even common schools of any value; no
industry and enterprise, and every motive for it crushed by arbitrary
and tyrannical institutions: the mind degraded and besotted,
inconceivably so, and preoccupied also with the vilest superstition, the
most inveterate prejudices, and the most arrogant bigotry. Who can
measure the vast disproportion? What mind sufficient to balance extremes
so inconceivably immense? On the one hand a minister to a thousand
souls, with many helpers and a thousand auxiliary influences in his
favor; on the other, one minister to a million of souls, with no helpers
and no auxiliary influences, finding out an untrodden track amidst
unnumbered obstacles, and penetrating with his single lamp into the dark
and boundless chaos of heathenism. This is the manner in which
Christendom shows that she loves her neighbor as herself; and in view of
it, judge ye, whether American Christians go as much as they ought to
instruct and save the benighted nations.

We said, that the number of missionaries to the heathen population is
about one to a million of souls; but let not the conclusion be drawn,
that every million of heathen souls has a missionary. By no means. The
few hundred missionaries preach to a few hundred thousand souls. The
millions and hundreds of millions of heathen, are as destitute of
preaching as though a missionary had never sailed, as destitute of the
Scriptures as though a Bible were never printed, and as far from
salvation, I was about to say, as though Jesus Christ had never died.
Men speak of operating upon the _world_. Such language is delusive. The
present style of effort, or anything like it, can only operate on some
small portions of the earth. To influence materially the _wide world_,
Christians must awake to a style of praying, giving, and _going_ too, of
which they have as yet scarcely dreamed. The work of going into all the
world and preaching the Gospel to every creature, has scarcely been
undertaken in earnest. And how vain it would be to expect to make any
material impression on the world, as a whole, when so small a company
from all the ministers in the United States go abroad, and a less number
even of lay members from the vast body of a million and a half.

The heathen are not lost because a Saviour is not provided for them.
"God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son." The
preaching of the cross is "the power of God and the wisdom of God" both
to the Jew and the Gr