“Sin” is a thing to be recognised and dealt with in preaching; but here again precisely the same difficulty meets you as you stand before a congregation of Burman Buddhists. The Burman, like other Orientals, will not, probably, deny the _fact_ of sin, but if you come to know his notion of what sin is, you will find that it is very different from yours, and that the term does not at all cover the same ground when used in his language and to him, as it does in yours to you. Nor can you, all at once, read into his term for sin the ideas you wish to teach, by merely using it in preaching; that reading in of new meanings is a lengthy process. [Illustration: A DEPOSITORY FOR IMAGES OF BUDDHA.] Of sacrifice for sin, or the necessity for it, or its efficacy, the Buddhist religion knows nothing; there is no Mediator, no atonement, no pardon, no renewal of our nature; so that all allusions to these great cardinal truths of the Christian religion will carry at first no meaning whatsoever, and the utmost they can do at first is to say with the Athenians, “Thou bringest certain strange things to our ears: we would know therefore what these things mean.” The simplicity of the Gospel is often made a theme of in Christian circles, and it is simple _when one has been trained up from infancy in its principles, and facts, and lessons_, but in the case of a heathen people, brought up in an elaborate system of religion alien to Christianity, the simplicity cannot be at all apparent. And, should the preacher, unmindful of the uninstructed condition of his heathen audience, allow himself to slip into the well known metaphors, and allusions, and phraseology—that “language of Canaan,” in which Christians often express themselves on religious subjects—it will become in the vernacular nothing more than a jargon. An incident will illustrate this. One Sunday afternoon I went, in company with a missionary brother, who had just arrived in Burma, to hold an out-door service. We sang a hymn to begin with, which I may say was not with any idea that they would understand it, but merely to attract the people to come and hear the preaching. When the singing was finished, he very naturally suggested that it would be well to explain the hymn. It so happened that we had, inadvertently, hit upon a Burmese translation of that well-known hymn— “There is a fountain filled with blood, Drawn from Immanuel’s veins, And sinners plunged beneath that flood Lose all their guilty stains.”