no land under Heaven is death so sudden and so frequent, so in no land that I have ever heard of is the death of a parent, or a husband, attended with such utter and immediate ruin to those who depend on him, as with the description of persons of whom I speak, it ordinarily is in Calcutta. And when to these we add the multitude of orphans, or worse than orphans, whose existence and distress are alike the evidence and aggravation of their father's crimes; when we consider that not Calcutta alone, but the poor and populous colonies of Serampoor and Chinsura are included within the natural limit of our care; and that whatever be the amount of distress in all these districts, it is to Europeans alone, under ordinary circumstances, the sufferer can look for relief or sympathy; it cannot excite surprise that, large as the funds are which have passed through the hands of those who manage this good work, they are altogether insufficient to the number of claimants who besiege them. Yet if those funds should fail, to what quarter must the poor apply? Shall private and individual charity suffice to feed so great a multitude? Let those answer who are already wearied with a daily swarm of petitions, and who may be assured that those petitions would, without this institution, be augmented a hundred fold, and their doors be blocked up by suffering Christians in every hideous shape of hunger, disease, and nakedness, till their time and means were engrossed by giving to those whose cases they could not investigate, or their hearts

hardened against all by the apparent impossibility of relieving many. Nor can further arguments be required to prove the advantage of a common fund under the management of a few benevolent individuals, who are content to give up no small portion of their time to enquire into the cases submitted to them; and who, from their long familiarity with this work of mercy, are really enabled, at a smaller expense of time than would, under any other circumstances, be necessary, to ascertain with tolerable accuracy the character and condition of each individual claimant.

Of the labours of the vestry, and of the effects of those labours, though not myself a member, I have frequent occasion to hear something; and when I mention that I have known instances of females respectably born and educated, soliciting for the monthly allowance of paupers; that I have known strangers who must have perished in the street for lack of friends and shelter, had not the bounty of the institution intervened; and that the free school of Calcutta, which owes its chief support to this fund, has been, under God, the only means of rescuing from an early death, or a life which was worse than death, many thousand children of Christian parents who had either abandoned or could not educate or maintain them; when I state that in the vestry alms, no Christian in distress, of whatever nation or sect, is suffered to go unrelieved; and that in the free-school, though we naturally prefer the religious instructions of our own Church, yet

those instructions are forced on no child whose pa rents are of a different persuasion; that Armenians, and Greeks, and Romanists, and even Hindoos, may be seen in our classes, their prejudices re spected, and their progress and comforts no less attended to than the children of our own people, I shall have said enough, I trust, to establish the claim of the institution, for which I now am pleading, to the support of every man who wishes well to his fellow-creatures, and who, without neglecting the prior claims of " the household of faith," is desirous, according to his power, "to do good to all men."

They were these claims, and claims like these, appreciated by a heart and head, than which few in the history of British India have been so warm and so cool, so ardent in the relief of distress and so calmly judicious in the choice of measures for alleviating it, which procured for this institution a more than common share of the attention and, liberality of that great man whose life was cherished still, though his presence and counsels had been withdrawn from these colonies, not by his private friends alone, but by every well wisher to India; by every one who had learnt to honour private worth or public integrity and firmness; by the guests who had drawn delight and improvement from his conversation while they partook in his hospitality; and by the poor against whom his doors, his attention, his indulgence, and his purse had never been for an instant closed. His loss, the in

stitution which I am now recommending, laments in common with almost every other religious or humane institution in the city; but it may be well to state, in order to intimate the extent of our misfortune in losing him, and to incite those who hear me to the exercise of a similar liberality, that accessible as Mr. Adam always was to the petitions and personal applications, of the frequency of which I have spoken, there was no charity whose claims he felt so strongly as this the eldest of all; that, ample as the donations were which the world saw affixed to his name, those donations fell considerably short of the sums which he contributed anonymously; and that even when he had left India without an idea of seeing it more, he had determined that, while life was spared him, his charities should linger here still. In him, in that other benevolent and virtuous statesman, whom, at a yet more recent date, the will of Providence has called to his reward; in others of less exalted rank, but of zeal not inferior for God's good cause, and the relief of their suffering fellowcreatures, whom since I last addressed you, a year of unusual mortality has swept from our social circles, the cause of charity has lost much; but to replace the void is not beyond the scope of our own increased exertions and the exertions of those fresh labourers who have, during that time, been added to the vineyard. Only let it be our endeavour to bestow alms as of the ability which God giveth, and that God may bless our bounty to its objects and to ourselves, let us devote it in humble prayer

at His Altar from whom we have received all things, and from whose grace only it cometh that we can render Him any true or laudable service.

To Him the Father of the fatherless, the Defender of the cause of the widow, to Him who heareth the cry of the destitute, and whose Son is not ashamed to call the poor His brethren, to Him, with that blessed Son, and the Spirit of bounty and love, be accounted all honour, praise, and glory!