more marvellous reports; and in this manner they go on, as it were, at full gallop, according to the present system, without taking time to dispel that thick and heavy cloud of ignorance and barbarism so necessary to be removed from the savage mind before it is prepared to receive spiritual instruction, or appreciate the benefits of Christianity. The result is scarcely a form of godliness, the time allowed being insufficient for perfecting the work, or doing it as it ought to be done; and this very want of time is chiefly the rock on which the missionary bark universally founders.
Before concluding this part of our subject, we {334} might advert to another evil connected with the present system, and perhaps the worst of all evils, inasmuch as no effectual remedy can well be applied to it—that is, the interference of sects with one another; for no sooner does a missionary plant the standard of the Gospel in any foreign land, but others of different persuasions follow: and it is no uncommon thing to see, in many parts of the heathen world, Papists and Protestants, with all the different branches of the two great sects, like rivals in trade, huddled together, working confusion; not only distracting and corrupting their converts, but destroying in their obstinacy the fruits of each other's labour—forgetting that they are all God's husbandmen, labouring in the same vineyard, and for the same master.
Next to the British empire, few countries on the globe have pursued the present system with more success than the Americans have done; yet the Americans themselves have found from long experience, as they now declare, that the system is defective, that the results produced nowise correspond to the means employed: and the same
