England. To many persons--I hope I may say, to all in this
congregation--this ceremony will seem eminently rational. We shall not
ask God to suspend the laws of nature, nor alter the courses of the
seasons, for any wants, real or fancied, of our own. We shall ask Him to
make us and our countrymen wiser and better, in order that we may make
other human beings wiser and better: and an eminently rational request I
assert that to be.

For no one will deny that it is good for heathens and savages, even if
there were no life after death, to be wiser and better than they are. It
is good, I presume, that they should give up cannibalism, slave-trading,
witchcraft, child-murder, and a host of other abominations; and that they
should be made to give them up not from mere fear of European cannon, but
of their own wills and consciences, seeing that such habits are wrong and
ruinous, and loathing them accordingly; in a word, that instead of living
as they do, and finding in a hundred ways that the wages of sin are
death, they should be converted--that is, change their ways--and live.

Now that this is the will of God--assuming that there is a God, and a
good God--is plain at least to our reason, and to our common sense; and
it is equally plain to our reason and to our common sense that, as God
has not taught these poor wretches to improve themselves, or sent
superior beings to improve them from some other world, He therefore means
their improvement to be brought about, as moral improvements are usually
brought about, by the influence of their fellow-men, and specially by us
who have put ourselves in contact with them in our world-wide search for
wealth; and who are certain, as we know by sad experience, to make the
heathen worse, if we do not make them better. And as we find from
experience that our missionaries, wherever they are brought in contact
with these savages, do make them wiser and happier, we ask God to inspire