begin with individuals, spread to families, to churches, to denominations, and to the whole body of the faithful. When Zion is thus awaked, aroused to the great work that is to be done without delay, and travails for the conversion of the world, the promise of Jehovah will be accomplished, and the heathen shall belong to Christ. But do I address one who is not born again. We do read of those who will arrive at the kingdom of heaven from the East and from the West, from the North and from the South, while the children of the kingdom are shut out. Why is this? Were the children of the kingdom refused admission into it? Oh no, they were invited, they had often been invited, they had been entreated to be reconciled to God. Yes, this is your situation-a sinner, an unpardoned, an unrenewed, a ruined sinner; not the victim of the church's neglect; not perishing because you never heard of Jesus;-but the victim of criminal unbelief, and perishing because you have heard of Christ, and yet have rejected his mercy, and despised his love. We pity the heathen, we pray for them, we anxiously desire their salvation; but oh, if there are different degrees of pity, if there are shades of earnestness in prayer, and if desire can rise higher and higher, till it almost reaches agony by its intensity, our pity, our earnestness, our desire must be the strongest and deepest and most intense, for the sinner who is perishing in the midst of spiritual blessings, and dying in thick darkness while the light of the gospel is shining around him. Is there one sinner who is thus exposed to danger? Let him listen to the voice of Christ now, lest the message he rejects be sent to others who will receive it with gladness; and that salvation which he has hitherto neglected be given to some poor idolatrous heathen, who has not yet heard the joyful sound. There is no time to lose, thousands are every day hastening to the world of spirits, and you will soon be hurried into the crowd. Be wise then for eternity, by securing in time eternal blessings. The object of this Essay has been to bring to view that glorious and much desired consummation of the affairs of the church of God, for the accomplishment of which the Benevolent Societies treated of in the "Harbinger of the Millennium," were established. I have endeavored to show, that this event may soon be realized, if the Christian church would perform those duties, exhibited and illustrated in the Dissertations of this work. These, together with the Appendix, deserve to be studied and pondered well by Christians of every name, that they may be excited to make incomparably greater efforts than they ever have made, for advancing these philanthropic and Godlike enterprises. With these views, we earnestly commend this book, prepared with great labor and judgment, to the perusal of all who love Zion and pray for her prosperity. THE CHRISTIAN PHILANTHROPIST. DISSERTATION I. THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE SCRIPTURES. MAN, destitute of Divine direction, though formed with noble powers of body and of mind, would have been a forlorn and wretched being; incapable of providing for his wants, and ignorant of his duty. Thus considered, and considered as the creature of that Being who is infi nitely benevolent, and who forms nothing in vain, he surely was not made to be abandoned to himself; nor were his faculties given him to remain unimproved. Some revelation, then, from God to him was necessary, and might be expected, at the commencement of his existence. The fact that man is capable of being religious, and that to be religious is not only his duty, but his highest interest, is also an evidence, that God, from his infinite goodness, would furnish him with all the means requisite for this purpose. But from long experience, we have full and striking proof, that the moral precepts of Confucius, Plato, Cicero, and Seneca, those lights and ornaments of the pagan world, are insufficient to convert men, or to |