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IT was the outspoken pledge of an English nobleman, who, as a statesman and political reformer, inscribed his name on the history of his nation, that, in case of social convulsion, much as he favored general freedom for all classes, he should "stand by his own order."

The words of Earl Grey would, we doubt not, be adopted by the writer of the present volume; and with a frankness and a tenacity equalling the like traits in the British Peer, this "WORKING MAN," the son of a sturdy English Radical, would account it his duty and glory to "stand by HIS OWN ORDER," the stalwart and the hardy, who contribute so largely to the national prosperity, bear much of the nation's burdens and perils, and deserve their full share of its consideration. Never forgetting, much less disowning, the peasant and artizan class, from which he springs, and with a kindly, earnest word for the wronged and much enduring sailor, his religion has yet taught him that, duly understood, the interests of all the orders and classes in a nation are coincident and inseparable. As a servant of Christ in the field of Foreign Missions, he has laboriously shown, that the needs of a remote and alien race are held by him to have a just claim for the best years of his life, and for the putting forth of his best powers of body and of soul. Apart from caste and from distinctions of race, of hue, and of language, he has consecrated himself, like the great Apostle of the Gentiles, as "debtor to all," to become "the servant of all." Yet even Paul, we may presume, would of all Hebrews greet a man of the tribe of Benjamin with special cordiality; and should an inquirer of the school of the Pharisees approach him, Paul would meet that disciple with an intimate and eager sympathy, derived from the vivid reminiscences of his own youth spent at the feet of Gamaliel.

The life of Francis Mason has been drawn through varied scenes and many lands. Neither a cloistered student, nor a thoughtless, frivolous rambler, his acquaintance with books has been supplemented by free collision with men. And to his free intercourse with mankind in various stages of culture and of barbarism, he has brought the mind stored with reflection, and the eye taught duly to observe and wisely to discriminate and to appreciate.

A native of England, an emigrant in early manhood to America, it was here that he became a convert, received his training for the ministry, and hence was sent by American Baptists to their missions in Burmah to labor among the people of that empire and among the Karens, an aboriginal race found largely in the Burman territory, but more migratory than the Burmans, and with a distinct language, some peculiar traits, and many remarkable traditions. There he has been brought into friendly and intimate relations with British officers, administering the affairs of their government in the outlying provinces of their great Indian Empire.

With a simplicity and directness that remind one of our own Benjamin Franklin, he has told the tale of his own eventful career. And in doing this he has afforded us some striking glimpses of what the United States were when he first reached our shores; whilst the main thread of his narrative bears us to philosophies, faiths, and races which were old and well settled far back as the days of Daniel, and before Greece had, under the conduct of Alexander, hurled herself upon India.

As travel becomes more frequent and more rapid, the various countries of our earth would appear to be compressed inevitably into closer proximity; and they must also become percolated with a fuller, prompter sympathy. To one who spends much of his time in journeying, the modern facilities of locomotion are almost equivalent to a prolongation and expansion of life; for distances that once could be traversed by him only in weeks, may now be surmounted in hours. And lands and continents, in other times so remote as to be beyond the range of any travellers who had not both adventurousness and opulence, and large leisure, seem in our own days, by steam and steel, by the railroad and the wheeled vessel, to be gathered up—and if the image may be allowed—they are puckered into narrower dimensions. They have become accessible to the holiday jaunt of the wayfarer whose leisure is scanty and whose funds are but stinted. The very surface of our globe is, in the phrase of the milliner's dainty art, tucked and plaited into smaller compass. Man, by his Creator set as the master of Earth, finds his domain shrivelled into more manageable dimensions, and finds himself endowed with new powers of survey and subjugation. The field shrinks, and the tiller of the field dilates, as Science enlarges his capacities, and Art multiplies his tools. Prophecy had of old assured him, that, in the latter days, "many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased." Running and knowing—crowds traversing a wider region, and taught a riper, larger wisdom—said the oracle. Each highway of modern commerce shows the fleet rushing and the thronging tramp of these many runners; and every living literature of the civilized world is found bearing its witness to the wide diffusion and the rapid multiplication of these learners. Easy transit seems giving ubiquity to the educated races. Cheap Literature would seem threatening to take on a polyglott form and to bring in a Pantheistic creed. Even the village journal must now report the news from the other side of the planet. "Our neighbor"—the old word in the second great commandment—is a phrase that has, in our days, become palpably far more applicable to the heathen, who are our antipodes, than it could have seemed to be in the days of Abraham, David, or Luther. And as the nations long disparted become better known to each other, it will be found that they are mutually needed each by the other. Our very Christianity is developed into a proper disinterestedness and enterprise, into a more heroic firmness and a more divine tenderness, by the wants and guilt of Paganism. Aided by us, these idolators aid, elevate, and enrich us. Neglected by us, they poison us by their misery, ignorance, and vices. Mutual helpfulness becomes the very law of modern Culture and Progress, and is the first condition of Liberty, Order, and Peace. Such mutual helpfulness is but one human and terrestrial side of the great work of Christian Missions. And the results of Western philosophy and science can have no higher honors, and can be put to no nobler uses, than when brought, with a wise compassion, to bear on the relief of the ignorance and wretchedness of the idolators of the old Eastern world. Among the honors, literary and political, that have clustered around the French statesman Guizot, now in the closing stage of an illustrious career, it cannot be among the least gratifying, that the British officer who put down human sacrifices among the Khonds, an aboriginal tribe in the hills of Orissa—the late Major Samuel C. Macpherson—was accustomed to say, "that it was from the study of Guizot that he had learned how to reclaim the Khonds."*

[Footnote: * Mem. by his Brother. London. Murray. 1865. p.351.]

