The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge extends her operations beyond our home population: in co-operation with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, it has laboured most diligently and with very encouraging success, in the wide and waste field of our numerous colonies. Missionaries, catechists, and schoolmasters, are sent into every land where we have possessions; and congregations have been formed and churches built where the glad tidings of the Gospel had never before been heard. But, however cheering what has been done and is doing for the spread of Christianity may be, the painful confession must be made that this country has never yet, in any adequate degree, discharged the religious obligations she owes her colonies. {211} The sceptre of Great Britain rules over one hundred millions who are said to be ignorant of the Gospel. Great and splendid have been the instances of individual liberality, but as a nation we have not made those strenuous exertions, those sacrifices which duty requires: we have been unmindful of the heavy debt of gratitude and service which we owe to the Ruler of nations. Why are we to suppose that Divine Providence has bestowed upon us such a vast colonial empire? Not to swell the pomp and increase the power and wealth of a little island, which has been proudly styled, “The Island, Empress of the Sea:” but that we may be instruments in the hands of the Great and Gracious Lord of the whole human race in benefiting mankind. And how can we best accomplish this great end? A Christian nation should make it an object of paramount importance to diffuse the light of that Gospel, in which it has itself for ages rejoiced as the best gift, the holiest privilege, it enjoys at the hands of God. Has then this Christian nation so acted? Alas! there is one circumstance, which painfully occupies at this moment the attention of the friends of Christianity, here and in India, which may suffice to answer in the negative. Bishop after bishop has been allowed to go forth, with the spirit of a martyr, and to meet a martyr’s death in India, where the diocese is admitted by all to be so extensive, that the strongest constitution must, from the effects of the climate, sink under even an imperfect discharge of the overwhelming load of duty. And yet repeated applications for the appointment of bishops to the several presidencies, by which the cause of religion amongst the Christian, and the spread of the Gospel amongst the Heathen population, would be very greatly advanced, have been up to this time refused, it is much to be feared, from an unwillingness to incur the expense of further episcopal appointments. May Bishop Turner be the last, who, humanly speaking, is to be thus sacrificed! For it would inflict a heavy load of sin upon a Christian people to be not only lavish of life, of talents, and of piety, but to prefer to the cause of God, who has so abundantly