ARTISTIC MUNIFICENCE.

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counted and the amount whispered to the presiding teacher. In crying aloud the contents of each basin he allowed pauses for the cheering, and artistically kept the largest until the last. Mr M, the deliverer of the oppressed, showed a fine eye for effect. He cared noth

ing for the cheap and ephemeral burst of admiration that might have been won by flinging his twenty sovereigns into the same basin at once, but sat proudly erect while his almoner, the butcher, distributed his munificence equally between all the six basins, thereby winning to

friends.

his interests the hearts of all the patrons and their After the benediction had been pronounced, the congregation walked thoughtfully home to cool down and face the future.

It is easy to sneer at the missionaries in the South Pacific as drones sucking the honey that others have stored; as ministers of the collection-plate rather than of the Gospel; as moral teachers whose grim code is responsible for the deterioration of native morality. The books written about the Pacific Islands have been the work of either missionaries or passing travellers, and hostile criticism by the latter has been in obedience to the natural law of reaction after the sometimes nauseous series of self-laudatory books given to the world by the missionaries themselves. Casual travellers, who hoped to see the natives in their primitive simplicity of manners, are disappointed to find them clad and in their right minds, and galled at the restrictions, apparently arbitrary and unreasonable, laid upon them by their spiritual guides. They have read much of the hardships of the missionary's life. They find him sleek and prosperous, the autocrat of his flock, living in a good house, travelling in a comfortable and well-found boat: they feel that an attempt has been made to obtain their sympathies under false pretences, and they write down mission enterprise a fraud, and the system a mere institution for raising money from the gullible native. In this extreme view they are supported by the Europeans of the place,—for traders do not love missionaries, regarding them as competitors who, besides crippling trade, interfere with their domestic arrangements.

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They are wrong, of course. It may be true that, with at few brilliant exceptions, the missionaries are men of but slight education and extreme narrowness of views, and that the time for hardship and danger has passed away; but one need only compare the past with the present to acknowledge how great is the work they have accomplished. The early missionaries went with their lives in their hands, having nothing to gain from their enterprise but the inward reward of self-sacrifice. As for the women who followed their husbands to suffer with them the privations they were less able to endure, forced to bear and rear children in unhealthy climates, shocked almost daily by scenes that disgust us even to read about, and relieved at last only to return to their fellows with shattered health, -no praise can be too great for them. If the first missionaries were ignorant and narrow-minded, so also, according to modern lights, have the apostles seemed, but no less in their case than in that of their great prototypes was their very narrowness of vision a means of success. Natives, like children, do not understand half-measures. If their gods were false gods, then was every custom connected with their worship, whether mutilations of the body, or ornaments, or dances, or ceremonies, fit only for the most rigid prohibition. To gain an ascendancy over them, something more was wanted than the mere ingrafting of a new belief upon their lives. Their own creeds were hedged about with tabus, each enforced by the fear of death, and a religion without such prohibitions could not long hold their respect. So, from no calculating wisdom, they took unconsciously the wisest course and made their new code as uncompromising as that they were displacing.

N

But now that the missionaries are only called upon to carry on the work founded by their predecessors, and know nothing of the danger their predecessors had to encounter, it is not astonishing that, among men recruited from a lower stratum of society and education, there should be some whose behaviour has detracted from the credit of the Missionary Society, and that these have been

A Tongan schoolgirl.

JW.C.

taken by hostile critics as

types of the body of which they are members. The two main charges brought against the missionaries of to-day are that they give a first place to the collection of money, and that they have introduced and kept alive among the natives the unedifying spectacle of warring Churches. To the first charge it may be answered that no Church

ever was or ever will be carried on without funds, and it is surely to the credit of a mission that they should have induced the people whom they benefit to support their Church and schools instead of leaving them to make appeals to philanthropists for funds to carry on their work. For the missions are not concerned only with the spiritual needs of the natives-they also do the great practical work of maintaining dayschools in every village. The missionaries themselves

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would not deny that there have been grave abuses in the means adopted for obtaining subscriptions; but these abuses have not been general, and they have been due to the fact that among the missionaries, as among every considerable body of men, there have been a few who were unworthy of the cause in which they were employed. The second charge is unfortunately true.

I shall not speak of the Church of England Mission working in Melanesia, of the Presbyterian Mission of the New Hebrides, nor of the London Mission of Raratonga, Samoa, and New Guinea, for none of those Societies are concerned with Tonga; but I shall confine myself to a review of the Wesleyan Methodist Mission of Australasia and the Roman Catholic Mission of the Société de Marie.

The Wesleyans sent their first missionary to Tonga in June 1822, and after three years' interruption they began. work in earnest in 1826. There were two years of doubt and difficulty, three of slow but certain advance, and then they found themselves successful beyond their wildest hopes. With the conversion of King Josiah Aleamotu and of Taufaahau their cause was assured. The people followed their hereditary chiefs, and the heathen party became an ever-dwindling minority. Haapai and Vavau were Christian to a man: two-thirds of Tongatabu had embraced the new religion. Yet in the year 1835 we find this minority so hostile to Christianity that they are prepared to fight rather than accept it. In 1837 they are actually embarked in the hopeless struggle against an overwhelming majority. In 1840 they have driven back their assailants, even when supported by an English shipof-war, and the hated missionaries are in flight. Yet there