nly, and in a spirit of grief and humiliation, how
such a course of conduct would have appeared in the apostles? Would it
have evinced a spirit of obedience? Believe me, in early times, a
readiness to obey supplied a great deal of machinery. Bring back into
the ministers of the present day the spirit of the apostles, and into
the churches the spirit of the early disciples, and operations at once
would be more simple and more efficient. A backwardness in duty--a
disposition, if we do anything for the heathen, to do it by proxy,
_this_ is it that makes the wheels so ponderous and encumbered. "The
letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life." Give us the spirit, and
annihilate the notion of operating so much by proxy, and we shall soon
see a multitude of angels flying in the midst of heaven, having the
everlasting Gospel to preach to the nations.

There is _no cheap or easy way of converting the world_. It is to be
feared that some fall into the contrary notion, because they do not wish
to believe that _all_ they possess is needed in the work of the Lord,
and that there is absolute necessity that they themselves go to the
heathen. It is to be feared, that it is for this reason that so many are
ready to imagine that the work is to be done by a few men, and a small
amount of means. It would seem they expect to form lines of these few
men, and encircle the globe in various directions; to place them on
prominent points, like light-houses, and leave each with his single lamp
to dispel the darkness of a wide circumference. They seem to imagine
that nations can be elevated from a degradation many ages deep, and
thoroughly transformed, religiously, morally, mentally and socially, by
the influence of a few missionaries, scattered here and there on some
high eminences of the earth: that a single missionary, under a withering
atmosphere, is to be preacher, physician, teacher, lawyer, mechanic, and
everything that is necessary in raising a whole community from the
inconceivable degradation of heathenism, up to the elevation of an
industrious, intelligent, and Christian people.

Neither are the expectations formed by many, of mission seminaries, less
visionary. A school, with two or three teachers, limited accommodations
and small funds, with all its school-books to make, and the whole
literature to form, is expected to accomplish all the work of the
academy, college, and theological seminary, and speedily to transform
untutored savage