talk and rant in a way which assumes that the missionary, in this single expression, must mean some other kind or degree of alarm than that which he and the others describe and illustrate, with so much simplicity, diversity, and particularity of narrative, in the substance of their communications? Does this man imagine that, in writing the expression in question, Mr. Marshman was betrayed for once into the acknowledgment of some quite different kind of alarm, which had been so carefully concealed, that not a hint of it had been suffered to transpire in the numerous letters and journals, till this unlucky sentence revealed the secret? Verily it was most marvellous, that after Mr. Marshman and his associates had with unequalled care and collusion kept this alarm a profound secret for a number of years, this identical and discreet Mr. Marshman should deliberately sit down to declare it in a paper which he had no doubt would be printed in Europe. Or say that this dire secret was communicated in confidence to Mr. Fuller, the secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society (for the letter was addressed to him), and that it was through his simplicity that it was betrayed in England. No, no, it had been much more for the ease of the Major's galled feelings that Mr. Fuller had been a man simple enough to have been capable of falling, in such a case, into such an error. But it is quite ludicrous to see this unlucky phrase of Mr. Marshman reverted to so many score of times, with such an air of significance and solemnity, as if it had let out some portentous discovery, and as if this one solitary expression contained the sole and entire information to be found in all the ample statements of the missionaries, respecting the manner in which they are regarded and received by the natives. The kind of alarm to which Mr. Marshman referred, is illustrated through every sheet of the Periodical Accounts; every reader is competent from those documents to judge of its nature, extent, and probable result; and every reader whose glimmering of sense has not been extinguished in prejudice and irreligion, can see that an alarm which never excites the people to any thing more than occa

sional expressions of abuse, which never asks the missionary whether he is not commissioned by his government, nor ever expresses to him a suspicion that he is so, and which permits the unprotected itinerant to return with impunity and without the smallest apprehension, to the same place, and on the same errand, as often as he pleases, may fairly be allowed at least a few centuries to grow into a desperation and a compact which shall threaten the safety of the English and their empire.

At the suggestion of the writer of the anonymous letter to which this third pamphlet is a reply, the Major has furnished himself with the statement of the Baptist Missionary Society, which by giving him a few facts not previously known to him, has for a few moments a little relieved him from the distress and durance of desperate sameness, and thrown one very transient gleam of something like novelty, over a wide tract of incomparably dull and stagnant composition. He charges the missionaries with having gone illegally to India, with violating the law of the country in itinerating without passports, and of having been "in open rebellion" at the time when two new missionaries, arriving at Calcutta, and being commanded by an order of council to return to Europe, pleaded the protection of the Danish Government at Serampore, where they had joined their brethren previously to the passing of this order. But little needs be said on any of these particulars. If, in 1793, Messrs. Carey and Thomas found the government so adverse to permit any attempt toward Christianizing the Hindoos, (even before there were Twinings and Scott Warings so covetous of disgrace as to rant about the danger and intolerance of such an attempt,) that a passage to India could not be obtained in an English ship, they must have felt a less degree of zeal than good men are accustomed to feel for a great object, if they could not have resolved. to put their undertaking on the ground of committing themselves to a Superior Power, and abiding the consequence. That consequence proved to be, an ultimate necessity of retiring from the British territory; and thus even an enemy might allow, that something like an even

balance was struck between the missionaries and the Christian government, which they had so insulted and endangered, by venturing, unauthorized, to touch a corner of its million of square miles, with a view to impart the gospel to some of the miserable pagan inhabitants. Thus they went out unauthorised; and if it should be admitted, that the refusal of a passage in an English ship, was really and strictly a prohibition of their entering India, (which however their admission in India. proved that it was not,) and if it should then be asked, Was not this violating a primary Christian obligation of obedience to government? it would become a Christian to answer, that this obligation does not extend to any thing purely religious; for if it did, it would by the same law extend to every thing in religion which it would be possible for a government to force within its cognizance, and would make it a duty to hold the authority of the magistrate more sacred than any other authority in the universe, even were he to forbid a Christian teacher to carry religious instruction into the next parish, or the next village, or the next house, or even avowedly and visibly to give religious instruction to the persons in his own house; and this would be an obligation, which we need not say that no Christian's conscience was ever yet capable of feeling.

