L I B RAFLY 
 
 OF THE 
 U N I V ERS ITY 
 or 1 LLl NOIS
 
 '-*.*>»•'■'%.
 
 CHURCH EXTENSION ^ 
 
 IN THE J 
 
 J 
 \ 
 
 BRITISH COLONIES AND DEPENDENCIES: \ 
 A SERMON 
 
 PREACHED AT 
 
 ST. MARY'S, OXFORD, ON TRINITY SUNDAY, 1859. 
 
 By henry hart MILMAN, D.D., 
 
 DEAN OF ST. PAUL S. 
 
 LONDON: 
 JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 
 
 1860.
 
 ,.>S-,K.N : PU..T,.:.> BV W. CLOW.S A.U SONS. STAMFORP ST«EKT, 
 AND CHARIKG CROSS.
 
 TO THE 
 
 REV. FRANCIS JEUNE, D.D., 
 
 MASTER OF PEMBROKE COLLEGE, 
 VICE-CHANCELLOR OF THE I'NIVERSITY OF OXFORD, 
 
 THIS SEEMON, 
 
 PREACHED BY HIS APPOINTMENT, AND PUBLISHED AT HIS REQUEST, 
 
 IS INSCRIBED, 
 
 AS A MARK OF HIGH PERSONAL ESTEEM, 
 
 AND OF RESPECT FOR HIS HONOURABLE OFFICE 
 
 IN THAT UNIVERSITY, 
 
 TO WHICH THE AUTHOR IS ATTACHED 
 
 BY SINCERE GRATITUDE, 
 
 BY PROFOUND VENERATION, 
 
 AND BY OLD AFFECTION.

 
 This Sermon — the publication of wMch, delayed by 
 peculiar circumstances, has been requested by the Yice- 
 Chancellor, before whom it was preached, in terms 
 which I am bound to obey — is printed, with the ex- 
 ception of a few verbal corrections, exactly as it was 
 delivered.
 
 CHURCH EXTENSION 
 
 BRITISH COLONIES AND DEPENDENCIES. 
 
 " For the earth shall bo full of the knowledge of the Lord, as tho waters 
 cover the sea." — Isaiah xi. 9. 
 
 The manifest preparation of the world for the peaceful pro- 
 pagation of the Gospel, at the time of our Lord and His 
 Apostles, has taken its place as one of the standing evidences 
 of our faith. It was impossible for the pious mind not to 
 discern the overruling Providence of God in the state of civilised 
 mankind at the period of Christ's Advent. For the first time 
 in the annals of man, a vast empire embraced the West as 
 well as the East under one dominion. To found, extend, 
 confirm, consolidate that empire, all human affairs seemed 
 unconsciously to have conspired, — the ambition, the valour, the 
 vices, and the vh'tues of nations and of men, — the profound 
 policy of Rome, — the unrivalled powers and energies of her 
 great sons ; the arts of Greece now sunk into seeming submis- 
 sion, but in the common phrase having subdued her conqueror, 
 and become through her language and her letters domi- 
 nant over the human mind, — all converged to this majestic 
 unity, and together fused the discordant races into one social 
 and political system. And now over all this realm, which 
 
 B 2
 
 ( 8 ) 
 
 included parts of the three continents, and which unto this 
 time had been in a perpetual state of confusion and of 
 anarchy, of foreign and of civil wars, peace had settled down, 
 the peace of a strong and irresistible despotism, which com- 
 pressed the whole with the iron arm of power, and had begun 
 to organise it by a scheme of wise jurisprudence ; this juris- 
 prudence hereafter to be matured, and to be wrought out to 
 what might almost be thought imperishable perfection, the 
 code which, yet unabrogated, rules either by its letter or by 
 its influence, large part of the civilised world. No wonder 
 that, in the early ages of the Gospel, the fathers of our faith 
 should behold in all-ruling Rome, the foreshadowed " City of 
 God," in her universal empire the prototype and harbinger, 
 as well as the preparation for universal Christianity. No 
 wonder that even in our days we cannot but contemplate 
 with awe, enforcing veneration, this as it were unfelt subjuga- 
 tion of the Avorld to the divine purposes, human events by 
 untraceable influences accomplishing the designs of God. It 
 might seem as if the world were thus laid level for the first 
 wave of those fertilising waters to spread equably and without 
 obstruction. It might seem that the conquering legions of 
 Rome, marching in their battle-array towards, or retiring in 
 their ovation from, the uttermost parts of the earth, were but 
 the avant courriers who were opening up the world for the 
 Apostles of Christ ; that their straight solid roads, their 
 broad arching bridges, which connected the remotest provinces 
 with the imperial city, were laid down, or spanned the wide 
 rivers, to facilitate the quiet movements of Christian mission- 
 aries; that the Mediterranean, with the ^gean, so short a 
 time before, the wild and almost undisputed domain of law- 
 less pirates, should have become a peaceful lake, over which 
 Paul might pass from city to city, from Jojjpa to Puteoli, with 
 no danger but that of shipwreck ; that two languages, or 
 rather one language, should be spoken over the whole civil-
 
