care to learn

there by the Conference in Australia seem to be chosen at haphazard from among the ordinary recruits for the Wesleyan ministry. They themselves appear to regard their mission as a profession rather than as a call, and to attach greater importance to the details of church government than to the spirit of missionary enterprise. Few of them are sufficiently interested in the natives to more of their inner life than has a direct bearing upon their church membership. I may even say without harshness that their chief efforts are devoted to securing adequate collections, and to defeating the work of their rivals, the Roman Catholics. From the 'Methodist Missionary Review' of November 1892 I take the following ingenuous passage from the pen of the most active among the present missionaries in Fiji: "Our average for the past three years has been £1000 a year. Some of our mountain sections have greatly increased their subscriptions, so that I do not walk hundreds of miles across the awful paths of Colo for nothing." In another place the same writer jocosely alludes to a curious system of remuneration: Now there arose a new Mission Board over the brethren in foreign fields, and they said- through the General Secretary-Behold, the children of these missionaries are more and mightier every year; come, let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply and cause a debit balance in the annual accounts.' So it has come to pass that the brethren in the foreign fields have been notified that a reduction of five guineas per annum will be made on all children born after the 31st December next." One cannot forbear wondering whether this heartless order had the desired effect.

THE FATE OF THE MISSIONS.

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The experience of Hawaii, New Zealand, Tonga, and Fiji, goes to teach us that the active life of Christian missions in the South Seas is from fifty to seventy years. A mission was founded in New Zealand by Mr Marsden in 1814. The missionaries, being men of a lower class than those who laboured in Polynesia, used their opportunities for acquiring private property in land, a fact that, among a people so earth-hungry as the Polynesians, may have precipitated the crisis. Hauhauism, that strange compound of Christianity and paganism, broke out in 1865, and finally quenched the spark of life that remained to the mission after the war.

The mission in Tonga, founded in 1822 by Mr Lawry, and shattered by the dissensions of 1887, enjoyed an active life of sixty-five years. The Wesleyan mission in Fiji, founded in 1837, is already showing evident signs of decay. I do not allude to the practice of Tuka (Immortality), a pagan cult curiously like Hauhauism, which was put down by the Government in 1887, and has since reappeared at intervals, but to that general inanition that has proved fatal to the Church in Tonga. Nor is this surprising when one remembers upon how slender a base most of these conversions rest. A vast majority of Tongans and Fijians embraced Christianity because, for political reasons, it suited their chiefs to do so. One who was present at the conversion of an entire tribe in Fiji once gave me an account of the ceremony. A great feast was made for the missionary, who took his seat by the side of the chief. The heathen priest, taking a kava root in his hand, thus addressed the ancestor-gods: "This is the paltry feast which we, your poverty - stricken children,

have made for you. It is our farewell to you: do not be angry with us that we are going to leave you for a time. We are your children, but for a time we are going to worship the god of the foreigners: nevertheless, be not angry with us!" Then the gods consumed the spiritual essence of the meat, and the missionary and his suite ate its grosser material fibre and enjoyed it very much. To the converted native the heathen gods are not always false gods; they continue to exist, but they have been deserted for a time in favour of the gods of the foreigners. This is why relapses into heathenism on the part of the most promising converts will always be so dangerously easy. The spirits of their ancestors are to them what Baal and Rimmon were to the people of Israel-existing beings, who may at any time become malignant and demand propitiatory sacrifice. With so thin a curtain drawn between the old and the new faith, the fickleness of the natives, and the coolness that always follows hard upon the white heat of conversion, have doubtless each contributed their share to the decay of mission influence; but I venture to assert that the main cause has been the unseemly dissension between the Churches, and the enlistment of the natives in feuds utterly unworthy of the Christianity the missionaries profess to be teaching.

I do not forget that the Wesleyans were first in the field, and that all these evils might have been avoided if, as in British New Guinea, the Churches had agreed upon exclusive spheres of influence, with well-defined boundaries for each mission. But the time for that has gone by, and it remains for the missions to look to the condi

tions of their very existence in a spirit of mutual conciliation and tolerance.

It is an ungrateful task to endeavour to pass a friendly criticism upon so privileged a body as the missionaries. No one has yet attempted it without being accused of blind prejudice or envy that wilfully ignores the good in order to drag into a false prominence the defects from which no great undertaking is free. If I seem to have erred in speaking strongly of imperfections that continue to suck the life-blood of the mission, it is because they might easily be removed if the missionaries could clear their eyes from the petty irritations of the moment, and see that their real interests lie in following the doctrine they are teaching-to have charity one toward another. Their predecessors achieved a great work. They found the natives almost irredeemable savages, and they so far influenced their outward lives that every man, woman, and child in the islands is a professing Christian; but they are going far towards casting away this precious result for want of a little patience and self-restraint. No one can admire more than I the admirable work that has been done: no one can more deplore the waste of so great an opportunity.

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XIV.

AMATEUR LAW-GIVING.

THE dismissed Premier was not only a spiritual and temporal dignitary, he was also the lawgiver of Tonga; yet it was only in the most limited sense that he united the qualities of Moses and Melchisedec.

It has been the fate of Tonga to furnish the vile body on which the legislative experiments of amateurs have been tried. The first written code of law in Tongan history was promulgated in Vavau in 1839, and, crude though it was, it may be doubted whether it was not far better suited to the people than the elaborate but often incoherent effusions of the missionary lawyers of later days. It was King George's own composition, and it was intended for his own people only, to be administered by judges of his own race. There was a long preamble filled with Biblical quotations, after which follow a few plain straightforward clauses such as the following:

It is my mind: That the land should be brought into cultivation and be planted. Hence, I inform you it is unlawful for outside the sty. If a hog be found

you to turn your hogs