indeed attend it at every step. We are at a loss to account for many things connected with it, but this is no concern of ours. The marching orders are clear and imperative. The greatest interests are at stake in carrying them out. For all practical purposes, the promises of God, the travail of the Redeemer's soul, the truth of Christianity, and its extension in the earth, are involved in the carrying out of this great enterprise. It impels us to grand and noble deeds by the highest and holiest considerations. The parting command of our blessed Lord includes the whole. "All power is given unto me in heaven and on earth. Go ye, therefore, and disciple all nations, and lo! I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." CHAPTER II. LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. IN prosecuting the Missionary work in China, we have various and peculiar difficulties to contend against, and we proceed to the enumeration of the most important of these. We may classify them under the following heads, the language and literature of the country, the national character and life of the people, their religious ideas, and the opium traffic. We need not advert to the natural moral state and condition of the Chinese, as forming a barrier to the spread of the gospel. It exists everywhere, with perhaps equal intensity, and is experienced in connexion with all Christian effort, alike at home and abroad. Our object is to individualize our case, and show the peculiar difficulties in the way of the Missionary enterprise in China. We refer to the language and literature of China, in the first place, as it stands at the very threshold of our work, and must be encountered at the outset of our labours. We are not about to consider the Chinese language in its peculiar structure or component parts. This has been well shown in various books written for the purpose; only we may observe, that it is, in our view, the oldest of living languages, and the nearest akin to the original mother tongue. It is in a historic, as well as constituent sense, the language of infancy, monosyllabic in its character, and composed of roots and elements which have existed from the beginning, without any essential variation or change. This has been the case, notwithstanding its high antiquity and extensive use, by the most populous nation in the world. It has been studied, cultivated, and employed, to an extent perhaps beyond comparison, but it retains all its early characteristics, and no modification or change appears to have come over it in the lapse of ages. This may be accounted for, in part, by the long isolation of the people, though their own national differences might, as in other countries, have served to affect it, or the fixed and uniform civilization that has existed in the country may have given a corresponding aspect to the language; but after all, it appears that the occasion of it is. to be found in the essential structure of the language itself. It has no alphabetic basis. It is the expression of things in the most natural and definite form, and it has maintained this principle, just as if a child had used it in early days, full allowance being made for the expansion of thought and feeling in after life. The written characters have undergone various changes, as they are more the result of artificial labour, and have thus been subject to many adventitious influences, brought to bear upon them. Speaking of the literary style as a whole, it has been stereotyped and fixed in its main features by the ancient classic writings, which have all along been studied by the scholars of China, and imitated in the fullest manner. The spoken and written forms require to be learned, in order to render a Missionary effective in the prosecution of his work. The former, apparently simple and easy at first, is found to be very otherwise as progress is made. We never met a person who knew anything about it, except as the result of close and prolonged study. Other languages, such as the Japanese, the Malay, and the Hindustanee, can be acquired, to some extent, by means of ordinary intercourse; but it is not so with the Chinese. Whether this is owing to the monosyllabic form of the words, that cannot be laid hold of by a casual hearer, or to any other cause, we are at a loss to discover, only it does require a great amount of attention and study. A good memory, a good ear, in a linguistic sense, and a good voice, are indispensable to a good speaker of Chinese. The manner in which it is generally learned is the following. A native teacher is engaged, who pronounces one, two, or more words at a time, the sound of which the foreign student endeavours to imitate. At first he may commit a number of mistakes, from not giving the right tonal accent or emphasis any correct The teacher peculiar to the phrase, or perhaps correspondence to the words at all. perseveres in the utterance of the sounds, and the scholar after repeated attempts, it may be, succeeds in a close imitation of the original. Thus the work goes on day by day, and month after month, for hours together, in the course of which an acquaintance is formed with a great variety of words, and the meanings attached to them. The colloquial medium, or the native dialect of the place in which the student is residing, and the mandarin or court dialect, are thus learned, by means of books published in these forms, or written by the teacher for the study of his particular pupil. At the beginning of one's study of the Chinese language, it is desirable that the colloquial medium, in one form of it or another, should be acquired, and it is recommended that it be done by means of the native character. This will facilitate the knowledge of it when the literature of the country is entered on, and enable the student more correctly to give the pronunciation, than by writing the sounds in English. The native scholar acquires his reading powers in a similar manner. He is set from the first day of his student life to pronounce the Chinese character in the orthodox style. He follows the teacher a number of times, and submits to correction until it is no longer necessary; and so he goes over the |