elves.

But I desire to say a word, not only about the opportunities offered to
us individually, but about those offered to England for this great
enterprise. The prophet of old represented the proud Assyrian conqueror
as boasting, 'My hand hath gathered as a nest the riches of the peoples
. . . and there was none that moved the wing, or opened the mouth, or
peeped.' It might be the motto of England to-day. It is not for nothing
that we and our brethren across the Atlantic, the inheritors of the same
faith and morals and literature, and speaking the same tongue, have had
given to us the wide dominion that we possess, I know that England has
not climbed to her place without many a crime, and that in her 'skirts
is found the blood of poor innocents,' but yet we have that connection,
for good or for evil, with subject races all over the earth. And I ask
whether or not that is an opportunity that the Christian Church is bound
to make use of. What have we been intrusted with it for? Commerce,
dominion, the impartation of Western knowledge, literature, laws? Yes!
Is that all? Are you to send shirting and not the Gospel? Are you to
send muskets that will burst, and gin that is poison, and not
Christianity? Are you to send Shakespeare, and Milton, and modern
science, and Herbert Spencer, and not Evangelists and the Gospels? Are
you to send the code of English law and not Christ's law of love? Are
you to send godless Englishmen, 'through whom the name of God is
blasphemed amongst the Gentiles,' and are you not to send missionaries
of the Cross? A Brahmin once said to a missionary, 'Look here! Your Book
is a good Book. If you were as good as your Book you would make India
Christian in ten years.'

Brethren! the European world to-day is fighting and scrambling over what
it calls the unclaimed corners of the world; looking upon all lands that
are uncivilised by Western civilisation either as markets, or as parts
of their empire. Is there no other way of looking at the heathen world
than that? How did Christ look at it? He was moved when He saw the
multitudes as 'sheep having no shepherd.' Oh! if Christian men, as
members of this nation, would rise to the height of Christ's place of
vision, and would look at the world with His eyes, what a difference it
would make! I appeal to you, Christian men and women, as members of
this nation, and therefore responsible, though it may be
infinitesimally, for what this nation is doing in the di