My earliest recollections of a heathen land are coupled with the memory of one who was ever spoken of at Madras as the good Bishop

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Corrie. No man, that I ever saw, had more distinctly marked in face, form, speech, and countenance, the character of S. Barnabas: "He was a good man and full of the Holy Ghost." In stature and general appearance, he reminded me of Bishop Chase, of Illinois, whom I knew when I was an undergraduate at Oxford. Both were of a height and size which might be called majestick. The American Prelate carrying with him the greater air of activity and resolution; the English one, of gentleness and compassion. Deeply as Bishop Chase interested me in his naratives of labour and adventure in the wild woods, through which, with axe in hand, he literally carved a way for the gospel, and won to the Church the successive bishopricks of Ohio and Illinois, the walk of Bishop Corrie among the idolatrous nations of the east was no less illumined by the Sun of righteousness. He was one of the little band of East India Company's Chaplains who, in the face of general indifference and partial opposition, have vindicated the missionary character of the Church of England. It is strange, indeed, that any clergyman or christian could ever exist in the presence of idolatry without attempting to preach and propagate the gospel but it is too true that numbers of our countrymen in India have lived, and are still living, in daily intercourse with thousands of benighted heathens, without so much as wishing to christianize them. Instead of having their spirit stirred in them like St. Paul's, when he saw the city of Athens wholly given to idolatry, they mostly stand aloof from, and sometimes discredit and discourage, the attempt to convert the idolaters. Nay, I have been obliged to entreat from the pulpit (and too often without success) that the christian gentry would refrain from attending and subscribing to idolatrous ceremonies!

It is no wonder that persons so indifferent to christian privileges should nourish the idea that the chaplains, being servants of the Government, are bound to limit their ministrations to the English residents. Notwithstanding that the Charter of the Company expressly declares that their chaplains are to instruct their native servants in the principles of the Protestant religion, any attempt on the part of a chaplain to enlighten the heathen was long viewed as an unauthorized and objectionable proceeding. But before we can visit the English residents in India with the censure which their conduct

doubtless deserves, we must ask if the clergy and laity at home have been, or are yet, free from the same condemnation of knowing their Lord's will and doing it not. They are certainly as fully aware of the extent of idolatry, and as responsible for its conversion, as those who happen to sojourn in the countries where it prevails. We are one church and one empire, and if the cause were duly sustained at the centre its impulse would be duly felt in the remotest extremities.

Happily, however, our church has never wanted individuals to attempt what the body only can effectually accomplish; and in India, David Brown, Henry Martyn, and Daniel Corrie, are well known names of such individuals who, filling the position of chaplains and ministers of English congregations, gave themselves to the work of missions among the natives, for the love of CHRIST and of souls.

The survivor of these, Daniel Corrie, was appointed Archdeacon of Calcutta by the lamented Bishop Heber, and on the erection of the Madras territories into a bishoprick he was selected for its first Prelate. He had been little more than a year in his see when I arrived; already he had suffered the bereavement of his wife, and said at the time he should not be long in following her. No one thought that his words would be so literally fulfilled.

He preached in his cathedral church the Sunday morning after I landed in Madras, on the text, "Young men exhort to be sober minded." I read the prayers, and in the evening preached my first sermon in the country from 1st Cor. i. 22-24. The Bishop was present and delivered the benediction, no one suspecting that it was his last appearance in the temple on this side the veil !

After the service the Bishop pressed my hand, and prayed that I might long be spared to preach CHRIST JESUS in that heathen land. It had been the subject of his own first sermon, both as a chaplain and as bishop, and it proved to be that of the last he should ever listen to. The Tuesday after, the good Bishop, while sitting in the Committee of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, was seized with an attack on the brain, which terminated in death on the following Sunday morning.

The second sermon which I preached in Madras cathedral was at his funeral. The vast concourse which thronged the spacious and elegant

building, from the Governor in his chair of state to the poor native christians, whose dark faces glistened with tears, told me how dear to many hearts was the good Bishop whom I myself had known only to lament. Often did I think of him, and his interest in my first sermon, during many subsequent years of ministration in a land which is ever rife with sudden death. A noble sermon on the death of this dear Bishop was preached in Calcutta by his friend and Metropolitan, Bishop Wilson. It begins with the true and striking exclamation: "All India mourns; we have lost one of the gentlest, meekest, most exalted christians that our church has ever known." Few but those who have been on the spot at such a time, know what a void is felt in all the plans and efforts of the church, by the removal of a colonial Prelate.

But I forget that I have not yet acquainted you with our arrival in the country I am speaking of. The coast of Coromandel is a long, flat, sandy, strip of ground, (about 70 miles broad at Madras,) behind which rises a range of mountains, which are rather incorrectly called the ghauts; this word really denoting, not the mountains themselves but, the passes by which the traveller ascends to the high table land beyond them. This low and level coast offers but few objects to the eye at sea; a round stony hillock here and there, or two or three tall cocoa nut trees shooting up from the sand, are all the eye can fix upon and of course nothing is seen till you come pretty near the

shore.

The captain had promised us a sight of Madras before dark, but he could not fulfil the expectations so excited. It was after ten o'clock (and in the tropics it is always dark before seven) that I had the gratification of seeing the distant twinkling of the lighthouse, an earthly star, which at that moment possessed a greater attraction for my eyes than the brilliant constellations over head. We made a very short night of it as you may well suppose, and when I hastened upon deck with the first gleam of daylight, the steeple of St Mary's Church and the Flag Staff rose clear and distinct above the level line before us, and the walls of the Fort that enclosed them could be seen, with the surf dashing against them.

It was not long before one of the natives stood upon our deck, and I was certainly but little prepared for such a first introduction. He

had come off on what is called a catamaran, which is nothing more than three logs of wood lashed together, so as to make a rude raft. Numbers of these are always plying about between the shore and the shipping, seldom having more than one man on each, who propels and guides it by a sort of paddle. They are often overset or washed off by the surf, when they quietly swim to their raft again. Of course their clothing is very scanty; indeed the man who climbed up our ship's side, and stood dripping on the deck with but one very narrow cloth about his middle, and his breast and limbs shaggy with hair, looked more like a great monkey than anything I could think of. He had a conical cap on his head, covered with waxed cloth, so as to exclude the water, and in this he had brought out letters for our captain.

Our next native acquaintance were the boatmen, who in a few hours after were rowing us, with a vast number of paddles rather than oars, in one of their huge masoolah boats to the shore; these boats are much the same shape with those little ones which you, boys, make out of half a walnut shell. Their boards are sowed together with twine instead of being nailed, which makes them flexible enough to withstand the blows of the surf. They swim very high out of the water, riding on the tops of the waves like corks. The rowers keep up a wild clamour, which they call singing, and look hardly more civilized than the Catamaran Jack, but they are very clever in managing their unwieldy boats. In a few minutes we were on the back of the outermost of the three huge lines of billows, which are always rolling on the Madras beach. We shot over it (every one screaming at the top of his voice), and were immediately on the second. Then there was a pause while they prepared for the third, which had no sooner lifted our boat than half the crew lept overboard, and dashing through the broken water on foot, dragged us high and dry on the beach. The surf was very moderate, and we experienced no inconvenience whatever; but I have seen it raging so furiously as totally to intercept the communication with the shipping for a week together: and people are sometimes cast away and drowned in attempting to cross it.

And now we were in India! With Pagodas and Minarets at every corner, and thousands of Mahometans and Idolaters swarming in the streets around us. We had little time, in the confusion that prevailed on every side, to think of the hot sun that was shining down