathe in our intercourse with others, we may expect them to manifest more or less of the same spirit towards ourselves. Hate them, and they will hate you; love them, and you will ere long kindle in their bosoms an affection responsive to your own; curse them, and they will fling back your curses ; menace them, and you will arouse a spirit of stern defiance; assail them, and they will turn upon you in wrath; do them either good or evil, and you may expect a return of your own treatment. You must first give to others what you wish from them. It is a law of our moral nature. Speak in harsh, angry tones to any

man; and his first impulse will be to answer you in the same tones. Address words of respect and kindness to the veriest churl or brawler in the streets; ånd he will make an honest effort to treat you as well as you have treated him.

But weakness and innocence are their own protection, better far than lead and steel. Throw an infant on the mercy of any man, civilized or savage; and, so far from killing it, he will instinctively respond to its claims upon his kindness and care. If that infant belongs to his enemy, he may wreak his vengeance on the latter by murdering the former; but the child left to itself, he would spontaneously protect and cherish. No man assails, or challenges to mortal combat, a woman, a feeble old man, or a minister of the gospel. Whence their security? They carry no weapons; they utter no threats; they have little or no power to defend themselves by force; they look for protection, nor look in vain, to the great principles of our nature. In these there is far more power for such a purpose, than there is in any weapons of violence that a Hercules ever wielded; and the feeblest, most defenceless, will generally be found to enjoy the greatest degree of safety. Even the iron tempest of war sweeps over them comparatively harmless. At the close of a battle, a soldier of the victorious army, more ferocious and reckless from the bloody work of the day, chanced to find a small boy on the field, and, very much from the habit of assailing whatever came in his way, lifted his sword to cleave him down, when the little fellow, looking up in his face, exclaimed, "O, sir, don't kill ME, I'm so little." That simple appeal went to the warrior's heart; and returning his sword into its scabbard, he galloped away without harming the child. Some men there possibly may be who would have killed him; but scarce one man in a million would so outrage his own nature.

Men generally rely upon force; but there is, in truth, far more efficacy in persuasion. Esop, in one of his fables, relates a contest between the sun and the north wind to see which should first disarm a certain traveller of his cloak. The wind blew, and the traveller wrapped his cloak more tightly about him; it blew still more loudly, but he only held his cloak with a firmer grasp than ever; the fiercer the assault, the more vigorous and determined the resistance. The sun took an opposite course; he betrayed no purpose of violence, no symptoms of wrath, but spread over hill and valley the warmth of his purest, gentlest radiance; the

traveller smiled, and at once yielded to persuasion what he had denied to force. Such is human nature; and a counterpart to this beautiful picture may be found all over the earth.

Universal experience proves the truth of this principle. You will find it at work every where; and a man, known to be unarmed, would be safer even among robbers and assassins, pirates and savages, than he would with the most formidable weapons. Let us hear the deliberate judgment of one taught by long and familiar acquaintance with the worst specimens of humanity. "Spanish smugglers," says Raymond, "are as adroit as they are determined, are familiarized at all times with peril, and march in the very face of death. Their first movement is a never failing shot, and certainly would be a subject of dread to most travellers; for where are they to be dreaded more than in deserts where crime has nothing to witness it, and the feeble no assistance? As for myself, alone and unarmed, I have met them without anxiety, and accompanied them without fear. We have little to apprehend from men whom we inspire with no distrust or envy, and every thing to expect in those from whom we claim only what is due from man to man. The laws of nature will still exist for those who have long shaken off the laws of civil government. At war with society, they are sometimes at peace with their fellows. The assassin has been my guide in the defiles of Italy, and the smuggler of the Pyrenees has welcomed me to his secret paths. Armed, I should have been the enemy of both; unarmed, they have alike respected me. In such expectation, I have long since laid aside all menacing apparatus whatever. Arms may indeed be employed against wild beasts; but no one should forget that they are no defence against the traitor; that they irritate the wicked, and intimidate the simple; lastly, that the man of peace among mankind has a much more sacred defence-his character."

FEASIBILITY OF PEACE.

There lurks in many minds a vague, deep-rooted idea, that the Peace Reform is really impracticable; and such skepticism, dishonorable to the gospel, and to the promises of God, holds not a few Christians back from the efforts indispensable to the success of this cause. Is there any just ground for such distrust? Our sole ultimate aim is the entire abolition of war. We seek to supersede the custom itself, by putting in its place legal, Chris

tian methods of justice and peace between nations. We dream not of accomplishing all this at once, or ever without the gospel; but we do hope, by God's blessing on a right application of its pacific principles, to drive the custom eventually from Christendom, and then to spread permanent peace, hand in hand with our religion of peace, over the whole earth.

Now, we contend that all this may be done. There is nothing in the war-passions of mankind, nothing in the habits of society, or the structure of government, nothing in the nature or the long continuance of this custom, nothing in all the influences that have so long been accumulating the world over for its support and perpetuity-nothing in all these, or anything else, to forbid the hope of its utter and everlasting extinction.

War is not a physical, but a moral necessity, only such as there is for duelling, intemperance, or any other form of folly and sin. It comes solely from the wrong choice of men, and might be prevented by a general change of that choice. It never rushes upon them like a tornado or the cholera, like the eruptions of a volcano, or like lightning from the cloud. A war without men to will it, and carry it on, would be a contradiction in terms; and if so entirely dependent on their will, can they not, if they choose, discard forever this brutal mode of settling their disputes?

Glance at the history of kindred reforms. Long was knight-errantry the admiration of all Christendom; but where is it now? Vanished from the earth, its very name a term of reproach, and its memory living mainly in those works of genius which ridiculed its follies from the world. Nearly the same might be said of the crusades, and all wars of religion, the prosecution of which was once regarded as the highest service a Christian could render the God of peace! So of trials by ordeal, and judicial combat, in which the accused was required to fight his accuser in single encounter, or plunge his arm into boiling water, or lift a red-hot iron with his naked hand, or walk barefooted over burning ploughshares, or pass through other trials equally severe and perilous. It were easy to multiply examples; but why allude to intemperance, and persecution, and witchcraft, and other evils already abolished, or put in a train which promises their ultimate abolition? I need not surely specify any more cases; for if such customs as these have already been wholly, or but partially done away, is there no possibity of putting an end to war?