 ( 9 ) 
 
 ised world, so as to be the vehicle of Christian truth from the 
 Euphrates to the Tiber, and beyond either river ; that com- 
 merce should have spread throughout the empire, and linked 
 together the most distant provinces ; and that the Jews, long 
 before their dispersion after the capture of their city, should 
 be among the most active traders, and, settled in every part 
 of the Eoman world, should offer a quiet domicile to the 
 wandering Apostle, and have familiarised the Roman mind 
 with the presence of strangers, having a peculiar religion. 
 May we not add, that Grecian philosophy should have under- 
 mined the ancient mythologies, and awakened noble aspira- 
 tions which it could not satisfy ; that Roman law should be 
 establishing notions of duty, and of obedience, of justice and 
 of social virtue, yet manifestly requiring something which 
 would sink deeper into the heart of man, to subdue haughty 
 Roman manners or purify corrupt Greek aud Roman morals. 
 Does not all this (we might enlarge upon it without end) 
 designate the predestined epoch of Christ's coming ? We 
 behold the world thus for the first time ripe for an universal 
 religion, and the universal religion reveals itself at that 
 happy instant. We say nothing of the moral yearning for a 
 Saviour from sin and sorrow ; of the unappeased graspings of 
 the human soul after an immortality of which it cannot 
 assure itself, man^s weariness of effete religions, and of at 
 best aristocratic philosophies, the philosophies of a few, and 
 to those few offering no repose, no certainty, no conviction. 
 Philosophy had well nigh extirpated faith in the Gods, with- 
 out faith in herself 
 
 We pass over centuries, centuries to us of immense extent, 
 to Him to whom " a thousand years are, but as a day," a few 
 waves in the immeasurable ocean of time. We behold 
 Christianity on the increase, arrested in her increase, under- 
 going, from without or from intestine discords, the severest 
 trials of her essential virtues, — her simplicity, her wisdom,
 
 ( 10 ) 
 
 her holiness, her love, — heathenised, secularised, philoso- 
 phised ; undergoing still more menacing trials of her stability 
 by the aggression of hostile religions, — one permitted to wrest 
 from her almost her whole Asiatic and African possessions. 
 Christianity shrinks into Europe, and Europe not for a long 
 time secure or inviolate or uninvaded by the indefatigable, 
 unexhausted enemy. In Europe she gathers her strength ; 
 she enters into alliance with all that ennobles man, with arts, 
 with letters, with science. She endures an awful schism which 
 seems to threaten her very life ; she endures perhaps a more 
 dangerous lethargy, from which she is wakened by a thunder- 
 storm which threatens to sweep her from the earth. 
 
 And now look abroad upon the world. Everywhere Chris- 
 tian nations are in the ascendant ; the Christian European races 
 have commenced and seem destined to continue the reverse 
 of that movement which more than once discharged Asia and 
 the barbarous nations of the North on civilised mankind. 
 On every side civilised mankind is on the aggressive. Europe 
 has become the officina gentium, the breeding and birthplace 
 of mighty hordes, almost as numerous as those which remain 
 behind. The tide of emigration sets in a resistless current 
 to the east and to the west, the north and the south ; new 
 continents, new worlds teem with the over-flowing population 
 of Europe ; before that population, wherever it settles down, 
 the native savage dies away, partly, it is to be feared, from 
 contact with the worst evils of civilised life, partly by what 
 may seem a law of nature. The vast Russian Empire, en- 
 croaching on the Shamanism of the steppes, extends from 
 the Baltic to the Pacific. France is recovering part of lost 
 Northern Africa. And there is one country, and to that 
 country we would confine our views, which has long taken 
 the lead in this wonderful out-pouring of her race to all 
 quarters'. Of all historic wonders, of all the events which 
 human prophecy some centuries ago could least have foreseen,
 
 ( 11 ) 
 
 is the extension of English dominion, the multiplication of 
 the English race, the diffusion of the English language. 
 Their gradual growth, and our familiarity with their constant 
 and regular progress, almost incapacitate us from grasping its 
 transcendent marvellousness. Consider the language alone. 
 In the reign of Elizabeth that language was not under- 
 stood even in many parts of the British Islands ; it is now 
 the native tongue of the American Continent, with here a 
 province and there a few families adhering to the language of 
 their race, from the frozen ocean to the doubtful borders of 
 Mexico. It has in Southern Africa a realm of which it is 
 difficult to conceive the future limits. Throughout India, 
 and her two hundred millions of inhabitants, it is what the 
 Latin was in great part of the Roman world, the language of 
 the rulers, of government, and public business. Through many 
 of the islands in the Southern Archipelago, in the whole 
 continent of Australia, it is the vernacular tongue. Men 
 accost each other on the coasts of China, at the foot of the 
 Himalaya, under the shadow of the Table Mountain, on the 
 Atlantic and Pacific shores of the American Continent, in 
 regions which have not been known for a century, but which 
 are now flourishing colonies, in a language which 250 years 
 ago at the furthest, would have sounded strange and unin- 
 telligible anywhere but between the Tay and the British 
 Channel. English writers are read, English poetry kindles 
 the imagination, English philosophy tries the intellect, 
 English history feeds the recollection with the memory of 
 the great and good amongst our ancestors (their ancestors as 
 ours). Thoughts which have found words here by the side of 
 our own Isis, may sound in ears, thrill hearts, be answered by 
 kindred thoughts among men who gaze on other constella- 
 tions ; men self exiled, and for life, to what in former times 
 had been considered inconceivable distance. 
 
