morally evil. Again, he argues that the earliest phenomena of conscience, the first exercise of that faculty, is in the form of self-accusation. The child does something for which he feels self-condemned, and this reproof of conscience antedates any precept emanating from that faculty, and is the sign and evidence of a sin antecedent to any command or prohibition thence derived. The inference, of course, is, if the fact is correctly given, that there was guilt before the transgression of a known law or the development in consciousness of the sense of obligation.

We leave these objections to make what impression they may, not caring at present to pursue the discussion. In giving this rapid sketch of the current opinions upon this great subject of Christian theology, we have not intended to set forth a particular view of our own, nor have we described the diverse interpretations of Scripture which have been adopted by the various parties. In conclusion, we indicate the method which must be pursued both in settling the fact and the philosophy, or solution of the fact. There are, in our judgment, three principal sources of knowledge on the subject. First, what is the testimony of the Scriptures? Do they propound a definite doctrine upon the points in question, and if so, what is it? Then, what says Christian consciousness, or the feeling and judgment of the body of unprejudiced Christian men, who have been taught by the Word and the Spirit of God? How does that consciousness decide, which has been molded by these agencies? And lastly, there is room for an inductive argument based on the phenomena of conscience in its early development and upon facts of human character and conduct as they present themselves, on every side, to our observation. What do these phenomena prove? What do these facts imply? Investigations conducted after this method, are the only road to sound and trustworthy conclusions.

The New England theology from the time when the elder Edwards wrote his treatise on Original Sin, has been engaged in the endeavor to vindicate individual responsibility, and to repel the objection to the Christian doctrine of depravity that it

makes men blame-worthy for what they could not avoid. The motive of our divines has not been a wish to lessen the guilt of man, but to maintain his guilt to the full extent, and to prove it upon him. Where have been the preachers who have brought sin home to the conscience in a more unsparing manner than the elder and younger Edwards, Emmons and Taylor? The modifications of the received doctrine of sin which have been broached, are due to this desire to place the fact of personal agency and personal responsibility above the reach of assault, by showing that the sinner, and the sinner alone, is the author of the actions and the character, for which he is condemned. Put the act of his self-determination where you will, with the Realist, in Adam, with Origen and Beecher, in a former world, with Coleridge and Müller in a timeless preëxistence, with Barnes and Taylor, in the infancy of this life; provided you grant the necessity for this act, the main principle stands fast. Let the Princeton school hold to the doctrine of a covenant with a vicarious person, and ground the imputation of sin upon that, as long as they concede that the mystery is not cleared up, and by the manner of this conces sion, virtually do homage to the principle that ill-desert, in the strict and proper sense, as far as we are able to see, can pertain to the sinner alone. Whatever changes of sentiment may take place in New England, this principle is not likely to be surrendered.

ARTICLE IX.-A HALF CENTURY OF FOREIGN MISSIONS.

FIFTY years ago, in the pleasant month of June, four young men, students in the Theological Seminary which had been only two years earlier established at Andover, presented themselves before the General Association of Congregational Pastors in Massachusetts, then convened at the neighboring town of Bradford. Those young men came before the meeting with a strange proposal. They came, under the advice and with the commendation of their theological instructors, to say that they had devoted themselves to the work of preaching the gospel among the heathen, and to ask the counsel and help of their fathers and elder brethren there assembled. The question was, how those young men and others-if others should offer themselves could be sent on such a mission; whether the Christian people in the United States could be reasonably expected to sustain them, and what arrangement could be instituted as a medium of regular communication between those who might be willing to contribute for the propagation of the gospel in heathen lands, and those who might offer themselves personally to the work. After devout and careful deliberation, the body of Christian pastors to whom those four young men had come with their proposal and petition, proceeded to institute such an arrangement. Nine persons-clergymen and laymen of distinction, five in Massachusetts and four in Connecticut-were named to act as commissioners "for the purpose of devising ways and means, and adopting and prosecuting measures for promoting the spread of the gospel in heathen lands." In this way it was that the institution began, which is now so widely known as "The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions." As these pages are passing through the press, the fiftieth year in the history of that institution is completed. The annual meeting of the Board and its friends, at Boston, in September next, is to be attended with some special commemoration of what God hath wrought

by that agency since the first meeting of those nine commissioners or rather of the five, four of the nine being absentat Farmington, in September, 1810.

There are a few among our readers, whose personal memory takes in the whole period since that missionary work began, and who can recollect distinctly for themselves what the condition of the world was, in respect to civilization and Christianity, fifty years ago; what the condition of the churches was; what means and arrangements there were by which the churches, in this and other Christian countries, were acting, or could act, on the unevangelized portions of the world. But the great majority everywhere must learn from others, rather than from any recollection of their own, what changes God has wrought, and what progress Christ's work in this world has been making, since the distinct beginning of foreign missions from these American churches.

Some effort of attention is necessary to any just view of what the condition of the world was, and what, on any merely human calculation of probabilities, were the prospects of the Christian religion in this world fifty years ago. The great wars which had begun in the first French revolution, nearly twenty years before, were still agitating all European Christendom, and, only two years later, the United States were drawn into that vortex. Political liberty was almost annihilated on the continent of Europe, the despotism of the first Napoleon being then at its hight. In France, in Switzerland, in every country on that continent, evangelical religion was, to human view, almost extinct, no general or effective reaction having taken place against the tendencies to mere formalism and to unbelief which had so widely characterized the preceding century. Our own country had hardly begun to be recognized as a power among the nations; the present form of our federal government had been in existence only twenty-one years, and only twenty-seven years had passed since the close of our revolutionary war. Outside of Christendom there was no recognized preparation, and hardly a visible opening, for the spread of the gospel. The great Mohammedan empire of Turkey had only ceased to be terrible to Christian nations; it

had not begun to fall or to be dismembered; nor had any change taken place, either in the spirit and policy of its rulers, or in the character of its people. The East Indian empire which a corporation of British traders had established, with its center at Calcutta, was a recent thing, and was, in fact, as completely an anti-Christian power, and as jealous of all Christian propagandism, as that of the Mogul emperors had been, when they reigned in absolute dominion at Delhi. China, like Japan, was closed and guarded against Christianity in every form. Africa, except along its ravaged and pestilential coast, was a continent of mystery, hardly visited, save by the traders in slaves; for even in the United States, whose government was earlier than that of any other country in prohibiting the slave-trade, the importation of slaves from Africa had been unlawful only two years. On our own frontier, the pagan savage, who had learned nothing from civilization but its vices, and had been enriched by it only with new implements and means of destruction, was still encamped in Ohio, was hunting the buffalo on all the prairies, and his canoe had not begun to be displaced by the raft and the flat-boat on the waters of the Upper Mississippi. What is now our western coast was hardly known to commerce; California was one of the remotest and least valued possessions of Spain, and no eye of avarice had caught the sparkle of its golden sand. The first overland journey up to the sources of the Mississippi, and down along the leaping waters of the Columbia to the Pacific, had just been accomplished at the expense of our national government. At that time, the entire census of the United States included less than one-fourth of the population which will be counted in the census of the present year, and the capability of the wealth which has now been realized on this continent had never been estimated. To draw out a full comparison of the civilized world as it then was, with the civilized world as it now is, both in itself and in its relations to what lies beyond the realm of civilization, would require a volume; but it may help us to conceive the difference, if we remember that then the scientific law or principle on which the electric telegraph depends had not been discovered or