The brazen gate of China, sculptured with inscrutable characters, and bolted and barred, as it seemed, against western ingenuity—the gate of its anomalous language, has actually been set wide open; and although the ribbon of despotic interdiction is still stretched across the highway that leads to the popular mind, access, to some extent, has been obtained; and who shall affirm that this frail barrier insurmountable as it may now seem, shall at all times, during another fifty years, exist, and be respected? Within even a much shorter term, is it not probable, that revolutions of dynasty, or popular commotions, may suspend or divert, for a moment, the vigilance of jealous ignorance? In some such manner it may be supposed that, the means of diffusing religious knowledge being, as they are, accumulated, and headed up above the level of the plains of China, the dam bursting, or falling into decay, the healing flood of Christian truth shall suffuse itself in all directions over the vast surface. But we are told that the national intellect is spellbound in a condition of irremediable imbecility. The people, it is said, have no ideas but such as are fixed under the petrifactions of their ancient usages; or even if they had a mind in which ideas might float, they have no medium of communication, or none which can take up even an atom of knowledge or of sentiment that is of foreign growth. How then shall such a people be converted to Christianity? Were it not as well to attempt to inform and persuade the sculptures of Elephanta, or the glazed images of their own pottery? To all this show of impossibility, a full and sufficient reply is contained in a single affirmation of Scripture, not less philosophically just than it is beautiful and sublime—"The Lord looketh from heaven, he beholdeth all the sons of men: from the place of his habitation he looketh upon all the inhabitants of the earth: he fashioneth their hearts alike."