 Is there then no manifest providential design in this
 
 ( 12 ) 
 
 scattering abroad of Christian nations to the uttermost parts of 
 the earth ? Is there not something at least sicmificant in this 
 disproportionate share assigned to the ofifspring of our Chris- 
 tian forefatliers in the development of the human race, and 
 in the world-wide diffusion of our language, rich as it is in 
 the treasures of Christian wisdom ? Does there not rise up 
 ■svithin our thought, and force itself upon our attention, some 
 singular similitude, some not remote analogy, between the 
 preparation of the world at Christ's Advent, and our own 
 days ? Is it possible, while we reflect on these things, not to 
 be reminded of a sentence in the Old Testament, " The Lord 
 did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye tvere 
 more in number than any people ; for ye were thefeivest of all 
 people."* Compare, for instance, the Spain and the England 
 of the 16th century; Spain, who in her lofty but not hyper- 
 bolical phrases, declared that the sun rose and set upon her 
 empire : the Spanish language, with her sister the Portuguese, 
 seemingly destined to be that of India and of the New "World. 
 And now measure against each other the extent of empire, 
 the compass of language ! Is there not an apparent designa- 
 tion of our race for something more than commerce un- 
 exampled in its extent and daring enterprise, than colonisa- 
 tion on a scale yet unknown ; a propagation of nations from 
 our loins — a peopling of realms to which our own small islands 
 offer the most astounding contrast. Or if we hold it pre- 
 sumptuous to read the designs of God in the overruling acts of 
 his providence, — if we would veil our faces in awful reverence 
 before the depths of his untraceable coimsels, — if we shrink 
 from assuming to ourselves the designated office of being the 
 apostles of Christ to the end of the world, how do we escape 
 the responsibility inseparable from our high position? how, if 
 we have the least sense of the blessings of Christian faith and 
 
 * Deuter. vii. 7.
 
 ( 13 ) 
 
 Christian holiness, do we shake off the imperious, the inevi- 
 table demands of Christian love, to disseminate among others, 
 among our own descendants, our own children, that of which 
 we acknowledge, feel, perhaps boast, the inestimable excel- 
 lence ? If in our humility we refuse to hear the summons 
 to the glory of establishing our faith in the uttermost parts 
 of the world, how do we elude the call of Christian duty ? 
 Answer, as we may, the broad patent fact, why are Christian 
 nations spreading to the limits of the old world, discovering, 
 peopling new worlds, but that the earth may be full of the 
 knowledge of the Lord, as the ivaters cover the sea ? 
 
 Of this we are sure, that no other religion has ever 
 advanced pretensions, so no other could fulfil the mission of 
 an universal religion. Among the most remarkable pecu- 
 liarities of the Gospel from its commencement, was what we 
 will venture to call its unmeasured ambition. From its 
 cradle in the manger at Bethlehem it would aspire to nothing 
 less than to be the faith of the whole human race, — the Wise 
 Men bear the homage of the Eastern world. All other 
 religions have been fettered by local boundaries, by some 
 ritual but essential observances, by some inexpansive tenets 
 which must for ever circumscribe their influence — holy places 
 in which the God dwelt ; holy families to which the God 
 confined his special favoiu: ; gods of nations conflicting with 
 the gods of other nations, each admitting the divinity of the 
 other ; the castes, the incommunicable privileges of Egypt 
 and of Brahminism ; the dreamy tenets, the strange peculiar 
 usages of Buddhism ; the religions without religion of China 
 and other Eastern races. Even the latest, and for a time 
 the successful antagonist of the Gospel, with its seeming 
 simplicity, its one God and one Prophet, was immutably a 
 southern religion : it never forgot entirely the Desert from 
 which it sprung. Its Arabian polygamy, its Meccan pilgri- 
 mages, its rigorous fasts, its precepts of hospitality, the most
 
 ( 14 ) 
 
 beautiful of the few original precepts of the Koran, have an 
 indelible stamp of the Bedouin tent, which might house the 
 unfrequent and weary traveller. Nor can we conceive but 
 that humanity, the more enlightened it becomes, will, by 
 common consent, relegate Mohammed himself, the man of 
 war, the man of sensual passions, however with the most 
 consummate powers and energies, perhaps sagacity — to what- 
 ever height later Mohammedan civilisation may have attained 
 — into his historic place as the barbarous prophet of a bar- 
 barous age and a barbarous nation. We cannot rest in such 
 a model of human excellence ; we cannot contemplate in the 
 Koran, we say not the ultimate, the perfect, but any credible 
 revelation of the universal Godhead. The Prophet and his book 
 of their inherent insufficiency, more than insufficiency, must 
 shrink into oblivion before the advance of human knowledge. 
 But Christianity, rising in the bosom of the most narrow 
 and exclusive religion, Judaism (for Judaism, to keep alive 
 the great secret of the divine Unity in one race of men, 
 must condescend to the immemorial unchangeable usages of 
 the older faiths, the universal Creator must recede for a time 
 into the God of Israel alone), Christianity, with one of the 
 sentences which fell among the first from its divine Author, 
 abrogated at once all this limitation, so congenial to human 
 nature that superstitious ages again engrafted it on Chris- 
 tianity itself. " The hour cometh when ye shall neither in this 
 