The Missions in which Dr. Mason has been vigorously, and through the blessing of God most successfully employed, have not prevented him from cultivating a keen relish for natural science. In his extended tours to preach the Gospel, his fatigue has been relieved by noting and recording the plants, and birds and fish, the insects and the beasts, brought by his Karen escorts to the place of encampment for the night. In an octavo volume of some nine hundred pages, and printed at Rangoon in 1860, on "Burmah, its People and Natural Productions," he has accumulated a mass of information on the subject of Natural History and of Ethnology and Language, that has received the warm acknowledgments of men of science.

The religious fruits of the Burman and Karen Mission have been memorable. The late Cardinal Wiseman, in a comparison of the results of Romanist and Protestant Missions among the heathen, issued by him from the press, allowed himself to speak disparagingly of Judson and his exertions in Burmah. An American scholar, on quite another side, removed as widely from sympathy with the principles of Judson, as was Wiseman,—the late Theodore Parker,—formed the highest estimate of the merits of that patient and resolute toiler for Burmah, Adoniram Judson. A missionary, who believed and preached Calvinism, must have conquered vast prejudices to have extorted such recognition from Parker. Great as were the attainments of that Romish scholar, and deeply as he graved his name on the religious annals of Britain, we think it will be the verdict of history, that the soul of the Baptist was cast, as compared with Wiseman, in a far more heroic mould: and his work of the finished Burman Bible is likely to leave a more durable and blessed imprint on the history of the world, than the works of the eminent prelate, varied, refined and scholarly as these were.

Dr. Mason entered that Mission field at a later stage in its history: but his, too, has been the high felicity and honor of completing, in the Karen language, a version of the Old and the New Testament. And the power of God's book, on the character of the nation receiving and cherishing it, is one of the settled facts of history. They who open, for the first time, that fountain to tribes long destitute, have a sure and lasting memorial.

An European Christian, resident in Switzerland, Dr. A. Ostertag, of Basle, has in Herzog's great Cyclopedia of Protestant Theology,* devoted some seventy-five spacious pages to the survey of the existing Protestant Missions among the Heathen. It has the breadth and thoroughness of German scholarship. Not in country, in language, or in denominational sympathies, allied to the people of whom he is speaking—the American Baptists, he describes these as finding in Burmah and the Karen people that one of their Missionary fields, which ranks, not only as compared with others of their own Missions, but "well nigh also as amongst all the Missions of the world, as the fairest and the most blessed."+ And returning, on another page,++ to this portion of his subject, he speaks of the Karens, as, since 1829, when Boardman began his visits to their villages, having had developed among them a work "so glorious as the History of Missions scarce anywhere else presents."

[Footnote: * Vol. IX., Stuttgart, 1858, pp.559, etc.]

[Footnote: + Herzog, IX., p.583.]

[Footnote: ++ P. 610.]

Among the Cherokees of our own land, and the Karens of that far Eastern continent, the gospel in its simplicity and directness and spirituality, accompanied by the Divine energy of the Holy Ghost, has proved its power to fix the roving tribe into habits of settled industry and order. Native pastors have been reared, in the American and the Asiatic fields, from the races evangelised, who have been singularly devoted and rarely useful. Dr. Mason has labored with such Karen associates, as Ko-Tha-byu, a remarkable man now gone home, and of whom Dr. Mason has published a memoir, and with others yet living, who reproduce the traits of character, that stand out in the first disciples, as portrayed in the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles.

The frankness of his utterances, when commenting on the tendency of "strikes" to recoil on the working classes, with whom he so lovingly identifies himself, and when alluding to the complicity of the American churches with slavery as he believes that complicity to have existed, in the years preceding the War of Secession, may startle some of his readers. But true affection is fearless in its candour, and nearing the end of his career, and writing from the Asiatic home of his missionary adoption to men of Europe and of America, whose shores he expects no more to visit, his remarks may be more patiently heeded, sent as across the ocean, and sounding almost as from the other side of the grave.

Whatever were the early delinquencies of the British government in its Indian territories, as to hindrances persistently cast in the path of quiet missionaries, a change has occurred in later years. Among the army officers and civilians in India, Missions have found, in our own times, some of their fastest friends. To Lieut. Col. Phayre,* the British Commissioner for Pegu, Dr. Mason has dedicated his volume on Burmah, imploring in Latin verse, that Burmah might long enjoy his beneficent influence. The Havelocks and the Lawrences of the English Indian service, recall the memory of Cornelius the Centurion: and pages of primeval Church History, traced by inspired evangelists in the first century, receive a fresh light from the campaigns of the nineteenth century, as the gospel is seen at home in the tented field. The work of a patient "dogged" toiler, to use the homely phrase by which Johnson and Chalmers were both wont to describe resolute, unrelaxing application, this autobiography has yet great naturalness and vivacity. It shows how fervid, unstinted toil leads to usefulness and to happiness. Many as have been the privations and the inevitable sorrows of his missionary career, the course of Dr. Mason has been largely blessed. And "they who turn many to righteousness" have the pledge of the Bible and the God of the Bible, that, whatever their lot on earth, "they shall shine as the stars forever and ever."

WILLIAM R. WILLIAMS.

NEW YORK, March, 1870.

[Footnote: * Since become Col. Sir A. P. Phayre.]