The following remarks are from the pen of a man as distinguished for Christian piety as for superiour genius--the immortal Cowper. "No man" (says that _evangelical_ poet) "was ever scolded out of his sins. The heart, corrupt as it is, and because it is so, grows angry if it be not treated with some management and good manners, and scolds again. A surly mastiff will bear perhaps to be stroked, though he will growl under that operation, but if you touch him roughly, he will bite. There is no grace that the spirit of self can counterfeit with more success than that of zeal. A man thinks he is fighting for Christ, when he is fighting for his own notions. He thinks that he is skillfully searching the hearts of others, when he is only gratifying the malignity of his own, and charitably supposes his hearers destitute of all grace, that he may shine the more in his own eyes by comparison." Nor is scolding, or ridicule either, the proper way to cure men of their religious prejudices: for, by inflaming their anger, it renders their prejudices the more stubborn and inveterate. It is no matter how absurd or even how monstrous their errors and prejudices; if you offend them by the grossness of your manner, there is little hope of your convincing them afterwards by the cogency of your reasoning. The Baptist Missionaries in India, at the first insulted, as we are told, the superstition which they attacked, and ridiculed and reviled the Bramins in the streets, and at their festivals, when the passions of the blinded and besotted populace were most likely to be influenced. But experience taught those pious and apostolical men, that this was not the right way to make converts: for which reason, in 1805, they made a declaration of the great principles upon which they thought it their duty to act. "It is necessary," say they, "in our intercourse with the Hindoos, that, as far as we are able, we abstain from those things which would increase their prejudices against the gospel. Those parts of English manners which are most offensive to them should be kept out of sight; nor is it advisable at once to attack their prejudices, by exhibiting with acrimony, the sins of their gods; neither should we do violence to their images, nor interrupt their worship."