see representatives of the highest and lowest grades
of Chinese society meet before the same font on Sunday; and then,
on the following Wednesday, at the Christmas feast, occupying
adjoining seats. Both are filling stations in life in which they may
exercise a beneficial influence on many around them."

XIII.--THE WEST INDIA MISSION.

[Illustration: A MAP OF PART OF BRITISH GUIANA.]

From the ample information recently furnished by the missionaries
to the Directors, we learn that these two colonies of the British
Crown contain together a population of Negro extraction amounting
to half a million individuals; viz.: BRITISH GUIANA, 100,000;
JAMAICA, 400,000. Besides these there are Indian Coolies, 28,800 in
number, of whom GUIANA has 25,000. That province also contains 7,000
Indians, while Jamaica has its thousands of heathen Maroons. The
ruling population of whites is 13,816 in Jamaica, and 2,000 in Guiana,
or about 16,000 in all. This native population of half a million,
just equal in number to the population of the single city of Calcutta
or Canton, spread over an occupied territory of twelve thousand
square miles, and situated only four thousand miles from England,
enjoys the services of three hundred professed ministers of the
Gospel; of whom a hundred and forty are supplied by Missionary
Societies not connected with the established churches and supported
by voluntary funds. The bulk of the population is nominally Christian,
and has been for some years as well instructed in Christianity as
an equal number of persons in the country parts of England. And
doubtless it has been thus christianized the more fully because of
the large supply of religious teachers furnished by the different
sections of the Church of Christ.

It is evident that the converts in Jamaica occupy a much higher
position of physical and social comfort than those in GUIANA, and
that the latter are not so well off as they were five-and-twenty years
ago. While wages have fallen and prices have increased, it is evident
that the moral influence of the 25,000 Coolies from India, with all
their heathen vices, on the 100,000 Creoles has been exceedingly
injurious. In neither colony has there been that thorough spiritual
growth, that self-control, that self-reliance among the christian
converts generally, which their best friends hoped for and thought
they were able to find. This cannot be deemed unnatural, when it is
considered that only thirty