esprit fort, who had been
accustomed to laugh at the popery of his country, than with a believing
Mahometan or Hindoo? Or are our modern unbelievers in Christianity, for
that reason, in danger of becoming Mahometans or Hindoos? It does not
appear that the Jews, who had a body of historical evidence to offer for
their religion, and who at that time undoubtedly entertained and held
forth the expectation of a future state, derived any great advantage, as
to the extension of their system, from the discredit into which the
popular religion had fallen with many of their heathen neighbours.

We have particularly directed our observations to the state and progress
of Christianity amongst the inhabitants of India: but the history of the
Christian mission in other countries, where the efficacy of the mission
is left solely to the conviction wrought by the preaching of strangers,
presents the same idea as the Indian mission does of the feebleness and
inadequacy of human means. About twenty-five years ago was published, in
England, a translation from the Dutch of a History of Greenland and a
relation of the mission for above thirty years carried on in that
country by the Unitas Fratrum, or Moravians. Every part of that relation
confirms the opinion we have stated. Nothing could surpass, or hardly
equal, the zeal and patience of the missionaries. Yet their historian,
in the conclusion of his narrative, could find place for no reflections
more encouraging than the following:--"A person that had known the
heathen, that had seen the little benefit from the great pains hitherto
taken with them, and considered that one after another had abandoned all
hopes of the conversion of these infidels (and some thought they would
never be converted, till they saw miracles wrought as in the apostles'
days, and this the Greenlanders expected and demanded of their
instructors); one that considered this, I say, would not so much wonder
at the past unfruitfulness of these young beginners, as at their
steadfast perseverance in the midst of nothing but distress,
difficulties, and impediments, internally and externally: and that they
never desponded of the conversion of those poor creatures amidst all
seeming impossibilities." (History of Greenland, vol. ii. p. 376.)

From the widely disproportionate effects which attend the preaching of
modern missionaries of Christianity, compared with what followed the
ministry of Christ and his apostles under circums