unchecked, obtrude their abominations on the notice of Europeans, or assume any undue licence under the protection of the British laws and government. During the first eight or ten years of his residence in Bengal, he continued to go occasionally among the Hindoos, and in a way not usual with the English. He attended, in their domestic circles, their literary and religious entertainments; and acquired a good insight into their character and customs and thus was he qualified to deliver from the Christian pulpit, his conscientious testimony and warning on these subjects to his countrymen and their descendants. For this purpose he entered on a set of discourses, designed for publication, of which he preached the Anti-Durga; and proposed yearly, at the respective festivals of these idols, to continue Anti-Kalee, Anti-Seeb, &c*; not as an offensive attack upon the Natives, but simply to enlighten the European society respecting their duty in reference to these things: for, through overstrained complaisance, or unseemly curiosity, many of the English accept invitations from opulent Hindoos "to festivals in honor of the Idol;" such being the phraseo

* Names of various idols of the Hindoos.

logy

logy on their cards, issued to a Christian community by Idolaters, who vie with one another to make these occasions attractive, particularly to the English.

The unguarded young, and newly arrived strangers, flock with great avidity to these Nautch celebrations; one of which generally falls upon the Lord's day evening; when Mr. Brown had too frequently to observe that the congregation of the church was thinned to increase the company attendant on the idol; or that, with still greater inconsistency, some were heedlessly proceeding to these exhibitions from the very doors of the sanctuary, where they had been professing to worship the True God, who came into the world and died upon the cross, that he might redeem us from such lying vanities.

The master of the house is customarily permitted to lead up his Christian guests, of either sex, and every rank and age, to present them before his idol, as being its visitors; who, to gratify their host, are not unfrequently induced to bow the head or bend the knee to the image, although it is so strictly forbidden in the second commandment; pleading in excuse, that, "if they go to the house where the idol is displayed, it is but civil to

the

the person who entertains them, to compliment him in return with a mock respect for his religion."

Utter disgust, intermingled with deepest pity, seemed to be the result in Mr. Brown's mind of the knowledge he had acquired, in his investigation of the obscene and sanguinary frivolity of this debased religion, and of its baneful influence on the principles and morals of its votaries. He clearly perceived that it became not the followers of a pure religion, at least not its sacred ministers, to explore these abominations minutely. Yet, as knowing that Britain had been converted from her dumb idols to serve the living God, he could not despair of a like happiness dawning also on the Hindoo; and entertained the opinion, that the Christian Scriptures must be the instrument which God would crown with success in this great change, devoutly to be wished!

And he had the happiness to have his judg ment and faith confirmed on this point; being made eminently instrumental in encouraging and directing the pious industry of the various Missionaries, and others, who of late years have labored to supply translations of the Christian Scriptures into many of the languages and dialects of the East.

In this point of view, he considered the rising of the Bible Society in Britain as forming a grand era in the history of Christianity. The Bible he entitled, "The Great Missionary, which should speak in all tongues the wonderful works of God." All his hopes of the extension of Christianity centered in this one point, that God would magnify his Word above all his name, and that by the gift of the Scriptures of Truth to all people a second, more widely extended, pentecostal influence would be produced, and a remedy be fully provided for the judicial sentence inflicted on mankind at Babel.

In connexion with this view, he considered the improvements made in paper-making and printing, in stereotype particularly, as all subservient, and ultimately conducive, under a gracious Providence, to the overspreading of the earth with divine knowledge.

Such anticipations refreshed and invigorated his spirits, particularly in his latter years. His belief was strengthened by the signs of the times, that the great purposes of God were about to be accomplished in the conversion of the nations to the faith of Christ.

The present attention to the Jews struck him as a new thing in the Christian church;

from

from which he formed the most hopeful anticipations, that the Jews themselves would eventually be made the chief preachers of the Gospel in all lands whither they are scattered.

He concluded this would come to pass by means of the translations of the Christian Scriptures, and the circulation of them in every country where the Jews are settled, or to which they can have access.

In the belief that God in his good time will bless His Word to them, and open their understandings to receive the record which He hath given of his Son, Mr. Brown had hope, that at no distant day, the Jews would rise up, each in his place, and declare among the heathen what things their Messiah hath done for a ruined world.

He was wont to consider that the conversion of a Jew, and of a Mahomedan, was not a work to be effected by mere human argument and effort and this made him somewhat jealous of those conversions which were produced by the instrumentality of man. But he never once doubted the reality of impressions which had been fostered under the power of the pure word of God, brought home to the conscience by the Holy Spirit,

without