It should however be observed, that Messrs Carey and Thomas and their friends, did not feel themselves precisely in such a dilemma. They knew that the refusal of an authorised passage did not amount to an absolute prohibition of their entering India; and they knew besides, that if it had, both our own and all other governments are willing to connive at many things which they do not choose expressly to authorise; and they trusted that, if once they were in India, the disinterested purity of their motives, and the peacefulness of their conduct, would secure them a silent toleration in the prosecution of a work, in which it would be evident it was impossible they could have any political or lucrative object in view. Such a connivance they did experience a considerable time, and were thankful that a purely benevolent and

religious design could obtain even thus much indulgence; while they knew that the purpose of solely making a fortune would have obtained not tolerance, but a full legal sanction, for the departure from England, and the pursuits in India.

After fixing their principal residence within the Danish settlement, they thought it right to continue to avail themselves of the privilege of connivance, to itinerate into the British dominions. Nothing was done clandestinely; the government knew that they travelled to various places to preach to the natives, and that they did this without passports; it knew that they dispersed tracts and testaments; it knew that several missionaries had been gradually added to the number; and knowing all this, the government appointed the chief of these missionaries to a highly respectable station in the college of Fort William, while the principal clergymen of the Bengal establishment became the zealous friends of the men and of their designs. Now what would have been thought of the sense of Mr. Carey and his associates, if they had been seized with a violent anxiety to forego their privileges, and to fetter themselves with a law, of which the governing power was content to suspend the operation?

Some acknowledgment is perhaps due to our author, for relieving the dull depravity of his uniform pages, with here and there an extra piece of folly, so ludicrous as to brisken the desponding reader, and enable him to get on half a sheet further. The best thing of this sort in his last pamphlet, is where he talks of the missionaries being "in open rebellion," on the occasion of their pleading the rights of Danish subjects, for the two additional ones who were commanded to return to Europe. To talk of nine men, without a pistol, sword, or pike, among them all, being in "open rebellion" against the power of a great empire, had been almost sufficiently absurd, even for this unfortunate man and his associates, if these nine men had really been subjects of the British government; but it does sound like a fatuity in which this ill-fated man can have no rival associates, when it is said of a

company of persons who were absolutely the subjects of another government, the former seven by their formally recognised establishment under it for a number of years, and two strangers by their being added to the number, through the conveyance of an American ship cleared for Serampore. It was by sufferance, that they were at any time on British territory; but on the Danish they were by authority. We suppose our author, when he was at once an officer and clergyman in India, used to get into a violent fret when any soldiers not belonging to the corps under his command happened to be near him, and had not the manners humbly to ask for his orders, and devoutly listen to his reading of prayers.

By the way, he piques himself not a little on this exploit of reading prayers, and says, in so many words, he "thinks he made a much better clergyman than any Calvinistic Methodist or Baptist in India would have made, for protestants of the Church of England." (Reply, p. 41.) Assuredly, had we been of his congregation, we should have endeavoured to comport ourselves in a manner worthy of protestants of the Church of England; but yet we cannot help imagining the distress to which we might on some unfortunate occasion have been reduced, by the too possible circumstance of the worthy Major's Prayer-Book being mislaid or wickedly secreted. It would have overwhelmed us with mortification, to hear perhaps some ignorant corporal say to his comrade, that the Prayer-Book, not the man, was the chaplain : nothing indeed could have been more stupid or false, but still we fear we should have had no prayers that day. Or if, to complete the mischief, some layman, just like Mr. Carey, had by ill luck happened to come among us at this moment of distress and confusion, and had obtained permission this once to pray for us, Major and all, in his devout, affectionate, and rational strain, with his fine fluency of expression, and a happy adaptation to immediate characters and circumstances, we cannot but fear that though we as well as the Major might have remained unshaken, the stupid soldiery might have fancied this a far superior kind of performance to the