pread the gospel
amongst a people so needlessly and greatly prejudiced against it by an
unwise and abrupt application of its principles. For instance, what
folly and madness it would be for our missionaries to Burmah, to make a
direct assault on the political institutions of that country! How fatal
would it be to their lives, and how incalculably injurious to the cause
entrusted to their hands! And, if this can be said of them, after they
have spent ten, fifteen, and twenty years, in efforts to bring that
portion of the heathen world to a knowledge and love of the truth, how
much more emphatically could it be said if they had been in the field of
their labors but three or four years! And yet, even this short space of
time exceeds the average period of the Apostles' labor among those
different portions of the heathen world which they visited;--labor, too,
it must be remembered, not of the whole, nor even of half of "the
twelve."

That the Apostles could not have made direct attacks on the institutions
of the Roman government, but at the expense of their lives, is not to be
doubted. Our Saviour well knew how fatal was the jealousy of that
government to the man who was so unhappy as to have excited it; and he
accordingly avoided the excitement of it, as far as practicable and
consistent. His ingenious and beautiful disposition of the question, "Is
it lawful to give tribute to Caesar or not," is among the instances, in
which He studied to shun the displeasure of the civil government. Pilate
gave striking evidence of his unwillingness to excite the jealousy of
his government, when, every other expedient to induce him to consent to
the Saviour's death having failed, the bare charge, utterly unproven and
groundless, that, the Divine prisoner had put forth pretensions,
interfering with Caesar's rights, availed to procure His death-warrant
from the hands of that truth-convicted, but man-fearing governor. Had it
not availed, Pilate would have been exposed to the suspicion of
disloyalty to his government; and so perilous was this suspicion, that
he was ready, at any expense to his conscience and sense of justice, to
avoid incurring it.

A direct attack on Roman slavery, as it would have called in question
the rightfulness of war--the leading policy of the Roman
government--would, of course, have been peculiarly perilous to its
presumptuous author. No person could have made this attack, and lived;
or, if possibly he might have es