ral instruction combining the utmost modal facility with the furthest practicable use of existing sanctions of opinion? Our knowledge itself militates necessarily, plainly, and directly, with the highest interests of the few, and with the warmest affections of the many. How, then, are we to procure acceptance for it without preliminary measures calculated to neutralise the hostility of the former, and to draw the sympathies of the latter? Let our knowledge have come fairly into the field against the knowledge of the East; and who could doubt the result? Not we; nor, assuredly, those who are so deeply interested in maintaining the present mental darkness of the land! The difficulty is to bring our knowledge into action, in despite of popular penury and imbecility, backed by the utmost covert opposition of those dark men! How is it to be done generally and effectually done? And, mind you, I speak not of the perfect realisation— be that the care of the Almighty-but of such inchoative measures as shall be not unworthy of His blessing from their prudence as well as benevolence, and, above all, from their being grounded in a due preference for the superior claims and extreme helplessness of the many! To seek to spread our knowledge directly through an English organ is to fling away every species of facilitation, conciliation, and compromise. Is this the way for a few insulated strangers to make a durable or useful moral impression upon a country in which the whole mass of opinions has been welded by consummate fraud into one compact system bearing the highest of possible sanctions, which it derives from a sacred literature, the monopolisers of which wield at will the hearts and understandings of the people? Those formidable pastors of the flock are the apostles of mental thraldom: We are the missionaries of mental liberty. Is it necessary to insist further on their hostility to us? Surely not: How, then, shall we foil them?-Let us give to our eminently generous and useful truths the facility and homely aptitude of vernacular media. So, and so only, may we hope gradually to draw over the multitude to our side. And let us, in the meanwhile neutralise the hostility of the learned, and smooth the passage

• Ours is "the poor man's Raj." It is so really such that the truth has already passed into a proverb. The few hate and fear us, with and without cause. Let us, then, bind the many to ourselves by community of language: let us vernacularise ourselves and our knowledge for their and our common benefit!

of Truth into minds so biassed against it, by borrowing, as often, and as far as possible, the maxims and examples of that sacred literature which in our hands is the only charm to conciliate confidence, lull suspicion, and paralyse opposition. The many cannot, and the few dare not, resist its spell. To the former it recalls the long-past ages of their national greatness to the latter, it is all things, the source of their power, the mystery of their iniquity; enabling him who knows it to command their willing and unwilling homage! I have spent many years in India, remote from the Presidencies and large towns and almost entirely amongst the natives, whom consequently it was ever an object with me to conciliate for my own comfort, and whom I trust I always felt anxious to win, in order the better to accomplish my public duties, as well as to influence the people to their own advantage and improvement. Yes! I say I have so spent many, many years, during which I solemnly declare that the only unequivocal voluntary testimonies I have received of influence over either the hearts or heads of the people have been owing entirely to some little knowledge on my part of their literature! With this instrument I have warmed hearts and controlled heads which were utterly impassive to kindness, to reason, and to bribery; and deeply am I persuaded, by experience and reflection, that the use of this instrument is indispensable in paving the way for any general, effective, and safe measures of educational regeneration.

It is a splendid compliment we pay to the people to master their difficult literature. The memory of better days connected with it elevates their lowliness to something like a communicable distance from our loftiness. Their shy and shrinking affections, to which we have no direct access of any description, may be poured out to us through this indirect and modest channel which carries the whole waters of their hearts, reflecting from its tranquil bosom every rite and custom, and thought and feeling, of the land! Hence its influence, with the many, in our hands: and, as for the few, with them to know it is to have been initiated into those mysteries, the participation of which is the ne plus ultra of authority! they may tremble, but must obey, and, ample as is the ground occupied by this all-pervading literature, we may use its sanctions for general truths to a vast ex

tent as righteously as efficaciously. Could anything surprise me in reference to the manner in which this all-important question has heretofore been treated, it would be the strange inconsistency of those whose extravagant applause of the people is combined with no less extravagant censure of their literature; and the scarcely less strange inconsistency of those others who would borrow the sanction of that literature for our physical truths, but on no account for our moral ones.

