neral information, that the Editors are three in number, volunteer labourers from the Missionary body in Calcutta, and of different denominations. This will be a guarantee to subscribers and well-wishers of all classes that no party has or can have influence in the management of the Calcutta Christian Observer, It is, as it has been and shall assuredly continue to be, in every sense a catholic publication, attached to no sectarian interests, advocating no peculiar opinions, steering clear of general politics, and directed, with every energy that can be made to bear upon it, to its originally declared aim and purpose, which will be found in the fundamental rules printed upon every monthly cover, and to which the editors solicit new attention. Let none then, belonging to whatever section of the Christian Church, hesitate either to subscribe to it or to contribute original articles for its pages;-its motto, whatever the leanings of its individual supporters, shall still, as heretofore, be

Amicus Plato, Amicus Socrates, magis amica Veritas.

II.-An address delivered at the Monthly Missionary Meeting,Circular Road Chapel, Monday the 6th November, 1837. By the Rev. W. Morton, and printed by request.

"This is the word of the Lord unto Zerubbabel, saying, not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts."-ZECHARIAH iv 6.

In endeavouring to put together a few reflections calculated to improve the present opportunity, the words just quoted presented themselves forcibly to my mind. When the Lord God of Israel brought back the captivity of his highly favoured and as terribly chastised people, what was their situation? Few in number they were, poor, weak and dispirited, and fiercely opposed by malignant, pertinacious and powerful enemies. Encouraged indeed, they were by the recital of previous prophecies, by most positive divine assurances; and they were brought back to the land of their fathers by a divinely appointed individual in the person of Zerubbabel. Yet when there arrived, the ruins only of the holy city, once" delightful for situation, the joy of the whole earth," and of the sacred temple, "the beauty of holiness, where their fathers had worshipped," with wasted fields and fallen towns, met their eyes and filled their hearts with sadness. It was little to be wondered if even the most repeated and precise assurances

therefore, of the restoration of the divine favour and of their certain re-establishment in their own land, now doubly a land of promise, should prove scarcely adequate to stem the torrent of their griefand still their rising fears. Never, perhaps, has a more interesting and affecting occurrence taken place in the history of any people than was the restoration of this remnant of Israel at the epoch in question. A comparatively small number of despised people, returning from a 70 years' captivity in a foreign and distant land, whither they had been removed by a divine judgment on them as a nation-who had been exhibited to the surrounding nations as a people whom the very God they acknowledged had been compelled to cast off for their wickedness, and spiritual folly, and shameless declension from their former high character for moral wisdom, purity and goodness-whose return was the signal for stirring up the bitterest opposition and enmity of an idolatrous population that had usurped their inheritance and of those leagued heart and hand with them at the court of Babylon-a people unpractised alike in the arts of peace or of war, without an army for defence, a regulated policy, a long established magistracy-called to relay the very foundations of their city, to rebuild their sanctuary, to recommence the business of a nation, and while yet weak, few and inexperienced, to contend with the opposition of subtle and powerful foes around and near and at the court of the mighty monarch whose rod had so severely chastised them at the divine bidding-the sense of all their past guilt, as a nation and as individuals, pressing upon them, deepened too by all the bitter and humiliating recollections of what they had suffered during their long captivity-the bones of those, for the most part, who had gone forth never to return, laid in a foreign soil instead of quietly reposing in the tombs of their fathers—and many of their dearest connexions yet behind, who had preferred continued banishment in Babylon under a foreign yoke, to encountering all the dangers and hardships, the uncertainties and fatigues of a return to Judea; where the toil of building, the labour of reducing anew to cultivation a soil that had become a wilderness and a covert for the wild beasts of the desert, and a probable, nay certain, contest with angry, numerous and powerful enemies, awaited them-all these were surely circumstances sufficiently disheartening; yet against all is set this one counterbalancing assurance, "This is the word of the Lord; not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts."

My dear friends, apply this to the erection of the spiritual temple to the Lord to be built up with living stones-to the restoration of fallen, blind and corrupted men, once and of a long date given over, in the divine judgment, to be "led captive by

the devil at his will," to the knowledge, love, service and favour of the Lord of the whole earth-to the gathering together from the moral wastes of India of a people "holy unto the Lord, to offer unto him spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God by Jesus Christ." Consider the mighty obstacles that oppose this work; its intrinsic difficulty; the enemies that must be encountered in it, the spirits of wickedness in high places, cunning, malignant and persevering; the instrumentality that can be applied to this stupendous and difficult labour; consider the force of prejudice, the depth of blindness, the perversity of heart, the inveterate superstitions, the abominable idolatries, the debasement of mind, the deadness of conscience, the lightness of character, the chains of caste, (than which diabolic craft never forged stronger wherewith to bind the intellects, the consciences and the hearts of fallen mankind;) consider the few who have put their hand to this appalling work, their slender qualifications, their feeble strength, their scattered positions; the little encouragement, rather the positive discountenance, too long and too widely met with from a Christian government and a Christian people-and assuredly you have a representation not less correct in truth than it is depressing in tendency. The work of missions-that work which our ascending Saviour consigned to his first missionaries, the twelve save one that had been with him in his humiliation, when he said, "Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature"is the great work we are now contemplating. Have I magnified its difficulties, have I exaggerated the feebleness of the means we possess for encountering them? I have not-yet withal there is to us, as there was to Zerubbabel, this one word of the Sovereign Lord "Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts."

