Much evidence in favour of the doctrine maintained in this Homily is, I think, pouring in from different quarters. There is a complaint from intelligent officials against the practice of giving Government aid to the secular teaching in Missionary Schools. Should the Missionary desire such aid? Does it not cramp all his efforts? Does it not force him to make a division which he should not try to make; which he can only have been tempted to make by fancying that he had a certain thing called a Faith or a Religion to teach, and certain other things which had nothing to do with Faith or Religion? Colonel Edwardes has also contributed an important help to our conclusions on this subject. He has gone beyond all my conceptions of the relation in which the layman and the clergyman should stand to each other. He would confiscate the property of the Hindoo Temples and of the Mosques. Such a proposition, even coming from a soldier, is very startling. Colonel Edwardes boasted, in his well-known work, that in his province—which, it may be presumed, no tidings of the Clive or Hastings policy had ever reached—an Englishman’s lips were supposed to be incapable of uttering an untruth. Can we retain that enviable and glorious, though somewhat perilous reputation, if the acts which he recommends are perpetrated? But we have another reason for protesting against it. We know that the Gospel mightily grew and prevailed in the city of Ephesus under the teaching of an Apostle of whom it was testified, by a perfectly impartial witness, that he was no plunderer of temples, no blasphemer of the Ephesian Goddess, an Apostle who, being endued, as we believe, with powers from above, used those powers not for that purpose, but for healing the sick, for showing that the God of whom he spoke was a giver of all good things. We know also that three centuries later, in the city of Alexandria, a Bishop not the least like Saul of Tarsus, aided and encouraged by the Imperial Government, led a mob to the destruction of the Temple of Serapis. And we know what came of that vigorous effort to assert the true religion, to propagate the true faith. We know that the true religion, the true faith, in Alexandria, never became so false, so mixed with heathenish abominations, as after it had disposed in that reckless manner of the outward symbols of heathen worship. We know that Alexandria was destined in the counsels of God to be trodden underfoot of the Moslem, because he was a better witness against idolatry than the Christian. We, clergymen, believing, as we are bound, the success of one of these experiments, the failure of the other, to be necessary consequences of obedience and disobedience to the commands and example of our Lord Jesus Christ, must adjure the Government, in His name, not to imitate the example of the Emperor of Constantinople, lest haply it should be said that while bearing the name of the Crucified, they have been practically converted to the maxims of Juggernaut or of Mahomet.
END OF VOL. IV