bers of our religious society at SierraLeone have returned to their father-land, by whose simple teaching a favourable impression has been made upon the people at Badagry; and the heathen Chief of that very place where Lander beheld the horrid Fetish-tree, whose gigantic branches were laden with the limbs and carcasses of human victims, has urged his petition, that the Committee will send him a Missionary, to instruct him and his people more fully in the nature and obligations of Christianity. In support of their prayer for a Missionary, the people are contributing considerable sums towards his maintenance; and the Committee have felt it to be their imperative duty to make such arrangements as will place this interesting Christian settlement under the pastoral care of the Missionaries at the Gold-Coast.........In the West Indies painful visitations have been experienced. The Committee have had to mourn the loss of several valuable Missionaries, who have been arrested by death in their career of honourable and useful exertion; and they regret to report, that owing to the financial difficulties of the Society, only a few of the vacancies which were thus occasioned have as yet been supplied. The returns from these important Missions, for the last year, furnish a satisfactory answer to the inquiry as to whether proper exertions are made at the older stations of the Society, to relieve the home funds from the burden of supporting them. Most of the stations in the colony of Demerara, and all in Barbadoes, have become entirely independent of foreign pecuniary aid. And this is the case with regard to the following eight central stations or Circuits, in Jamaica :-Kingston, Morant-Bay and Bath, MontegoBay, Falmouth, St. Ann's Bay and Ebenezer, Ocho-Rios and Watson-ville, and Beecham-ville,—all of which stations support themselves; and some of them, moreover, render important assistance to the newer and poorer Circuits. The amount of local exertion made by these Missions to meet their own necessities may be partly judged from the fact, that, in Jamaica, eleven new chapels have been completed and opened for public worship in the last year; the total cost of which is upwards of £15,000 sterling. From these instances of honourable exertion, the case of Bath may be selected for special remark. At this station there are not any white persons but the Missionaries, and only about a dozen Creoles, or persons of mixed blood. With these exceptions, the religious society and

congregation consist of blacks. But the people at this place, after providing for the support of their own Missionaries, gave a surplus of Circuit-funds for the year, amounting nearly to £200, for the relief of the newer stations in the District, where the church members are as yet too few in number to meet the whole of their own expenses. And, in addition to all this, the people at Bath have provided for themselves an excellent new chapel, at a cost of upwards of £2,500 sterling. The Committee refer with pleasure to another proof of the solicitude of the Missionaries and the people to make their local income equal to the expenditure. Rents being exces sively high in Jamaica, the Missionaries there have adopted a plan for building houses at the several stations, to be regularly settled, like the chapels, on Trustees. These remarks respecting pecuniary exertions must be understood to relate to the local efforts made by the Missions to meet their own expenditure, exclusively of their contributions to the funds of the Parent Society, for the support of the Missionary work generally throughout the world. The Committee are thankful to report that the WestIndian stations have this year presented to the General Mission-Fund the noble sum of £4,500.........The schools generally, under the able superintendence of Mr. Armstrong, are in efficient operation; and the school for training teachers at Kingston, in Jamaica, has been commenced under the able direction of Mr. Auld, late of the Glasgow Educational Institution, with an encouraging prospect of success.

The official communications which have been received by the Committee from the Eastern and Western Districts of Canada, as well as from the adjoining provinces of Nova-Scotia and New-Brunswick, and the island of Newfoundland, are of an encouraging character. Chapels have been erected and enlarged in several places during the year; and in the midst of much poverty, a noble spirit of liberality has been displayed by the people, in co-operating with the Committee in making provision for the support of their Missionary Pastors, as well as in directly contributing to the funds of the Parent Society....... Commodious buildings for a Wesleyan Academy have been erected at Sackville, New-Brunswick, at an expense of upwards of £5,000; the whole of which has been defrayed by Charles Allison, Esq., of that place. Arrangements have been made by him for presenting the

