presuming to speak to him in a standing posture, a breach of discipline for which, if reprehensible, I was probable answerable, having encouraged the chief on all occasions to put himself on an equal footing with myself and the other officers. The missionaries seemed also to live much more apart from the natives than in Samoa, where free access is allowed to them at all times. Here, on the contrary, the gates of the enclosures were not merely kept closed, but sometimes locked,--a precaution against intrusion which, although perhaps warranted in some degree by the custom of fencing their grounds, and by the greater propensity on the part of these people to theft, I never saw adopted elsewhere, and which must operate unfavourably to that freedom of intercourse so necessary to the establishment of perfect confidence between the pastors and their flock.

If the missionaries were overbearing to the chiefs even at that early date, a light is thrown upon the curious persistence with which some of them clung to paganism. The ancient beliefs of the Polynesians never formed a system of religion, and, to compare small things with great, as the way was already smoothed for Christianity by the growing scepticism of the Roman empire, so were the minds of the Tongan chiefs ripe to seize upon any religious creed with a more logical foundation than the worn-out mummeries of their own ancestor-worship. Perhaps the ancient priestcraft, with its exactions of votive offerings and its hysterical oracles, would have shared the fate of its forgotten predecessor, phallus-worship, had the priests been less politic and tactful. But they knew that the existence of their order depended upon the union of Church and State; and their oracular utterances, plastic as those of Delphi, were directed always to upholding the privileges of the chiefs. Between the two orders there

A WORN-OUT HEATHEN CREED.

201

was a thorough understanding. The chief saw that the regular offerings to the spirits were not stinted; the priest, possessed by his god, retained sufficient self-command to gasp prophecies in remarkable accordance with the chief's interest. That they, like the Augurs, could meet without grinning, was doubtless due to the grim reality of the risk that often attached to the sacerdotal office; for was not the priest of Tubou Totai already doomed to be strangled for failing to restore Finau's daughter, when sudden death overtook overtook his patron? Even seventeen years before the arrival of the first missionaries, the chiefs did not care to conceal their scepticism; and perhaps, if the tragic death of Finau had not seemed so signal a revenge of the outraged gods, the missionaries would have found that the ancient faith had crumbled away of itself before their arrival.

Combs.

J.M.C

The influence of the priests had been so slight that, even with the fear of seeing their occupation gone, they could oppose no obstacle to the new creed. They are scarcely mentioned even by missionaries. The opposition came from the chiefs them

selves, inspired thereto, not as the good missionaries tell us, by the "great enemy of God and man," but by what has since proved to be a well-grounded alarm for the safety of their order. Some of them were shrewd enough to see in the new creed a political system that struck directly at their privileges. In Tonga, as in Galilee and in Rome, the first Christian convert was a commoner. The chiefs, who held that their inferiors possessed no souls, learned with dismay that in the sight of the missionaries all men, not ministers of the Gospel, are equal; that one law was to bind the chief and his serf alike that the proudest aristocracy in the world were to be abased to the level of the meanest plebeian. Their real stumbling block was the socialism of Christianity; for the Tongan chiefs having, like Nicodemus, great possessions, were not masters of the higher Biblical criticism that has adapted the creed to the social inequalities that clash with its teachings. To them the new system seemed to strike directly at the privileges of their order. Their power rested upon superstition, hardened and cemented by long custom, and to admit mere foreigners to superior authority was to lower them in the eyes of their subjects. They did not resist the new teachers, they simply claimed the liberty to dissent from the majority, -a liberty which of all others men are least willing to grant to one another.

Missionaries are by the nature of their calling intolerant. Tolerance in an evangelist is a sign that he is unfit for his mission. If Messrs Rabone and Tucker had been the men to discourage their new converts from coercing the heathen, they would not have achieved their

THE SOCIALISM OF CHRISTIANITY.

203

remarkable success. Expecting hardships, disappointments, and possibly martyrdom, they suddenly found themselves the most powerful persons in the country. Whatever measure of influence the chiefs possessed, that they were able to exert for the furtherance of their cause; and, as the unrealised possibilities of their position were borne in upon them, they gave God the praise, and began to make their power felt on their own account. The chiefs whose favour they had courted were now to discover that these foreigners, who had so meekly sought their protection, were, as the vicars on earth of a great and terrible Otua, to assume their rightful position of superiority. Henceforth the chiefs must pay to them the deference they had themselves received from their inferiors. Small wonder that, to those who still hesitated, this new portent of the secular power of the priesthood, never admitted under their heathen system, became so insurmountable a difficulty that they chose rather to cleave to their heathen gods and their independence.

It is easy to blame the missionaries after the event, to point to the lessons of history by which they might have been guided, and to forget that if they had been of that cool and calculating temper that is capable of founding a policy upon the teachings of history, they would never have come to Tonga. These men were not members of an Order trained to obey the direction of a central authority; they were homely men of slight attainments, burning with a zeal that drove out all considerations of policy and caution.

204

XIII.

ODIUM THEOLOGICUM.

It has been the fate of all Churches to be tempted with the apple of temporal power; to lack the moderation to thrust it aside; and to fall by tasting of it. The errors that once ruined the Church of Rome-that may yet destroy her successor in England-may be watched in miniature in the South Pacific. There is something in the education of ecclesiastics, no less than in that of soldiers, that unfits them to wield the civil power. The messengers of peace and of war are prone alike to strain the authority committed to them, perhaps because they believe that the

world has the same instinct of obedience as a

regiment or a congregation. As in the fifteenth century the Popes, the successors of Peter the fisherman, exacted the obeisance of sovereigns, so (to strain a comparison) the followers of Him who took the world for His parish claimed from the chiefs of Tonga the same marks of respect as paid to them by their own vassals. They mistook the enthusiasm of a hysterical people for a permanent warmth

very

were

sud

of devotion to the new faith, forgetting that the denness of their conversion marked them with the brand