of the Society, the Christian traveller who would scatter the seed of truth as he journeys, and the Christian father who would furnish his children with a library of devout and wise authors; the Christian minister who would train himself and others to higher devotedness and usefulness; the Christian mother desiring aid to order her youthful charge aright, and the young disciple requiring a guide to the formation of a character of intelligent and consistent piety-all find their wants met. Against Romanism and intemperance the Society have furnished a quiver of polished arrows in their bound volumes of Tracts on each subject, in addition to the separate volume of Beecher on the one, and of the lamented Nevins on the other. They have Mason's Spiritual Treasury for the family altar and the closet; and for the pilgrim gathering up his feet into his couch to die, they have the Dying Thoughts of Baxter. They leave behind, after the funeral ceremony has been performed, the Manual of Christian Consolation, by Flavel the Nonconformist, and Cecil the Churchman. They instruct the active Christian with Cotton Mather's" Essays to do Good," the book that won the praise and aided to form the usefulness of our own Franklin. They assail the covetous and hard-handed professor with the burning energy and eloqence of Harris's Mammon. But the time fails to review separately all the varied themes of their publications, and the varied channels through which they are prepared to pour the same great lesson of Christ the only Saviour, the Sovereign and the Exemplar of his people.

3. But what evidence have we that these volumes are fitted for the present generation of men in other lands? Many, then, of this class of publications are written by missionaries abroad, conversant with the field they till, and anxiously and prayerfully addressing themselves to its wants. In Burmah and Siam, in India and in China, the Society is thus assailing the favorite idols and delusions of the heathen, in the manner which men who have given their lives to the work deem most suitable. The Society is thus, at the same time, proclaiming the Gospel before the car of Juggernaut and around the Areopagus where Paul preached; and many of their Tracts have already been blessed, to the conversion of the readers, and to shake, in the minds of thousands besides, the old traditional idolatry received from their forefathers.

Others of these compositions are translations of works written in England or America, and many of them are in the number

of the Society's English publications. It may to some minds seem very doubtful that any work prepared originally for the Christians of Great Britain, or our own land, can, by any possibility, be intelligible or useful to heathen nations trained under different influences and strangers to our modes of thought and expression.

But it should be remembered that the good effects of some of these translations have been put beyond doubt by the testimony of missionaries as to the interest they have excited, and even by the conversion of some of the heathen. One of the works of Baxter, we believe it was his Call, was translated in his lifetime by our own Elliot for the use of his Indian converts; and a youth, the son of one of their chiefs, continued reading the work with tears on his death-bed. The pastor who talked to the carpet-weavers of Kidderminster could, it seems, speak as well to the savage hunters and fishermen of Natick and of Martha's Vineyard. The Dairyman's Daughter was early translated into Russian by a princess of that country, and has been acceptable and useful. The free-born English maiden that lived and died amid the delightful scenery of the Isle of Wight has told her tale effectively to the serfs and amid the snows of Russia. Fuller's Great Question Answered, another of the Society's Tracts, was crowned with striking success in a Danish version, and it was found that the pastor of the inland English village of Kettering was still a powerful preacher in the new garb and tongue that had been given him for the inhabitants of Copenhagen. Others have gone yet farther. We name the Pilgrim's Progress of Bunyan as an illustration, because none of the religious works of Europe has been so widely translated. In English the Society has printed it not only in the ordinary style but in the raised and tangible characters used by the blind. Little did the tinker of Elstow ever dream that his matchless allegory should be translated into the tongue of the false prophet Mahomet. Yet it has appeared in Arabic; and Joseph Wolff, in his travels in Yemen, distributed copies of the version in that ancient and widely-spoken language. In seven at least, if not in more, of the dialects of India and the neighboring countries it has made its appearance; in the Oriya, the Tamul, the Hindustani or Urdu, the Mahrathi, the Malay, the Bengali, and very recently in the Burman.

Fears, at the time when an Indian translation was first proposed, that its European ideas and imagery would be unintelli

gible to the native of the East, led a popular female writer to prepare in its stead her Pilgrim of India, with its Hindoo phrases and metaphors. But the original Pilgrim has been permitted now to speak, and he has spoken not in vain. The num ber of the London Evangelical Magazine for the present month, (Oct. 1842,) contains the memoir of Daniel, a Hindoo convert, written by himself. From this it appears that the work of Bunyan was a powerful instrument in his conversion: "At this period a gentleman put into my hand a book called the Pilgrim's Progress, which I read. Partly by reading this book, and partly by the remembrance of all the labor which had been expended on me at Coimbatoor, I began to feel that the Christian religion was the only true religion, and that Christ was the only sinless Saviour." This was, probably, the Tamul version.

