missions reflect the highest credit on him whom the Church selected to lay her foundations in this land, and whom she will not fail to honor; and the prosperity of the missions indicates both the energy of the administration and the industry, and faithfulness, and ability of those who have worked the field.

And now Methodism is to organize her first Mission Conference on the soil of India; the continent on which Paradise bloomed, the ark rested, the law thundered, and the cross warmed with atoning blood; the land of prophets and apostles, of martyrs and mysteries, of the arts of man and the revelations of God. We bring back to her a Bible all whose pages were written on her soil, and are so illustrated in her living customs that they may be read by the roadside without a commentator. We bring to her a religion. whose first and fullest enjoyments were felt in the hearts of her noblest sons.

The location of our Conference is worthy of remark. We meet beneath earth's loftiest mountains. If the Lord's house were established in the top of the mountains, we should be under the droppings of its sanctuary. I stood upon the top of Cheena, and looked over a field of mountains, their bosoms encompassed by the fir, the pine, the cedar, and the sál, but their heads.

cold and bare granite, embraced by a semicircle of the snowy range whose peaks rise from twenty-three thousand to twenty-five thousand feet high, covered with eternal snow, on which the foot of man never trod, and never will tread. I walked a few paces and looked down upon the plain of the Ganges, stretching out like an immense ocean fringed with sea-weed, but with no sign of life. And yet I knew that in the mountains on the one side there beat six hundred thousand human hearts, and in the plains on the other fifty millions; and I said, "These all belong to Christ.” The voice of the prophet came over me: "The idols shall he utterly abolish;" and the voice of the Father, "Ask of me and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession;" and that other voice, "A nation shall be born in a day"—a prophecy to be realized in the crystallized civilizations of the East. We have had the planting, and it has been long; the harvest may come soon. There is a plant which it requires a century to mature, but it blossoms in a day. God has great and precious promises that have not yet been fulfilled. "He will arise to shake terribly the earth." Already I hear the precursors of the coming storm, and see the idols swept before

the flood, and the whole land rising as by a divine force into light and love.

Now unto Him that is able to keep us from falling, and to present us faultless before his presence with exceeding joy, be all honor, might, majesty, and dominion, now, henceforth, and forever! Amen.

VII.

GENERAL REMARKS ON INDIA.

THA

HAT immense triangle stretching from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin, a distance. of nineteen hundred miles, and from the Hindoo Coosh on the west to the borders of Burmah on the east, a distance of fifteen hundred, is, in many respects, the grandest peninsula on earth. It has an area of 1,446,576 square miles, and is much larger than France, Great Britain, Austria, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Greece, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Turkey, Prussia, and the Ionian Republic, united.

It is divided by the Vindhya Mountains into Hindostan and the Deccan, each of which has a table-land and plains. The table-land of the former is supported on the south by the Vindhya range, and on the north by a lower one in the Bundlecund, sloping gradually into the basin of the Ganges. The table-land of the Deccan, fifteen hundred feet above the sea level, is sup

ported on the north by the Vindhya, and on the other three sides by the Ghats, which run round the peninsula near the coast, leaving low plains between their bases and the sea. The Nerbuddah River forms the dividing line between the two table-lands; the Warda marks the southern boundary of a woody tract which is peopled by aboriginal tribes; the Godavery flows through a valley that might supply the world with sugar; the Indus makes an Egypt in the north-west. Eastward of this stream, and westward of the Aravalli chain, lies a desert, with here and there an oasis.

Between the ranges of the Himalaya and the Vindhya mountains is the plain of the Ganges, with the Punjab at its head and Bengal at its foot, the latter of which seems to be the united gift of the Ganges and the Burrampootra. This great peninsula is walled in on the north by the snowy range of the Himalaya, and protected both on the east and west by mountain chains; and although it has gates alike on the east, the northwest, and the west, through which the Affghan the Tartar, and the Persian invasions have a different periods poured upon the plains below, yet with the instruments and science of modern warfare these passes may readily be guarded.

Off its southern extremity lies the fragrant