English Church, what then it had not, an organization for direct Missionary work amongst the Heathen in Africa and the East. This was its beginning: and this voice, my brethren, awoke not within the noble temple wherein are enthroned the Primates of our ancient Church; nor in the stately halls wherein the piety of other times has seated them: it did not first sound within either of our two famous Universities; it was spoken amongst men busy with the daily charge of their few sheep in the wide wilderness of our metropolis. What could seem less likely to wake up the slumbering heart of England to this great work of evangelizing the earth?

For it was at a time which seemed in all respects, both within and without, most unpropitious for the effort. It was near the close of one of those periods of which it may be truly said that in it, as to the work of God," they all slumbered and slept." Within, a heavy lethargy oppressed the Church; without, was the wildest commotion of national disaster. All Europe was convulsed; the great earthquake of the nations shook across her seas this favoured land. She too, as a nation, was apparently unready for the call which reached her. So far from being in

n Matthew xxv. 5.

any wise prepared to allow that all who needed what she had herself received, had in that very want a true claim upon her loving sympathy, she was not yet prepared to abandon her own share in that most accursed traffic which rolled continually across the seas from Africa to her West India colonies, the groans of the enslaved, and the avenger's cry of blood. Yet at such a time this whisper of a voice was heard. And the good hand of God had already fitted some of England's senators to listen to its faintest accents, and amongst them chiefly one who had seen British India for himself, and sighed over its abominations; one whose birth and family connected him with the merchant princes of this land, but whose new birth led him to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness; and another (for history must speak what a son's reverence would rather muse upon in silence) who had already learned to live for others, and had received from God's hands the clientship of tortured Africa. But even with this aid, small and seemingly insufficient was that early company. Yet it had within it the true principle of strength. For those designs sprung from a simple desire to obey the great precepts of Christ's gospel, to Charles, Grant, Esq. He did not actually sit in Parliament till 1802.

o

P Henry Thornton, Esq.

" W. Wilberforce, Esq.

B

act in His strength, to declare His name, by His appointed instruments to those who sat in darkness. He of whom I have spoken, and who was looked to as their earliest head, at the desire of all, sought at once to put the projected institution into the closest relations with the fixed organization of the Church, and to commit to her Primate the keeping of that post he had been asked to fill. But the time for this was not fully come. "Out of weakness" was the law of its beginning, though having within it the true principle of faith, that further word was step by step accomplished, and "out of weakness it was made strong." For so, with humble thankfulness to God, we may surely say this day it is. For today we keep its Jubilee; and that it should have survived till now, this is a great matter. and this is not all, but from that smallest seed how fruitful are the branches which have unfolded all their goodly proportions. It has grown strong in all the material instruments needful for its labour. Its income, insufficient as it is for the work which has grown up under its hand, has yet under His blessing, whose only is the increase, been swollen from a rill into a river; its friends are no more shut into a single chamber, but spread to-day the lengthened chain of thanks

Yea,

giving and prayer and offering from the farthest Australasia to the Islands of the Western Indies. It has moreover been continually drawn up more and more into the actual organization of the Church. Not that herein there has passed any change over its principles. For in principle and in plan it has always been a duteous handmaid of the Church of England. But that, as its operations have been widened, and its character better ascertained, opportunities, withheld from its earlier days, have offered themselves for its acting more completely under the guidance of the heads of the Church at home; whilst the wide increase of the Colonial Episcopate has allowed it to labour in many of its fields of work, under resident Bishops abroad. And to mark one more, and that in some respects the chiefest, sign of strength bestowed upon it, God has prospered its labours with no scanty measures of actual success. Amidst what confident predictions of undoubted failure-what Ishmael mockings of the true heir by the son of the bond-woman-were those labours first commenced? How have the results vindicated those who ventured on those labours in a simple faith in Christ's word, with a single trust in the power of His Gospel wherever it is preached in its unadulterB 2.

ated purity, to reach under the teaching of His Spirit the deep cravings of man's heart, and by bringing him to Christ the Lord to overthrow the strongholds of the enemy. Look at the Islands of New Zealand, now a Christian Bishopric; hear the songs of praise to Christ the Lord, rising in the Maorie tongue amongst those coral reefs of the Antipodes; or look to Southern India waiting for the word of Christ, stretching forth her hands to God, saying (as did one of old in vision), "Come over and help us;" look to that glorious Tinivelly mission to which such glorious witness has been borne by the Bishop of that district; or look again to that first great practical redress of the wrongs done to Africa by England, the Christian settlement of Sierra Leone; look to the 13,010 communicants gathered by this Society from amongst the heathen; look, I would say, above all, to the great fact that it has begun by a company of native Priests, Deacons, and Catechists, not merely to spread the truth of Christ by foreign lips, but to reproduce the Church through an indigenous ministry, and say, I pray you, whether you can doubt that "out of" that its early "weakness" this Institution has been "made strong," when in these spiritual children given to its prayer and labours God has poured so