Academy, and grounds connected with it, to the Conference, as a Centenary offering from that generous and nobleminded friend to Wesleyan Methodism. More than £1,000 have been already raised by voluntary contributions in the country, for the purpose of furnishing that Institution; and the Provincial Legislature has granted £500 towards the same object... The Missions

amongst the aborigines in Western Canada, and in the extensive territories belonging to the Honourable the Hudson'sBay Company, manifest proofs of growing improvement. The school at Alderville, under the direction of our excellent Missionary, the Rev. William Case, assisted by our faithful brother, John Sunday, is the means of doing much good. The female department is conducted under the judicious and affectionate superintendence of Mrs. Case......... Although difficulties connected with the vastness of the Hudson's-Bay territories, and the small and scattered Indian population which they contain, combined with their peculiar mode of living, have hitherto prevented the formation of religious societies, the Missionaries there are "in labours more abundant," and hopeful signs are beginning to manifest themselves, as the fruit of their holy, arduous, and self-denying services......... The following is a summary of the Society's operations :-The total number of principal or central Mission stations, called Circuits, occupied by the Society in the several parts of the world now merated, is 261; the number of Missionaries employed, exclusive of Catechists, &c., is 368; the number of full and accredited church-members, exclusive of those under the care of the Society's Missionaries in Ireland, is 87,258; the number of scholars in the Missionschools is nearly 60,000........In conclusion, the Committee congratulated their friends that the experience of another year afforded fresh evidence of the soundness of those great principles which regulated the operations of the Society....

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15 Missionaries, and 3 wives of Missionaries, have been sent out by the Society since the last Anniversary; namely, Mr. and Mrs. Hudson, to Barbadoes; Mr. Symonds, to Macarthy's Island; Mr. Raston, Mr. Annear, to Sierra-Leone; Mr. Allen, Mr. Rowland, Mr. Wyatt, to the Gold-Coast; Mr. Brown, to St. Kitt's; Mr. Thompson, Mr. Savory, Mr. Sinclair, to Jamaica; Mr. Hardey, Mr. Sanderson, to Madras; Mr. Pickavant and family, to Newfoundland; and Mr. and Mrs. Cargill and family, to Poly

nesia. Of this number, Mr. Pickavant and Mr. Cargill have returned, after a short visit to England, into the foreign work......The following much-lamented Missionaries have been removed by death: Mr. William Scott Fox, at sea; Mr. Goodricke, Cape-Town; Mr. Thackwray, Mr. Walden, Gold-Coast; Mr. Redfern, Mr. Lofthouse, Jamaica; Mr. Cameron, Dominica; Mr. Bates, Tortola...... To this affecting record must be added that of 5 excellent females, wives of Missionaries, who have also exchanged mortality for life.

The VISCOUNT BERNARD, M. P. for Bandon, on rising to move the First Resolution, said, I can assure you that it gives me great pleasure to be allowed to propose a Resolution to this Meeting; for, though an attached member of the established Church, I have yet to learn that it is inconsistent with the duty I owe to her, to come forward and extend the right hand of fellowship to all who are seeking to spread the knowledge of our Saviour, and who are anxious to fulfil the last parting direction of our blessed Redeemer, who when he had completed the work of man's redemption, directed his disciples to bear the Gospel of peace to the utmost limits of the globe. But, Sir, I feel pleasure on other grounds in appearing before you on this occasion; for, connected as I am with the south of Ireland, (a district of the empire from which few persons probably are here present,) I feel that I should be acting inconsistently with the duty I owe to the Wesleyan Methodists in that quarter, for whom I entertain the most sincere respect, with many of whom I am connected, not merely by a public tie, but to whom I am bound by intimate friendship and affection; I feel I should act inconsistently with the duty I owe to those individuals, if I did not assure their brethren who are present to-day, that, though situated in a distant part of the empire, they are second to none in the zeal, the devotion, and the activity they have manifested in behalf of your important Society. But I have, too, a debt of gratitude to discharge; for, as an Irishman, I cannot forget that, in the dark hour when the Church to which I belong was called on to pass through the furnace of affliction; when she was deserted by many who ought to have been her friends, and when those whose duty it was, and whose inclination it ought to have been, to stand by her in her afflic tion, looked coldly on; then the Wesleyan body showed that they were ready to sympathize with her sufferings, and, if

