How changed is the aspect of the world now!  There is hardly a spot upon earth (if we except those enslaved by Popery) where the Protestant missionary may not preach the gospel without the fear of persecution.  The door of the world has been thrown open, and the world’s Lord and Master commands and invites His servants to enter, and, in His name, to take possession of the nations.  Since 1812, India, chiefly through the exertions of Mr Wilberforce,[A] has been made accessible to the missionaries of every Church.  Christian schools and chapels have been multiplied; colleges have been instituted; thousands have been converted to Christ; and tens of thousands instructed in Christianity.  The cruelties of heathenism have been immensely lessened; infanticide prohibited; Sutteeism abolished; all Government support withdrawn from idolatry; and the Hindu law of inheritance has been altered to protect the native converts; while a new era seems to be heralded by the fact that a native Christian rajah has himself established a mission among his people.

[Footnote A:  In 1812, we find from Mr Wilberforce’s Life (vol. iv., p. 10) how he was “busily engaged in reading, thinking, consulting, and persuading,” on the renewal of the East India Company’s charter.  He was fully alive to the importance of the crisis with reference to the interests of Christianity.  He thus writes to his friend Mr Butterworth:—­“I have been long looking forward to the period of the renewal of the East India Company’s charter as to a great era, when I hoped that it would please God to enable the friends of Christianity to be the instruments of wiping away what I have long thought, next to the slave-trade, the foulest blot on the moral character of our countrymen—­the suffering our fellow-subjects (nay, they even stand toward us in the closer relation of our tenants) in the East Indies to remain, without any effort on our part to enlighten and inform them, under the grossest, the darkest, and most depraving system of idolatrous superstition that almost ever existed on earth.”  The deepest anxiety was felt by all Christians for the issue of the debate.  “I heard afterwards,” he writes, “that many good men were praying for us all night.”  These prayers and efforts were crowned with success; and Mr Wilberforce, when communicating the joyful news to his wife, writes—­“Blessed be God! we carried our question triumphantly, about three, or later, this morning!”]

All the islands in the Eastern Archipelago are now accessible to the missionary; most of them have been visited.  Ceylon has flourishing congregations and schools; Madagascar has had her martyrs, and has still her indomitable confessors.