“I have said that appearances are pleasing: you will conclude that I speak comparatively. Alas! I ought to weep day and night at the reflection, that in this small place there are about 10,000, souls ‘sitting in darkness and the shadow of death!’ O that the Lord may speedily open a door for the entrance of Divine light among them! I am learning the native language as fast as my slothful nature, and the unsettled state of my affairs, calling me continually here and there, will let me. My Moonshee can now perfectly understand me: and when I tell him my meaning, he points out the proper word. In this way, besides my reading for instruction, I have translated the history of Joseph; and also to the sixth chapter of Genesis; and have got to the seventh of Acts. These will soon be useless, as better translations will be to be had; but they are of use to the above-mentioned native Christian for himself, and those who listen to his conversation; and these exercises improve myself. I shall begin Persian soon (D. V.) The Hebrew is a key to the Arabic; and Arabic and Persian are so blended with the Hindoostanee, the popular language of this country, that without the knowledge of Arabic and Persian, Hindoostanee cannot be perfectly understood. “In order, too, to translate accurately, you know, the knowledge of Hebrew and Greek is necessary. You would be astonished at the subtilty with which the Hindoos (I mean learned Hindoos) argue on religious points. A rich man of this place one day visiting me, we entered into a discussion respecting one of their incarnations of the deity. The incarnate God, from their account, married many wives, had many children, &c. and when I observed that these things could not be the actions of God, assigning my reasons, &c. he readily answered, that the deity having taken to himself a human body, these actions were the actions of the man, and the godhead residing in him had no part in them; that I acknowledged Messiah ate, drank, slept &c., which were as little the actions of God, as those related of Krishnoo. I answered, that the body being the instrument of the soul, needs refreshment to support it in its labours; but that the body cannot accomplish any of its desires without the concurrence of the spirit that actuates it; so that this multiplying of wives, and other acknowledged sinful actions, would not have been accomplished by Krishnoo without the animating spirit. He at length left me, something in anger.