 mountain nor yet in Jerusalem worship the Father 
 
 TJie hour cometh aiid now is when the true worshippers shall 
 loorship the Father in spirit atid in truth, for the Father 
 seeheth such to worship him. Crod is a Spirit, and they that 
 ivorship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." * So 
 early was the proclamation, so early the principle laid down 
 of the universal kingdom of the Gospel. How strange in 
 those days, too familiar in our own to be fully felt. God 
 
 * John iv. 21-24.
 
 ( 15 ) 
 
 resumed his sole supremacy, he became the God of man- 
 kind, acceptable equally over the whole surface of the globe. 
 As the globe should reveal its unknown worlds, God was 
 still everywhere to be worshipped in spirit and in truth ; 
 and when that God was to be worshipped in Christ and 
 through Christ ; when the Holy Ghost, proceeding from the 
 Father and from Christ the Son, was to be the "power of 
 6rO(i" working on the universal soul of man, after but a 
 short time the barrier with which the new religion was 
 environed through the stubborn prejudices of the old, fell 
 down on all sides. The world was surprised by the unwonted 
 assertion of one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God the 
 Father of all, u>ho is above all and through all, and in yofii 
 all* Among the strange and repulsive tenets which aston- 
 ished the Romans was the all-comprehensive exclusiveness 
 of the new religion. It would be nothing less than the 
 sole saving faith, the sole revelation of the Godhead. The 
 Roman could comprehend the Jew with his national faith, 
 though that national faith worshipped only the clouds and 
 the Deity of Heaven ; though it had no image in its temple, 
 it yet had its circumcision, its Sabbath. Christianity alone 
 had nothing distinctive except the sublimity of its creed, its 
 indispensable holiness, its love of God, its love of man. It 
 had but two absolutely necessary rites, its sacraments : and 
 ^W)ho shall forbid water, that any man in any part of the 
 world, at any time, should not he bajytised." f Where may not 
 the simple elements of our Holy Eucharist be found ? Even 
 its fusts, hardened in later times into regular ordinances, 
 were but general admonitions to Christian temjDerance and 
 Christian abstemiousness. Why was this? — because Chris- 
 tianity took man as man, — man as he has been since the fall 
 of Adam, — man as he is at every period of the world, — man as 
 
 * Ephes. iv. 5. t Acts x. 47.
 
 ( 16 ) 
 
 he will be till the final consummation, — man prone to sin, — 
 man with that part of his original righteousness to which the 
 Gospel itself appealed and through which it obtained its 
 hearing ; — man, therefore, with the capacities for redemption, 
 for sanctification ; — man under every former religious dispen- 
 sation, Jew or Gentile ; — man at every age and stage of civili- 
 sation, Greek, Roman, Barbarian^ Scythian; — man of every 
 class or order, bond or free. The only barriers against which it 
 struck, which did not fall prostrate before it, were the barriers 
 which still arise and coop it up and hem it in on every side, 
 which refuse to fall even in the centre of its acknowledged 
 dominion, the barriers not less ubiquitous and universal, of 
 human unbelief and human wickedness, of blind human igno- 
 rance, and blinder superstition, of human pride, malice, 
 cruelty, avarice, licentiousness, brute force, ambition, tyranny. 
 For, where and when, in what region, in what period, is not 
 the Everlasting Spirit over all approachable by human prayer, 
 where is not that prayer accepted by Christ and through 
 Christ ? Where is the Holy Ghost limited in its untraceable 
 operations ? Where may not man be taught, where may he 
 not practise the Christian virtues ? Where may he not 
 obtain at least some gleams of Christian knowledge ? Where 
 in God's universe may not God, the God of the Gospel, be 
 worshipped, and served, and loved? Where may not the 
 mutual duties of man to man be fully discharged, and the 
 brotherhood of man be taught to recognise that more limited 
 it may be, and, alas, often more jealous, yet more intimate, 
 more holy brotherhood in Christ Jesus ? W^here will not the 
 unapproachable model of all human goodness — Jesus as 
 shown in the Gospels, be still before us, winning us onward, 
 but still soaring above us, the higher we rise, in its unattain- 
 able perfection ? 
 
 Thus then if there be any law of human progress, however 
 irregular and uncertain, here advancing and there seeming to
 
 ( 17 ) 
 
 recede ; if the development of the human race proceed ac- 
 cording to any system or design ; since man, we boldly say, 
 cannot exist without religion ; as the religious sentiment, en- 
 grafted by God on our hearts, is as unextinguishable as any 
 other part of our being ; so Christianity alone can be the 
 universal sempiternal religion. It may be doomed to other 
 vicissitudes, other obscurations. Un-Christian fanaticisms, or 
 fanaticisms which take the language and some part of the 
 vital power of Christianity, may for a time and in some 
 places supersede it. But we cannot doubt its endurance unto 
 the end : Heaven and earth shall pass away, hut my words 
 shall not pass away.* It may even take new forms ; but it 
 will in its essence be the one eternal Gospel, the one as- 
 surance to mankind of pardon, of peace, of immortality. 
 