need were, to share her trials. I feel, also, that I owe a deep debt of gratitude to that body for the zeal they have shown in Ireland in the cause of scriptural education. They hold, with us, that religion (religion based upon the word of God) is the only ground upon which the instruction of the young ought to be conducted; and that it is instruction of this nature alone that will tend, under the divine blessing, to regulate their future lives. I feel, however, that it is improper for me to trespass on the time of the Meeting; and, while I join with you in imploring the blessing of Almighty God upon the future exertions of this Society, I shall content myself with moving the Resolution which has been placed in my hands,

"That the Report, of which an abstract has just been read, be received and published: and that this Meeting offers its grateful acknowledgments to Almighty God, for the encouraging measure of success which he continues to vouchsafe to the Wesleyan Missionary Society, in common with other similar Protestant institutions and adverts especially with thankfulness to the auspicious recommencement of Missionary operations at Tongatabu, after the brief interruption which they had experienced; to the favourable reception of Mr. Freeman in the capital of Ashúnti; and to the opening prospects among the Veddahs in Ceylon."

The REV. DR. BUCHANAN, Minister of the Tron church, Glasgow, rose to second the Resolution, and was received with loud and reiterated manifestations of hearty welcome. He said, I believe it is not uncommon, in what is called the fashionable world, to have one class of acquaintances in the country, and another, and altogether a different, class in town; to have very dear and intimate friends in the one place, who are totally unknown and forgotten in the other. I can safely venture to affirm, however, that this is not the nature of my acquaintance with Wesleyan Methodists. It is not here only, in your great anniversary Meeting, where the whole weight and worth, the whole power and influence, of your important Society, are concentrated within this spacious Hall, and where (as the Honourable Chairman has observed) any man may account it, not only a duty and a privilege, but an honour and a distinction, to be permitted to appear; it is not here alone that I enjoy the satisfaction of joining hand in hand with members of your body in promoting the great and glorious enterprise which you are

associated to advance.

I have stood side by side with your Ministers on the humbler platform of your Glasgow DistrictMeeting; and I have preached in one of your pulpits, within a few hundred yards of my own parish-church. I have done so, because, like the Noble Lord who has just addressed you, I rejoice to avail myself of every opportunity of associating with my fellow-Christians, of other evangelical denominations, in advancing the common cause of our common Lord. I rejoice to overleap the proud, and cold, and selfish barriers of a sectarian spirit, and to give the hand of fellowship to all who love the Lord Jesus in sincerity. I am one of those who are deeply impressed with the conviction that we have had infinitely too much of separation and estrangement among the churches of Christ, and who think that those enmities and divisions, which have so cruelly rent and torn the Lord's body on earth, have been not more disgraceful and disastrous to the churches themselves, than they have been fatally ruinous to the world. It is on this subject that, with your permission, I am desirous very briefly to address you. As to the facts connected with your own great Missionary enterprise, it could not be regarded as otherwise than obtrusive on my part, were I to presume to speak of them. Others here present are far more competent to address you on such a subject than I can be; and doubtless they will do so with the fulness and the ability which the occasion and the cause demand. But, coming among you as I do from another Church, I may be permitted to hail the assembling on this occasion of persons connected with several branches of the church of Christ, as some symptom of the giving way of that spirit of enmity and division which has so long rent the professing Christian world. If there be in domestic life one scene more painful to contemplate than another, it is surely a divided family,-a family in which the bonds of mutual sympathy and love have been broken and cast away; where the endearments of home have been exchanged for the cold selfishness of the world; where all the hallowed associations that should link together husband and wife, parent and child, sister and brother, have heen utterly broken down; where suspicion clouds every brow, where jealousy fills every heart, where bitter words are emanating from every tongue, where arms that should be entwined in the embraces of affection are lifted but to strike and to wound. Who can contemplate such a spectacle without

occasion for more signally manifesting the Almighty power. Or, to take a case higher and more solemn still, as well might it be said, that man's apostasy was good, because it became the occasion for the in-bringing of the glorious scheme of redemption, whereby even to the "principalities and powers in heavenly places' was to be "made known the manifold wisdom of God." We may not "do evil that good may come."