A translation was made by the British missionaries into the Malagasy language, for the use of the Christian converts whom God granted to their labors in the island of Madagascar. Of the hold which the volume took upon their hearts we may judge from the language of the letters addressed by some of these converts to their missionary pastors when expelled from the island-"We are impressed and delighted when we read the Pilgrim's Progress." And at a still later day, when the storm of persecution beat yet more heavily upon them, and some were executed for the profession of their faith, it is said that while awaiting death they felt inexpressible peace and joy, and said one to another, "Now are we in the situation of Christian and Faithful, when they were led to the city of Vanity Fair." An European book, thus quoted by African martyrs about to die, must be of singular merit.

The same book has been translated into Finnish, for the use of the region verging on Lapland, and printed in Dutch for the use of the missions in South Africa. A version has been made into Hawaiian at the Sandwich Islands; and one in Tahitian for the Society Islands, though we do not know that the latter has as yet been published.

A book which could thus interest the fur-clad peasantry of the frozen North in their smoky huts, and the tawny Caffer and Hottentot in the midst of his sandy, sunburnt plains; which delights, in the cabins of our own West and in the far Hindustan, must have some elements that fit it for use everywhere. The nature of man is one in all climes. Conscience may be

drugged and mutilated, but its entire extirpation seems impossible, and it lives under the pressure of error and amid torpor to witness for truth, and right, and God, in quarters where our unbelief and fear would expect to find it, if not utterly wanting, at least utterly inert. The same heart beats under the tattooed skin of the New Zealander as under the grease and ochre with which the Tambookie or Bechuana of South Africa delights to adorn his person, under the silks of the Chinaman and the furs of the Laplander. It has everywhere the same depravity, that no grade of civilization or refinement can so adorn as to lift beyond the need of the renewing gospel, and that no brutalism can so degrade as to put below the reach of the same efficacious remedy. Religion, it should be remembered. again, is not mere abstract speculation; it is also emotion. With the heart man believeth. Now science and literature (strictly so called) may be an affair of certain civilized nations, and of them only; but poetry and passion are of all lands and of all kindreds of the earth. And how largely do these enter into the structure of the Gospel, of the book revealing that Gospel, and of all Christian writings modelled upon that Bible. There are, it must be allowed, in the production of Bunyan's genius, excellencies and peculiarities that do not exist to an equal extent in many of the other publications of the Society, adaping it to interest mankind in every grade of civilization and under all the varieties of custom and taste, that culture or neglect, error or truth may have produced. Yet it will, in all probability, be found, when the trial shall have been made by competent translators, that many other of the favorite books of British and American Christians are fitted to become nearly as much the favorites of the converts whom the grace of God shall gather in the ancient East or in the islands of the seas.

Our hope that much of the literature of European or American origin may thus become at once available for the spiritual wants of the converts from heathenism rests not on the peculiar talent of the works so much as on their subject and structure. Their theme is Jesus Christ, the character and the history devised by infinite wisdom, with the express intention of winning its way to the sympathies of man, under all the varieties of complexion, caste, language, laws and literature. This theme has proved its power to exorcise superstitions the most foul and inveterate, and to raise from the deepest and most hopeless degradation. Pervaded and saturated as so many of the Soci

ety's works are with this subject, we have confidence that the divine grandeur of the theme will, to some extent, compensate for the defects of the human authorship. The idols of all lands shall totter from their shrines, and yet be broken before its might; and we look for the shattering of all by the faithful and full presentation of this truth-Christ and him crucifieda truth that is to be the great Iconoclast principle of the age; for it is God's own device, and carries with it God's own promise, and the irresistible energy of his benediction.

We have reason, again, to expect the adaptation of much of the religious literature of our own country and Britain to the wants of the foreign missionary, from its close assimilation to the character of the Scriptures. This is a book carrying one of the evidences of its divine origin upon it, and its power of interesting all grades of society and all ages of mankind. Far as any religious writer becomes penetrated by its spirit, and transfuses, as many of the Society's authors have done, its imagery and train of thought, into his own compositions, so far he prepares them for acceptableness and favor among every tribe of mankind. If the Scriptures look with special favor on any class of our race, it is on the Eastern portion of the world. The Bible is an Oriental book, as far as it is the book of any one region or race. It would have been, in style and imagery, a very different volume had the Anglo-Saxon race been left to prepare it. And as far as it should have partaken of their marked peculiarities it would have been less fitted for one great errand it has in this age to accomplish. The missions of our times are pouring back from the favored West and from the tents of Japheth the light of salvation on the long-neglected habitations of Shem, its original seats, and upon the millions of the East. It is some advantage, then, that we go to them with a book that, if it favor any class, is more Eastern than Western in character; and that we carry with the Bible a biblical literature that, from the book on which it has been founded, has, in many of its specimens, caught a tinge of similar feelings, and imagery, and style.

In that body of religious literature whose evangelical and practical character we have thus imperfectly examined, the Society have done much. But it would be doing them and their objects gross injustice to suppose that they present it as a complete body of religious reading for all the wants of the age. Its publications may have some inequality of merit. What