 It certainly may seem, as far as we can judge, that Divine 
 Providence meditates the growing knowledge of God onward 
 to, or at least towards, this universality, rather by the exten- 
 sion of Christian nations than by the conversion of Gentile 
 races. Here and there a single wild island may accept the 
 Redeemer, and the vices and cannibalism of the rudest savage 
 be tamed to Christian gentleness and modesty. We may 
 deplore the failure, from extraneous causes, of that greatest, 
 most sagacious, for a time most successful, experiment in the 
 science of the conversion of uncivilised tribes by that famous 
 society (of which so much evil and so much good has been 
 spoken, and justly spoken), the South American Encomiendas. 
 It was a noble Christian work to change wild savages into 
 Christian children, though it might hardly compensate for the 
 deliberate policy of dooming all the Christians of Europe to 
 perpetual childhood. The boasted triumphs of Xavier, his 
 successors and rivals, in the East, have left but scanty results ; 
 with the power of the Romanist kingdoms their religious 
 
 * Luku xxi. 33.
 
 ( 18 ) 
 
 influence has waned away. We speak not thus to discourage, 
 we would rather urge the most adventurous, prodigal, even 
 wasteful exertions of Christian zeal and love. Cast thy bread 
 upon the waters, for thou mayest find it after many days* 
 As grain buried in the Egyptian mummy-pits for thousands 
 of years is said to retain its principle of life, and to quicken 
 again into a harvest, so the latent Christianity, which seems 
 trampled out or withered away from the souls of men, may 
 be working in secresy and in silence. Here and there Oases 
 of verdure in the dreary wilderness of the unchristian world, 
 as in parts of the East, as in the strange civilised barbarism 
 of Madagascar, may smile and rebuke the despondency to 
 which we may be bowed down when we contemplate on a 
 wider scale how much, since its earlier centuries, Christianity 
 has lost, how little won, — won, that is, by the direct conversion 
 of heathen nations to the faith of the Cross. 
 
 We turn to the special object of our present address, the 
 propagation of the Crospel among the colonies and dependencies of 
 G-reat Britain. But at the vestibule of our enquiry we are 
 arrested by the broad distinction between two classes as it 
 were of those colonies and dependencies, totally opposite in 
 their demands, and requiring it should seem directly different 
 modes of procedure. It would be most presumptuous, in one 
 especially with no personal knowledge of the East, even had 
 we time or space to enter fully into the subject, to embark on 
 the vast and perilous subject, on which the wisest are most 
 silent, the most pious the least positive. In our Indian 
 Empire, in great part of it, for it is an error to suppose that 
 India is one immense homogeneous whole only with the same 
 races and religions mingled up in different proportions; so 
 great rather is the dissimilitude, that what might be fatal to 
 our usefulness, even to our power in one quarter, may be 
 
 * Eccl. xi. 1.
 
 ( 1^ ) 
 
 safe, wise, consistent with Christian prudence in another — in 
 our Indian Empire we are a few Christians, and those 
 strangers in the land, scattered over a vast surface, from our 
 power, our knowledge commanding, and now again, by the 
 blessing of God, ruHng as undisputed sovereigns. But these 
 Christian few stand front to front with millions of worshippers 
 of two, rather of three or more religions, different in antiquity, 
 but each profoundly rooted, and moulded up and intertwined 
 with the habits, laws, usages, the whole life of their believers : 
 all these from their harmony with the Eastern mind, out of 
 which they have grown, and which they have powerfully tended 
 to form, adverse, jealous, obstinate, with much of the hatred 
 with which all men, Orientals especially, hate their superiors, 
 a subjugated race their conquerors. How are these strong- 
 holds to be broken down, to be approached ? And we can- 
 not but admit the justice of the caution that one false step 
 may destroy, it might seem for ever, all hopes of success, 
 by destroying our dominion through which alone success is 
 possible. Suffice it here, with undissembled modesty, to 
 suggest but two great principles of conduct. While we 
 compel none, while we jealously abstain from anything which 
 the most suspicious mind may pervert into seeming compul- 
 sion, let us not disguise, let us not dissemble, rather display, 
 with pardonable, with prudent ostentation, our own religion. 
 The Eastern mind comprehends difference of religion ; what 
 it does not comprehend is no religion. The Brahmin may 
 affect to look down on the unprivileged European, the Budd- 
 hist be shocked at him who destroys life, and displays no ex- 
 travagant asceticism ; the Mohammedan may proudly keep 
 aloof from him who adheres to his own prophet, Jesa, but he 
 will reserve his most bitter contempt and hatred for him who 
 appears to have no God ; who never worships, never prays, 
 has no outward symbol, shrine, monument of his faith. 
 Raise then our churches with munificent splendour, instal
 
 ( 20 ) 
 
 our religion in the highest state, consistent with its dignity, 
 its simplicity. Do not as those of old, who boasted of their 
 spiritual conquests in India, advance towards, approximate to, 
 even rival in the outward practice of religion, the native siiper- 
 stitions. Stand resolutely aloof, stand in the quiet calm 
 supremacy, the moral power of our faith ; but emulate that 
 seriousness, that solemnity, that august majesty of religion in 
 its ceremonial, which works upon the uncivilised, especially 
 the Eastern mind. 
 