These divisions

may have been overruled, in the providence of God, to the completion of his designs; but, in themselves, these divisions are evils, "only evil, and that continually." They serve to transmute the olive-branch into a sword; they change the glad sound of peace into the tocsin of war; they send flying abroad over the earth, in the hateful form of a bird of prey, a religion whose Spirit descended from heaven in the likeness of a dove; and if there be aught on earth which is fitted to fill the Christian with confusion and shame, to make him cover himself with sackcloth and sit in ashes, it is the spectacle of the church's divisions, and of the ruin those divisions have wrought. The spectacle of Marius, the banished Roman, sitting amidst the ruins of Carthage, Rome's once mighty rival, has been thought, by its inherent pathos, a scene well fitted to call forth the creations of the painter's hand and the poet's ge nius. But is it not a scene darker and sterner still, that would lay before us the banished archangel who once led the armies of heaven, sitting amidst the ruins which the church's divisions have spread over that earth which Christ came to redeem, and smiling, with fiend-like malignity, over the desolation which those divisions and dissensions have оссаsioned? In the close of that interesting and valuable Report which has been read by the Secretaries, reference is made to times of coming conflict; to the evidence which the existing condition of the church and of the world presents, of the approach of a great war of principles, when the powers of light and darkness shall be seen arrayed in deadly hostility the one against the other. It is well, on auch an occasion as the present, to look 10 these signs of the times. We have, Indeed, cause to rejoice, that in these signs there are the materials of hope and encouragement, as well as of some anxiety and alarm. We know that wherever and whenever there is a revival of God's cause among his people, strife and opposition will be manifested. The inhabitants of our earth, however various their names, however diverse their par

They

ties, must be divided into two great classes, the powers of light, and the powers of darkness; "the seed of the woman," and "the children of the wicked one." Satan, as "a strong man armed," is on the one side; and while his yoke is borne, while his goods are in peace, all may be outwardly quiet and tranquil. But Christ is the adversary, "stronger than he;" and when Christ cometh to bind the strong man, and to spoil him of his goods, then the manifestation of strife and of enmity on the part of the world begins to appear. The reason of this is evident. A period of revival of religion is necessarily a time of enmity and opposition; of strife, painful and severe. There are multitudes of men who vehe. mently decry such revivals, and who loudly denounce those connected with them, as disturbers of the public peace. These men would prefer to slumber on; to lie smitten with spiritual impoteney and death in the porches of Bethesda, rather than endure the rustling of the wind of the breath of the Almighty Spirit, by which alone life can be imparted to this palsied and perishing world. would rather lie prostrate in an atmo sphere sickened and loaded with corruption, than be startled by some Boanerges, some son of thunder, awakening them to a sense of guilt and danger by flashing the lightning of the justice of an offended God upon their inmost conscience; even though the alarm that rouses them be the inevitable and indispensable precursor of the sweeping away of the clouds from the face of an angry Deity, and of restoring the light of the Sun of righteousness, the countenance of a reconciled God, to an apostate and condemned world. I rejoice that we have fallen upon times when symptoms so manifest and encouraging of a spirit of reviving and refreshing from the presence of the Lord have begun to appear. If we look out on Christendom, we see there, through the circulation of the word of God, (a cause in which this Society, as stated in the Report, has been faithfully and devotedly engaged, according to its utmost means and opportunities,) a smouldering fire beginning to spread beneath that mountain of corruption and death with which Antichrist has overlaid and overloaded the nations of the Continent. And I believe that never, since the period of the Reformation, has Antichrist (though that power may be apparently regaining in some quarters its political ascendancy) felt more perceptibly beneath its feet the heaving of that moral earthquake which is destined to upturn its unsightly dominion. The rationalism