"We cannot doubt that amongst the main causes of the prosperity of North America are, the permanence of religious feeling, and the blessing attendant on the fact, that the missionary spirit has never perished. The labors of this great people on their own vast continent have been conducted with the greatest judgment, and marked by a success which encouraged their extension in other lands. In the year 1812, they turned their attention to the East, and, under an act of incorporation from the state of Massachusetts, commenced their missionary efforts in the Old World. Their first missionaries to India appeared there in 1812, but were ordered by the Governor-General to leave Calcutta by the same vessel in which they had arrived. One of them landing in Ceylon, on his voyage home, was so struck with the openings which it presented for missionary enterprise, and so much encouraged by the Governor, Sir Robert Brownrigg, to engage in it, that, on his representations, the American Board, in 1816, sent out three clergymen and their wives, who fixed their residence at Jaffina, which has been ever since the scene of their remarkable labors. These were reinforced in 1829, and for many years their establishment has consisted of from seven to eleven ordained ministers, with a physician, conductors of the press, and other lay assistants; these are selected from Congregationalists and Presbyterians. It is gratifying to be enabled to add, that a most cordial good-will and desire to co-operate has from the beginning prevailed between them and the other Protestant missionaries in their neighborhood. For thirty years they have assembled periodically in a "missionary union," to decide on measures and compare results. "With all of them education is," as our author says, "a diurnal occupation; whilst in their purely clerical capacity they have felt the necessity of proceeding with more cautious circumspection, improving rather than creating opportunities, relying less upon formal preaching than on familiar discourses, and trusting more to the intimate exhortation of a few than to the effect of popular addresses to indiscriminate assemblies.'