The people, say the former, have no material prejudices or prepossessions: for, if they had, it might be necessary to consider them when a handful of insulated strangers purposed to lay an absolutely new bias on the popular mind! The literature of the people (they add) is sheer folly and iniquity: for if it were not, its pervading and mighty authority might seem to suggest it as a necessary means of laying that new bias on the people's mind! To a reflecting mind such propositions as the above evidently cannot consist together: whatever be the merits of the people, those merits cannot have been forgotten in that deliberate portraiture of themselves which they have embodied in their literature! The character of that literature is mixed: but it is more faithful to their virtues than to their vices; else the limners had not been men. For the rest, those conductors of education who seek that literature not as an end but as a means-nor for itself but for its inducements-may safely borrow many of its precepts, examples, and illustrations to recommend to general attention the substance of a higher knowledge. Of this obvious truth the second class of objectors to which I have just alluded have not been unaware. But they have drawn a strange distinction between the licitness of such recommendation of our physical science, and its illicitness in reference to the other and more important branch of our knowledge, founding that distinction upon what I conceive to be a false and narrow view of the subject. "Much as I approve of Mr. Wilkinson's suggestion to teach the natives astronomy by means of the Siddhantas, I am very far from thinking that any good use could be made of their moral system. This is a very different question from the former: for the truths of astronomy are derived from mathematical demonstration, whereas morality,

• "Calcutta Christian Observer," for August, 1843.

when disjointed from revelation, is not so indisputable: but is, even in material points, open to objection: witness the different systems that have been formed concerning the principle of moral approbation." This is, I confess, language such as I never expected to hear at the present day, and which is certainly opposed to the sentiments of the greatest and best men of Europe. With them the Divine geometrician is likewise the universal lawgiver and judge, whose moral attributes and ours alone cause it to be that there is, or hath been, such a thing as Religion in the world. That those attributes, on our part, are His work, is a proof that they are immutable and universal: that they are indispensable to His honour and our happiness, is a proof that they are indisputably vouched to all human apprehension. Were morality disputable there could be no religion: were there no religion there could be no Revelation. Have not the mass of mankind in all ages and countries by the general tenor of their lives demonstrated the practical indisputableness of morals? Conscience! does it speak one language at Benares and another at Canterbury? Or is that to which it testifies less satisfactorily evidenced, than that two and two make four? Certainly not!

"If we bear in mind that the question relates to the coincidence of all men in considering the same qualities as virtues, and not to the preference of one class of virtues by some, and of another class by others, the exceptions from the universal agreement of mankind in their system of practical morality will be reduced to absolute insignificance."*

"On convient le plus souvens de ces instincts de la conscience. La plus grande partie du genre humain leur rend temoinage. Les Orientaux, et les Grecs et les Romains conviennent en cela."+

As to the speculative disputes respecting the principle of moral approbation and disapprobation, they have no more to do with the fact that mankind naturally approve what is right, and disapprove what is wrong, or with the practical system of ethics resting on that fact, than have the laws of motion and their

Mackintosh, Eth. Phi.

+ Leibnitz, Œuvres Phil. To the same effect might be quoted Butler, Berkeley, and all the greatest lights of the Anglican Church.

practical consequences, and axioms with the question whether space be a plenum or a vacuum. Let the sense of right and wrong be a rational or sensitive principle, an original or a derivative one, it will still be the very same sense after these doubts are solved as it was before they were started; and it is indeed surprising that an intelligent writer should cite such doubts to bear witness against that which they have no earthly relation to, viz., the immutability and universality of moral distinctions, and the consequent harmony of the moral precepts thence derived by the sages of all nations and of all times. But it is obvious that, beyond the limits of ethics, strictly so called, there is a very large and most important field which the most captious must concede to be neutral ground, quoad objections on our side to the use of Oriental sanctions of opinion.

The elemental laws of thought,-including a designation of the necessary boundaries of human inquiry, and the best rules of investigation within those limits-the law of population, the philosophy of wealth, the general principles of jurisprudence, of judicature and of reformative police! How are we to inculcate the elements of our knowledge upon these topics, which are at once infinitely more essential to the welfare of the people of India than mathematical and physical science, and infinitely more liable to the adverse influence of prejudice and prepossession?

Physical science is almost unknown in India, and hence there will be little for us to undo: it stands almost wholly aloof from the turmoil of the passions and interests of men, and hence there will be little difficulty in removing obstructions to fair and patient attention.

But the philosophy of life, however ill it is yet understood, has been an object of study in this land for 30co years, in all which time the falsest interests, and the most turbulent passions, and the most fantastic opinions, have contributed the warp, as nature and experience have the woof, to its network.

To leave the woof as it is, and to supply a new warp from the schools of European wisdom-hoc opus, hic labor est! To attempt to remove both warp and woof were, I believe, to disorganise society, and to insure our own destruction in its disorganisation! Here it is, certainly, that the countenance and