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260 BIBMAH.
gion, for missionaries of a purer faith. In the meantime,
the results of the patient and exemplary labours
of the American missionaries must not be lightly es-
timated. As pioneers in the work of civilization,
they have done incalculable service. The number of
professed converts may be inconsiderable,* but it is
evident that they have done much towards undermining
the prejudices of the natives, and wakening a
spirit of intelligent inquiry among the higher orders.
The impression of the superiority of the British in arts
and arms, which our conquests cannot fail to produce,
will not a little favour any attempts to impart to them
the blessing of Christian instruction; while the more
intimate commercial intercourse which promises to be
carried on between British India and the Indo-Chinese
nations, will inevitably lead to the most beneficial
results. In Birmah, there is no intolerant sacerdotal
caste to intercept the diffusion of knowledge; there,
no shoodras are condemned to eternal mental bondage ;
nor is woman there reduced to a cipher or a slave.
The machinery of instruction seems ready prepared in
the national institutions, and the zayats may here-
after serve the same purpose as the Jewish synagogues
in the Apostolic age. The costly war into which the
British have been reluctantly forced, and which has
shaken the Birman empire to its foundations, will, we
doubt not, prove a benefit to that country, which it
has laid open to the progress of knowledge and the
* In 1825, the first native Christian Church established at Ran-
goon, consisted of eighteen baptised converts. Mr. Hough had retired
to Serampore, where he was engaged in superintending the
printing of Dr. Judson's revised translation of the Gospel of St.
Matthew in the Birman language. The Serampore missionaries,
it seems, have already established stations in Arracan, which bids
fair to be a most important sphere of exertion and channel of com-
munication. Miss. Reg. Feb. 1826, p. 76.