ere no life after death, to be wiser and better than they are. It
is good, I presume, that they should give up cannibalism, slave-trading,
witchcraft, child-murder, and a host of other abominations; and that they
should be made to give them up not from mere fear of European cannon, but
of their own wills and consciences, seeing that such habits are wrong and
ruinous, and loathing them accordingly; in a word, that instead of living
as they do, and finding in a hundred ways that the wages of sin are
death, they should be converted--that is, change their ways--and live.

Now that this is the will of God--assuming that there is a God, and a
good God--is plain at least to our reason, and to our common sense; and
it is equally plain to our reason and to our common sense that, as God
has not taught these poor wretches to improve themselves, or sent
superior beings to improve them from some other world, He therefore means
their improvement to be brought about, as moral improvements are usually
brought about, by the influence of their fellow-men, and specially by us
who have put ourselves in contact with them in our world-wide search for
wealth; and who are certain, as we know by sad experience, to make the
heathen worse, if we do not make them better. And as we find from
experience that our missionaries, wherever they are brought in contact
with these savages, do make them wiser and happier, we ask God to inspire
more persons with the desire of improving the heathen, and to teach them
how to improve them. I say, how to improve them. All sneers, whether at
the failure of missionary labours, or at the small results in return for
the vast sums spent on missions--all such sneers, I say, instead of
deterring us from praying to God on this matter, ought to make us pray
the more earnestly in proportion as they are deserved. For they ought to
remind us that we possibly may not have gone to work as yet altogether in
the right way; that there may be mistakes and deficiencies in our method
of dealing with the heathen. And if so, it seems all the more reason for
asking God to set us and others right, in case we should be wrong; and to
make us and others strong, in case we should be weak.

We thus commit the matter to God. We do not ask God to raise up such
missionary labourers as we think fit: but such as He thinks fit. We do
not pray Him to alter His will concerning the heathen: but to enable us
to do what we know already to be His