The chief remnants of cannibalism are to be found in the New Hebrides. The leader of the attack on John Williams is still alive at Erromango, and the savage defiant nature of this people has never been subdued. They belong more to the Melanesian than the Polynesian races. The first are more like the Negro, the second more like the Malay. The Melanesian Missions are in the charge of the Missionary Bishop, John Coleridge Patteson, who went out as a priest with the Bishop of New Zealand in 1855.

The New Zealand story, as I have said, cannot be told in the lifetime of the chief actor in it. It is a story of startling success, and then of disappointment through colonial impracticability. In some points it has been John Eliot’s experience upon a larger scale; but in this case the political quarrel led to the rise of a savage and murderous sect among the Maories, a sort of endeavour to combine some features of Christianity and even Judaism with the old forgotten Paganism, and yet promoting even cannibalism. It is memorable, however, that not one Maori who had received Holy Orders has ever swerved from the faith, though the “Hau-Haus” have led away many hundreds of Christians. Still, a good number remain loyal and faithful, and hold to the English in the miserable war which is still raging, provoked by disputes over the sale of land.

The Melanesian Mission was begun from New Zealand; but whereas the isles are too hot for English constitutions, they can only be visited from the sea, and lads are brought away to be educated for teachers. New Zealand proved too cold for these natives of a tropical climate, and the college has been transplanted to Norfolk Island, where Bishop Patteson has fixed his head-quarters. One of his converts from Banks’s Island has received Holy Orders, and this latter group seems in good train to afford a supply of native ministers to islands where few Englishmen could take up a permanent abode.

The African Missions would afford much detail, but want of space has prevented me from mentioning the Rev. George Leacock, the West Indian clergyman, who gave up everything when already an old man to pave the way of the Gospel in the Pongas. And the Cape still retains its first Bishop, so that it is only on the side of Natal and Zululand, where the workers have passed away, that the narrative can be complete. But the African Church is extending its stakes in Graham’s Town, Orange River, Zululand, and Zanzibar; and while the cry from East, West, and South is still “Come over and help us,” we cannot but feel that, in spite of many a failure, many a disappointment, many a fatal error, still the Gospel trumpet is being blown, and not blown in vain, even in the few spots whose history, for the sake of their representative men, I have here tried to record. Of the Canadian and Columbian Indian Missions, of the Sandwich Isles, and of many more, I have here been able to say nothing; but I hope that the pictures of these labourers in the cause may tend to some understanding, not only of their toils, but of their joys, and may show that they were men not easily deceived, and thoroughly to be trusted in their own reports of their progress.

Charlotte M. Yonge.

March 16th, 1871.

CHAPTER I. JOHN ELIOT, THE APOSTLE OF THE RED INDIANS

Since the great efforts that Britain had made between the years 500 and 1000 to bring the knowledge of the truth into the still heathen portions of the Continent,—since the days of Columban and Gal, of Boniface and Willibrord,—there had been a cessation of missionary enterprise. The known portions of the world were either Christian, or were in the hands of the Mahommedans; and no doubt much of the adventurous spirit which, united with religious enthusiasm, forms the missionary, found vent in the Crusades, and training in the military orders. The temper of the age, and the hopelessness of converting a Mahommedan, made the good men of the third 500 years use their swords rather than their tongues against the infidel; and it was only in the case of men possessing such rare natures as those of Francis of Assisi, or Raymond Lull, that the possibility of trying to bring over a single Saracen to the faith was imagined.

It was in the revival from the Paganism with which classical tastes had infected the Church, that the spirit of missions again awoke, stimulated, of course, by the wide discoveries of fresh lands that were dawning upon the earth. If from 1000 to 1500 the progress of the Gospel was confined to the borders of the Slavonic nation, the space of time from 1500 onwards has been one of constant and unwearied effort to raise the standard of the Cross in the new worlds beyond the Atlantic.

Spain, Portugal, France, as nations, and the great company of the Jesuits as one mighty brotherhood, were the foremost in the great undertaking; but their doings form a history of their own, and our business is with the efforts of our own Church and country in the same great cause.

Our work was not taken up so soon as theirs, partly because the spirit of colonization did not begin amongst us so early as in Spain and Portugal, and partly because the foundations of most of our colonies were laid by private enterprise, rather than by public adventure, and moreover some of the earlier ones in unsettled times.

It may be reckoned as one peculiarity of Englishmen, that their greatest works are usually not the outcome of enthusiastic design, but rather grow upon them by degrees, as they are led in paths that they have not known, and merely undertake the duty that stands immediately before them, step by step.

The young schoolmaster at Little Baddow, near Chelmsford, who decided on following in the track of the Pilgrim Fathers to New England, went simply to enjoy liberty of conscience, and to be free to minister according to his own views, and never intended to become the Apostle of the Red Indians.

Nothing is more remarkable than the recoil from neglected truths. When, even in the earliest ages of the Church, the Second Commandment was supposed to be a mere enhancing of the first, and therefore curtailed and omitted, there was little perception that this would lead to popular, though not theoretical, idolatry, still less that this law, when again brought forward, would be pushed by scrupulous minds to the most strange and unexpected consequences, to the over-powering of all authority of ancient custom, and to the repudiation of everything symbolical.

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