 But trust not to this : it must be not the outward but the 
 inward beauty of holiness, which must slowly, yet eventually, 
 command and win, it may be at first, hardly respect, yet here- 
 after, by God's blessing, more than respect. We must show 
 our calm, conscious, uninsulting superiority in those virtues, 
 to which the hardest and most bigoted human heart is not 
 inaccessible. As it has been by unexampled English valour, so 
 it must be by the loftiest English justice, by Christian wisdom, 
 shown in all our policy, in every act of our government, in 
 the increasing prosperity of the realm, in the depression of 
 the oppressor, the elevation of the oppressed, by the resolute 
 determination to do good, that we must preach our faith. 
 The Gospel to be known must live in our lives, judge on our 
 tribunals, pervade our whole scheme and every detail of our 
 administration ; it must be felt in all its blessed influences, 
 speak in the language of all our acts, which will need no 
 interpreter ; and surely so doing, so resolutely continuing to 
 do, we may leave the rest to God. How these Christians love 
 each other, was the wondering homage paid by the heathen 
 world to the early believers. The more hard-won homage, 
 how these Christians love all mankind, must be wrung from 
 that human heart, which cannot, after some long period, we 
 trust, refuse to unseal itself to such undeniable influences 
 of Christ's Holy Spirit. 
 
 How striking the contrast of our Indian Empire with our
 
 ( 21 ) 
 
 other colonies and dependencies ! In these we build up, as 
 it were, in the wilderness a new society. An European city, 
 an European state springs up on the silent untrodden shore, 
 on the banks of the unexplored river, in the primeval forest. 
 The savage man recedes, wanes, dies out ; the civilised man 
 sees his children, his descendants, rise around him, till in a 
 few years the cluster of log huts, the few low cabins, are a 
 spacious city. But are these young cities, which in Milton's 
 words, rise like an exhalation, to be left to those at whose 
 words that Miltonic city arose from the burning marl of the 
 lower world ? Are they to be English in birth, in language, 
 in arts, in enterprise, in laws and customs, in all but religion ? 
 We implicitly believe that in a nation of Christian descent 
 Christianity will of itself, almost of its own intrinsic force, 
 revive and struggle for its proper ascendancy. The English 
 Bible and the English Liturgy are an indefeasible inheritance, 
 from which, if, like unnatural parents, we would cut off our 
 descendants, we could not. They are the inalienable patri- 
 mony of all who do now, or to the end of time, shall speak the 
 English tongue. Is it not a fact worthy of notice that our 
 colonies and dependencies may date from the birthtime of 
 our vulgar Bible and our Book of Prayer ? These may have 
 been at times unhappily divorced, by blind aversion on one 
 side, by more blind tyranny on the other; but, either alone 
 or together, they are the undying part of English letters, to 
 take no higher ground. Where English is spoken they can 
 never become old or obsolete. 
 
 Yet surely this is not all. The mother, if she has the 
 natural affection of a mother, must do more. She must not 
 leave the Bible to preach itself, the prayers to adhere, as they 
 may, to the uncertain and over-crowded memory of those 
 who may have learned them in their youth. Shall men, 
 families, tribes, nations, be left to dig wells for themselves 
 before they can taste the living waters ? Shall they be coni- 
 
 c
 
 ( 22 ) 
 
 pelled by the agony of thirst to seek those living waters ? Shall 
 there be no one to lead them to the fountain ; no one to strike 
 what may seem a hard rock, but will suddenly gush out with 
 its welcome and abundant streams ? Shall there be no one, at 
 least on one day in the seven, commissioned, compelled by 
 his duty or by his love, to arrest them in their exhausting in- 
 terminable toils, to speak to them of other things than break- 
 ing up the soil, or digging it may be the gold, than the sordid 
 rivalry for gain, or at best the desire of increasing the wealth, 
 the comfort, the happiness of the family ? 
 
