is preferable; because corporeal improvement (if I may be allowed the term) is the first object in view. But when men's temporal wants are in some degree satisfied, and their minds begin to be accessible to reason and argument, (as among the heathens of Asia and other countries,) the mental activity and the spiritual zeal of evangelical missionaries are as appropriate and acceptable as the manual operation of their less educated brethren would then be misplaced. And I trust we have yet to learn that sacrifices of the higher qualities of the mind are less acceptable to God than those of the coarser operations of the hands. At all events the self-denial of the individual must be admitted to be great and praiseworthy in proportion to his possession of those attainments which give a charm to the intercourse of civilized society. Were Mr. Swartz and Mr. Martyn "lazy evangelical missionaries" because they did not drive nails and construct ploughs in the luxurious societies of India and Persia? Proh Pudor!

The reader may probably anticipate that some useful lessons may be deduced from the preceding arguments, when we inquire into those parts of the commonwealth of Britain, which include her colonial polity and her charitable institutions. I cannot, however, close this chapter without entering my protest against some mistaken doctrines that have found a comparatively easy entrance into the mind, through the custom prevalent among writers of denominating uncivilized man, man in a state of nature:-as if a responsible agent endowed with reasoning and moral faculties, and gifted with an immortal spirit, fulfilled the ends of his nature in proportion as his objects are confined to the mere animal gratifications ·

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and sensual pursuits of the brutes that perish; in proportion as all the great and nobler parts of his nature lie buried and obscured! Corrupt and fallen as it is, surely it is still the nature of man, for which all his moral and physical properties are best adapted, to pursue those objects which have a tendency to refine and enlarge the mind, to lift him from his fallen condition into one approaching to his original state, to lead him to the practice of the virtues and the charities of life, and to find his highest enjoyments in the praise of his Maker, and in promoting the happiness of his fellow-creatures. No one who has engaged in the pursuit of happiness, successively, in the career of sensual gratification and in that of Christian morality, will hesitate in admitting the superior happiness imparted by the latter. And what is superior happiness but a system of enjoyment the best adapted to our natural faculties, when renewed and confirmed by God's appointed means? Let us then no longer entertain the idea that the brutal state of man is his natural state, and that all those combinations of society, which call for the more refined and enlarged exertion of his mental faculties,. are merely artificial inventions foreign to his original

nature.

A state of nature, says Bishop Horne in his Discourse on the Origin of Civil Government, has been supposed by some writers of eminence, when men lived in a wild and disorderly manner, when they were mere savages, restrained by no laws human or divine, except the physical force and the unruly pas sions of their fellows.

The state of civil government has been opposed to this, as arising out of the inconveniences which men

perceived to flow from the unbridled licentiousness of their natural state, and as becoming gradually more perfect from their experience of the benefits conferred by each successive improvement in the career of subordination.

The Bishop, however, doubts whether this theory afford a true account of the origin of civil society; and very justly infers that it is calculated to rob God of the glory which is due to his moral attributes, and to introduce a false and dangerous system of reasoning upon some of the most important relative duties and charities among mankind. For if the savage state be really that of nature, it seems to follow that, according to the opinion of some modern philosophers, it is also most consistent with the will of God and the happiness of man, and that so far from endeavouring to raise men above it, we are doing good service by reducing to their original and simple elements the complicated and tyrannical systems, which the inventions of man have falsely adorned with the epithet of salutary government. "But," says the eloquent and venerable Bishop, "the .truth is, when we reflect a little farther upon the subject, we cannot but perceive our apprehensions greatly shocked at the supposition that the wise and good Creator, who formed mankind for society in this world, and designed to train them by a performance of its duties for a more noble and exalted fellowship with angels in the world to come, should place them, at the beginning, in the abovementioned wild and disorderly state of independence, to roam in fields and forests like the brutes that perish, and to search for law and government where they were not to be found; that he should give them no rulers

by whom, nor rules how, they should be guided and directed, but leave them to choose for themselves, that is, to dispute and fight, and in the end to be governed by the strongest!" "But are these things so? Did God indeed, at the beginning, bring into being, at the same time, a number of human creatures, independent of each other, and turn them uninstructed into the woods, to settle a civil polity by compact among themselves? We know that he did not. He who appointed a regular subordination among the celestial hierarchies, who is the God of peace and order, provided for the establishment and continuation of these blessings among mankind by ordaining, first, in the case of Adam, and then in that of Noah, that the human race should spring from one common parent. Unless therefore some other origination of mankind be discovered, all equality and independence are at an end. The state of nature was a state of subordination; since from the beginning some were born subject to others; and the power of the father, by whatever name it be called, must have been supreme at the first, when there was none superior to it." To fathers within their families,' saith the judicious Hooker, nature hath given a supreme power; for which cause we see throughout the world, even from the foundation thereof, all men have ever been taken as lords and lawful kings in their own houses." "

The Bishop then goes on to show how, from the Patriarchal, society spread into the lesser governments of States; till through the workings of corrupted nature disputes were engendered, which terminating in war, victory at last declared for one of the parties, and the other was obliged to submit. Thus the larger governments arose by conquest, and in their turn

contended with, and overthrew, each other. In this state of things, and in the ignorance of what had happened in former ages, it is not surprising that heathen writers should have believed that civil government should at first have arisen by an agreement among independent savages. But in us who have the Scripture History before us, it would be something worse than unreasonable to overlook the information which that supplies to us, and have recourse to romantic schemes which owed their being to the want of it.

But if it be asked, how then comes it to pass that we do now actually find in different quarters of the world many tribes of these lawless and independent savages, who seem scarcely to have arrived at the infancy of society, but who will probably emerge from it in the progress of time? It may be answered, that after the first migration from the Patriarchal tribe into other climates, where few of the conveniences of life are to be procured, and cut off from communication with the rest of the world, men would almost necessarily degenerate. Strangers, for want of commerce, to arts and learning, they must continue in the deepest intellectual poverty, and would soon exchange the law of conscience imprinted on their hearts for superstitious customs and diabolical and idolatrous rites. And thus degenerating, as they must of necessity do every day more and more, they would come at last into that deplorable state of ignorance and barbarism, in which some nations are found at this day. But this is a state of degeneracy, not a state of nature. Could it then be the state in which the Lord of all things placed the noblest of sublunary beings, the heir of glory and immortality, when his own hands had formed and fashioned him, and he had