Our readers must not infer from what we have just said, that we do not find anything with which to reproach the Jesuits in their American missions. We shall have many things to censure in them, but, on the whole, their proceedings appear to us to be deserving of the greatest praise, and we feel obliged to defend them from the gross abuse which has been indiscriminately poured upon them on this score. The character of the Western and Eastern missions differ widely, both in the means employed and the results obtained. In East India and China, the principal feature of the missions is the idolatry with which the Jesuits polluted the Christian religion. Having to deal with populations in possession already of more or less civilisation, and deeply imbued with the prejudices of their religion, the Jesuits thought of humouring them in their belief, and sometimes shewed themselves more inclined to idolatry than the pagans they were labouring to convert. Besides, having on one side to contend with the pagan priests, who wanted themselves to work the ignorance and prejudices of the Indians to their own account, and being harassed on the other by the chief of their own religion, who would not admit of any other idolatry than that which was approved by himself, the Jesuits could not obtain in the East Indies any great and permanent result. Of a quite different character are the missions of America. The Jesuits found there a barbarous and savage population, zealous of their vagabond independence, fierce in their enmities, without any positive notion of a peculiar religion, and, consequently, easy to be subjected to any superior intelligence who should undertake to inculcate upon them no matter what new creed. The chief difficulty there lay in the impossibility of having any intercourse with the persons whose conversion was desired. The Indians, simple and kind when first discovered, had now become ferocious and excessively cunning, having been driven to extremities by the cruel and merciless treatment they had experienced from the rapacious Spaniards, a treatment which had inspired them with mortal hatred against all Christians, and against the very name of Christ, which had been sacrilegiously employed in the massacre of their kinsmen. Yet it was among the same savages, who avoided Europeans more than a ferocious beast, that the Jesuits, without arms or any compulsory means, simply by persuasion and kindness, succeeded in erecting an empire, all the laws of which were based upon the first principles of Christianity. Let us see how they performed such real prodigies.