 In these lands what form will Christianity, — for Christianity 
 there must be, — assume, Christianity, which among its wonder- 
 ful endowments has that of adapting itself to every age, every 
 race, every social condition of man ? — how shall it perceive 
 with its intuitive and infallible sagacity, how supjDly, with. 
 that pliant versatility of which St. Paul gave us the authority 
 and the example, and with its indefatigable charity, the wants 
 and craving necessities of a young society, gathered from all 
 quarters, from all ranks and conditions of men : many wild, 
 restless, adventurous, who can hardly find, or care to find, rest 
 for the sole of their feet : — men perhaps outcast by law, out- 
 cast by destitution, — men who have shaken off their country, 
 or whom their country has shaken off, — men weary of the old 
 world, of whom the old world was weary, — speculators, 
 traders in search of wealth, husbandmen, artisans in search of 
 an honest subsistence, — some who, from a farm of a few it 
 may be exhausted acres, find themselves pasturing their 
 flocks on boundless mountains, breaking uj) a virgin soil un- 
 limited in extent ; all busy, active, earnest, except a desperate 
 and dangerous few, who have been drained perhaps as the 
 dregs from more prosperous settlements ; men probably with 
 all forms of Christian f^xith, or with none ; men who have 
 brought with them of religion nothing but a narrow and 
 bitter sectarianism ; or men without God in the world. Of
 
 ( 23 ) 
 
 an ancient and venerable faith, a faith which worshipped in 
 high arched cathedrals, piled up by the piety of centuries, a 
 very few — a still diminishing few — will have any sacred re- 
 miniscences, and these reminiscences will of course die out. 
 More may have a remembrance of the village bells which 
 tolled them to the schodl or to the house of prayer, the font 
 of their baptism, the altar where they pledged their marriage 
 vows, the graveyard Avhere their rude forefathers repose. But 
 all these feeble ties to their country, to the church of their 
 country, are either abruptly severed, or fade away from the 
 occupied recollection. They have to organise new com- 
 mimities, — strangers among strangers, their ordinary every- 
 day life has to recommence, their religious life, if there be 
 any religion, must in most cases seek new guidance. On the 
 other hand, in the wilderness, in a strange land, among un- 
 familiar faces, unaccustomed voices, untried and uncom- 
 municating hearts, the religious wants will, in all but the 
 worst, be most strongly felt. The lonely man, the lonely 
 family, will know, will feel, that there is one unchangeable 
 Being who is above all and over all — who is following them 
 as it were to the uttermost parts of the earth. There is one 
 Redeemer, one Comforter, ever present in the mind and in 
 the heart ; who is with us under every change of climate or 
 soil. Other constellations may shine over our heads, but 
 there is one Creator of all the regions of the starry heavens, 
 one Mediator, one Intercessor with that great Creator. 
 
 Children too are born, shall they be without the old 
 holy privilege of baptism ? and men would sanctify the 
 indissoluble ties of marriage; and men are on their dying 
 beds, and they yearn for the assurance of pardon, reconcilia- 
 tion, immortality ; and men die and would fain have prayer 
 uttered over their remains in the depths of the wild wood, or 
 on the vast level prairie. In such communities, who will not 
 
 c 2
 
 ( 24 ) 
 
 welcome the pious missionary (for the religion of the new 
 settlers, and of their teachers, must have something of the 
 boldness and the enterprise of settlers) : it must throw off its 
 formalities, it must not be rigid in observances ; its worship 
 at first must condescend to be rude, remembering that He 
 who in his birth was laid in a lowly manger, will not disdain 
 to be worshipped in a wigwam or a log hut. 
 
 As the settlements grow into villages, towns, cities, the 
 clergyman will find his place, the Church will rear its ho- 
 noured head. And surely our Episcopal Church will commend 
 itself, not so much it may be by theological arguments as by 
 its vigorous unity of purpose, by its subordination to one, it 
 is to be trusted, wise, and devout, and conciliatory, and self- 
 denying Head. Its movements will not be desultory, capri- 
 cious, without rule ; but with a fixity of purpose, a harmony 
 of action, and yet with sufficient pliability, to adapt itself to 
 all the circumstances of its new life. It will have its rule 
 not lightly to be infringed, but not to be adhered to with dead 
 unprofitable formalism. It will bear with it, we trust, all 
 its comprehensive universality. It will be the Church of 
 England in the Colonies — not the sect of the Church of 
 England — open to all, forcing itself on none. It will stand 
 not on rights or privileges, but on the better ground of the 
 devotion of its ministers, the calm order of its services, its 
 promptitude to obey, to meet, to anticipate the call of all 
 who may implore, seek, need its aid. It will offer freely, if 
 not its special privileges, its blessings. It must, indeed, 
 depend, as far as its local power and legal authority, on 
 itself; it will have nothing august but its inherent sanctity, 
 nothing of beauty but the beauty of holiness. It will have 
 its trials ; not such as adhere to ancient establishments, 
 jealousy of their being established, traditions of fabled or 
 long lost riches, which from far-receding ages of priestcraft
 
 ( 25 ) 
 
 and sacerdotal power, have clung around them like a poi- 
 soned robe. Ease and wealth will be the last probation to 
 which a colonial clergy will be exposed. We must look for 
 no endowments, perhaps for no hereditary possessions, least 
 of all for territorial possessions, — simply impossible, or, if pos- 
 sible, utterly unprofitable, where, when all may be land- 
 owners, hired labour cannot be had, — for vast, broad, 
 fertile lands, which the clergy cannot cultivate themselves 
 or find others to cultivate for them. In truth, what is called 
 the voluntary system will be in the end, in some way or other, 
 inevitable : this system, with all its advantages — and it has 
 its manifest unquestionable advantages. And we must look 
 within the hearts and souls of our ministers for security 
 against its fatal evils, dependence, the peril of the true 
 dignity and authority of the ministerial office, unworthy de- 
 ference to opinion, the temptation to low arts of popularity, 
 the difficult alternative of not daring to give offence, where 
 offence ought to be given, to the high-minded sinner, or the 
 hazard not only of the sacrifice of material interests, but the 
 more noble, more Christian dread of forfeiting that influence 
 which is essential to the successful discharge of duty. 
 