Yes, my dear friends, this is our encouragement-the work is God's; the means are His; and the event is His.

I. The work is His. The object of missionary labour is to bring back blind, depraved, lost and unhappy men to the knowledge, love, service and restored favour of their God. No object greater than this can awaken the imagination of the highest intellect of men or of angels; no object more sublime, more holy, more merciful, more beneficent, more stupendous and wonderful than this, can be supposed to occupy the mind of God himself; for it is to effectuate the design of His first creation of our race; to restore them to that state of excellence, moral and intellectual, and to that condition of order and happiness in which his own voice at their creation pronounced them emphatically good; it is to destroy the darkness of ignorance, the malignity of sin and all the unutterable miseries to his own creatures thence ensuing; it is to make goodness and felicity co-extensive with the habitations of VII.

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men; to introduce universal peace and harmony over the ruins of war, malevolence and bloodshed; to bend passion and appetite to the control of enlightened reason and a pure conscience; to render society an interchange of justice and good will between man and man; to extend the arts of peace, the blessings of civilization and knowledge over the whole earth; to make the "desert to blossom as the rose, the wilderness as the garden of the Lord; even as Eden :"-it is to accomplish that of which prophets have sung, and to which the harp of the sweet Psalmist of Israel was attuned; that which brought the Son of God from his native heaven to be "a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and to make his soul an offering for sin ;" it is that He may see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied;" that He who "has borne our iniquities may justify many, the isles waiting for his law;" it is, in short," to turn men from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God;"" to destroy the works of the devil," to remedy the ruin of a world, to close the gates of hell, and to people a blissful and holy heaven! Such is the work: is it not the work of God indeed, worthy of his wisdom, his benevolence, his power? This is the design of ages, the purpose of the Saviour's death, the assurance of the Spirit of prophecythat all the ends of the earth shall remember themselves and turn unto the Lord"-that "the knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth "—and that "God shall be known upon earth, his saving health among all nations."

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II. And as the work is His, so are the meansnot by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts." In a review of the arduousness of the work, the feebleness of the instruments, the seeming inadequacy of the means, we are apt to say, "all these things are against us," and "who is sufficient for these things?" and so to be discouraged, to faint and to despond; and we might perhaps even withdraw altogether from the work, but for the latent hope that we shall see better days. I need not say to you, my dear brethren, who are engaged in the missionary work, how numerous and oftentimes almost overpowering are the discouragements we have to encounter; a moral darkness that may be felt-an apathy and insensibility of conscience like the death of the soul-an enchaining superstition that has wound itself round every faculty, and has so long been worn that the miserable captives even hug their bonds and are unwilling to be freed-a subtlety of absurd metaphysics that stultifies the soul and makes the very senses pander to their own deception-an abandonment" to work all iniquity with greediness" that at once appals and shocks almost to despair. You have seen and contended with all the unholy and hardening influence of Hinduism; and were your weapons carnal

you would long since, no doubt, have concluded its abandoned votaries under a perpetual sentence of sin and reprobation, and have left them "to perish in their gainsaying." But, blessed be God, it has not been so; "you have not so learned Christ," but know assuredly that it is "not by might, nor by power, but by his Spirit," the victory may be won, as saith the Lord of Hosts. "Not by might"-no human energy is adequate to quicken the dead; the dead in sin are harder to awaken than the spiritless corpses that fill the graves of earth. Prepossessions, the prejudices of education, the force of evil habit, the power of sin, the strength of superstition, an unfeeling conscience, a besotted understanding, a corrupted heart, dominant appetites, depraved affections are not to be operated upon by man's feeble instrumentality; it has long been tried and tried in vain. The voice that called Lazarus from the grave, alone can reach the ears of the dead in sin. "He who commanded light to shine out of darkness," alone can pour" the light of the knowledge of his own glorious self," his will and purposes, on the dark mind of fallen men. He who created the heart must again put forth his almighty power, ere it can be recreated after his own sin-defaced image," in knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness." He who first breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life" and bade him to become "a living soul," must breath again upon the moral carcass of that soul, now sunk in an otherwise everlasting death, ere it shall awaken to the life of righteousness.

"Not by power"-argument, persuasion, the application of the most interesting motives, the employment of all the resources of the profoundest erudition, the most cutting sarcasm, the most awakening and stirring eloquence,-all the mightiest efforts in short, of learning and ingenuity, of reason and of oratory are still, as they have been ever found, utterly inefficient to this great and mighty work of "converting souls from the error of their ways;" of humbling the pride, and softening the obduracy, and subduing the impiety, and purifying the sensuality of fallen men. None was ever born to God" of the will of the flesh, or of man,"-none but " of God" himself; for," not by human might, or power," is such a work to be accomplished.

But what is impossible with man, is possible with God; with God all things are possible." When His Spirit brooded over the dark face of the great abyss in which were mingled, in chaotic confusion, the elements of a universe inextricable by less than creative energy, his word went forth, and light, order, beauty, fruitfulness arose, and earth, and sea, and skies proclaimed the power, and love, and wisdom of Jehovah. "Who art thou, O great mountain? before Zerubbabel," before the Missionary of the cross of Christ, "thou shalt become a plain, and he shall