 It is probable that religion in a new land will encounter, 
 for a long time at least, little of speculative unbelief. Men 
 in that state are usually too busy to think themselves out of 
 their religion. The more mysterious doctrines of our faith, 
 as that which on this day we commemorate, will be acqui- 
 esced in as the common language of the faith. The difficulty 
 will be from the coarser rivalry of those who are more ready 
 to teach than to learn ; whose rude, often Avell-intentioned 
 zeal, may, perhaps, by skilful treatment, be directed to one 
 common end, will be awed by the piety, which it is not 
 permitted to doubt, of the more educated man, by the supe- 
 riority which will be unpresumingly assumed by higher
 
 ( 26 ) 
 
 knowledge, tliat knowledge ever tenderly exerted for its 
 benign uses : which will never give nor take offence, wh;ch 
 will follow the apostolic maxim, of rejoicing if Christ's Gospel 
 be preached, it may be out of less worthy motives in a 
 harder, harsher, more stirring tone ; it may be with some and 
 for a time more successful zeal. 
 
 Depend upon it in such a society (be it in its younger and 
 wilder form, or more settled or organised) the man of educa- 
 tion, the gentle man (Christian gentleness is but another 
 word for true courtesy) will take at once and maintain his 
 place. From him Gospel truths in all their simplicity, re- 
 iterated as they will be in the inevitable course of his duty, 
 and pressed and urged on all who will hear (few, I suspect, 
 will refuse to begin to hear), will sink into the general heart, 
 and by God's grace build up a Church, if not yet in outward 
 majesty, in inward power, in the attachment, in the confidence 
 of the people, as commanding as enduring as we trust will 
 be our own. 
 
 But if such be the necessities of our colonies and de- 
 pendencies, how are those necessities to be supplied ? How 
 are a clergy, especially of a higher class, to be sent forth, or 
 for a short time at least maintained, but by the country which 
 those colonists relieve by their departure, which they may 
 enrich by their growing prosperity. We are yearly, monthly, 
 daily casting forth our swarms into the wilderness ; they go 
 for life, they go for death : shall they go unaccompanied by 
 any pillar of fire, with no Prophet to guide them in their 
 course ? Every year new lands are furrowed by the English 
 plough, new forests fall before the English axe, new havens, 
 new seas are alive with English barks, new Englands are 
 springing up in each hemisphere ; and if in such young 
 societies the restraints of religion, the consolations of religion, 
 the hopes of religion, the blessings of religion, are of more
 
 ( 27 ) 
 
 especial need, will the ungrateful country, will the unwise 
 country, it might almost be said the unchristian country, 
 shake them off as it were like an uneasy burthen, and take 
 no thought of their future, of her own future in them? 
 Surely in this solemn place there can be no suspicion of 
 flattery, even of friendly flattery, if allusion be made to one 
 who we trust has secured the gratitude of unborn generations 
 by the devotion of a large portion of large wealth to the 
 endowment of English bishoprics in English colonies. Let 
 us admire, and, according to our power, not rest in barren 
 admiration of her example. 
 
 Upon us, the people of this realm, the people in the widest 
 sense, it mainly depends, whether England shall not only be 
 the mother of the nations, but the mother of Christian 
 churches ; whether those who depart, and for ever, from her 
 shores, and the children, and the children's children, of those 
 who so depart, shall, to the end of time, own not merely 
 their natural, but likewise their spiritual parentage. If in 
 future years the ties of connexion shall be severed, not 
 violently we may venture to hope ; if when through self- 
 government, which we are wisely sanctioning, to which they are 
 habituated from their foundation, these colonies shall be able 
 to stand alone, and it may be better that they should stand 
 alone and become independent states — with us it will rest 
 whether those finer and more indissoluble ties of a common 
 religion may hold us together in amicable brotherhood, in 
 filial love on one part, when filial obedience shall have ceased, 
 in parental love, we may say honourable pride in our off"- 
 spring, on the other. If we cease to be subject to one 
 Sovereign, possibly to render allegiance to one code of laws, 
 we may live in one faith, read one Bible, pray out of one 
 Liturgy, be the common worshippers of one God, to whom 
 devotion may speak in one tongue and in one form : and
 
 ( 28 ) 
 
 remain one harmonious fraternity under one Redeemer. And 
 so, finally, Christian nations covering by degi'ees a much 
 larger part, if not the whole of the habitable world, the sub- 
 lime sentence of the Prophet may be at length fulfilled to 
 the letter, and the earth shall he full of the knowledge of the 
 Lord, as the waters cover the sea. 
 
 LONDON: PRIKT£0 BY W. CI.OWES AND SONS, STAMFORD 6TKEET, 
 AND CUARIKO CROSS.
 
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