AT the present moment, it is usual to speak of mission work in New Zealand as a complete failure. The great body of the native population have apostatized from the Christian faith, and substituted in its place a fierce fanaticism which has almost nothing in common with the religion which they once professed. The system of Pai Marire (the name by which this fanatical faith is known) was inaugurated by the commission of a great crime, as if its adherents wished to break for ever with Christianity, and to render the gulf of separation between the past and the present impassable. Until within a recent period, the whole of the missionary churches and schools were closed, and the missionaries themselves had to seek refuge in the neighbouring towns. A few of them have given up their work in despair, and sought for more inviting fields of labour else where; most of them are still lingering in the land of their adoption, "hoping against hope," watching, waiting, and praying for better times.

Our residence in the island extended from 1864 to 1866, when the war was at its height. During that period missionary work was at a complete standstill; one or two missionaries remained among the Ngapuhi tribe in the north, who continued loyal, owing mainly to the influence of Tamati Waka, a gallant old chief who fought on our side against Heke in 1845, and has been our devoted friend and ally ever since. The Rev. Mr. Spencer maintained his position in the rebel district of Taupo, notwithstanding repeated warnings to leave; and a son of Bishop Williams had the courage to remain at his post, and to confront the Pai Marire impostors when they endeavoured to find proselytes among his congregation. It is

due to the missionaries to add that in no case did they desert their congregations till their congregations deserted them, and they were repeatedly warned by the rebel chiefs that they could no longer be answerable for their safety. The Venerable Archdeacon Brown (venerable by years as well as by position), who has spent thirty years in the island, lingered on at his romantic home at Tauranga till William Thompson, his former pupil, had almost to employ friendly force to induce him to leave for Auckland, where he remained till our supremacy was re-established at Tauranga.

Such facts prove that the missionaries were not wanting in moral courage; in truth, they rather erred on the opposite extreme. They had such unbounded faith in the attachment of those who had been under their spiritual care, that they refused to believe, till conviction was forced upon them, that their lives would be exposed to danger. Even after they were driven forth from their homes, they watched for every favourable opportunity of returning, and, in some cases, exposed their lives to needless danger in the attempt. Volkner had been driven from Opotiki by his own congregation; to return under such circumstances was an act of rashness bordering on folly; but his conscientious scruples constrained him to act as he did. The apostle Paul made his journey to Rome with the full consciousness of his fate before him; the missionary Volkner was influenced by the same heroic spirit of self-denial. Within the last five years, many brave men have found a grave in New Zealand; but none have died more nobly, or in a nobler cause, than the gentle German who sealed his testimony with his blood.

We had no opportunity of seeing the missionary system in actual operation. All the mission schools in the province of Auckland were closed on account of the war, except two: Bishop Patteson's Training Institution at Roli Marama, and the Wesleyan College at the Three Rings. The former, a plain wooden edifice, is situated on a small bay about three miles to the south of Auckland, and is intended for the religious training of native youths from the South Sea Islands. The Bishop visits these islands periodically in his yacht, the Southern Cross.. On the occasion of each visit he leaves a certain number of pupils who have gone through the necessary training, and brings back a fresh supply. The system is grounded on the idea that the work of native evangelization can be carried on most effectually by the natives themselves, and that the duty of Christian churches consists mainly in imparting to them the preliminary instruction necessary to qualify them for this kind of labour. It must be admitted that this system, viewed a priori, has much to recommend it; of its practical working we can say nothing farther than that Bishop Patteson, whose opinion is entitled to much respect, speaks of it in hopeful terms. Last year there were between forty and fifty youths, all born in the South Sea Islands, in this institution. Their average age was about seventeen or eighteen. The period of training does not extend to more than five years. They are instructed in the industrial arts as well as in religion. They are are thus qualified to command the respect and secure the attention of their countrymen, who as yet have made little progress in civilization. The youths we saw in the institution, though evidently of the same race as the Maories, were decidedly inferior to them in physical organization and intellectual vigour; but the difference was only such as might be expected between the natives of a tropical and a temperate climate. Bishop Patteson, a distinguished Oxford scholar, was attracted to this remote field of labour through sympathy with his friend Bishop Selwyn, who preceded him, and has devoted his time, his talents, and his fortune, to advancing the good work among the South Sea Islands. Missionaries who have less claim to public notice than Bishop Patterson have been eager to rush into print. An account of his different visits to the South Sea Islands would be deeply interesting.* He has had

* Christian Work has had frequent quotations from his journals.

to suffer perils by sea and perils by land; in those latitudes the winds and the waves are less to be dreaded than the fierce passions of a savage race. A few years ago, while landing a party of native converts, he was fired at by the heathen islanders, and two of his crew were killed. It went the round of the English papers that the Bishop, who, like the apostle John, has a heart overflowing with love to all God's creatures, had attacked the natives, and killed two of them. The enemies of missions rejoiced in this iniquitous tale, and found in it an argument against all missionary labour. The Bishop knew the golden eloquence of silence, and waited patiently until the truth came out.

The Wesleyan College at the Three Rings is different in object and character, being intended for the religious instruction of native children of either sex. It is a large building, capable of accommodating a much greater number of children than it contains at present; but this is owing to that violent outburst of insurrection which has swept away other institutions of a similar character. It owes its stability to its being situated within a few miles of Auckland; but the war has greatly affected the attendance of native children. Parents who took part in the rebellion were doubtful of the safety of their children, and removed them from the control of the missionaries. The extent of the rebellion may be learned from the fact that only one or two native schools remained unclosed. A farm of considerable extent is attached to the Wesleyan College, and the children seem to devote much of their time to industrial pursuits.

It is now universally admitted that the instruction of the young is a necessary condition to the permanent success of missionary labour. Humanly speaking, little can be done with adults who have grown up in an atmosphere of vice, and become hardened in evil. Such men may change their religion, but change of religion does not necessarily imply change of character. The Maories came over to Christianity almost en masse; but they remained, for a time at least, much the same as before. They changed their religion, but their character remained unchanged; the leavening of their minds with the leaven of divine truth was necessarily a work of time; the seed was too often sown in an unfruitful and unpromising soil. The missionaries knew this from the first, and wisely devoted much of their time and attention to the instruction of the young. At home the directors of industrial schools find too often that little good can be done with the

children, unless they be removed from the vitiating influences of home; the missionaries in New Zealand found that without this no good could be done at all. The daily, hourly conversation of the adults, proved that they were saturated with vice; in fact, that they knew no distinction between vice and virtue. The idea of chastity, in the Christian sense of the term, was entirely unknown to them; a wife was bound to be faithful to her husband, under pain of death, but before her marriage she might lead a life of sin without reproach. The infusion of different ideas into the native mind must needs be a work of time. Meanwhile the evil was urgent; if the children were to grow up better than their parents, they must be removed from all parental control, and taught to breathe a healthier and purer atmosphere.

All the missionary bodies vie with one another in opening native schools. In one distriet, where we spent six months, there were formerly three Church of England schools, two Wesleyan, and one Roman Catholic. These schools were supported partly by voluntary contributions, partly by Goverment grants. These grants were continued from year to year; the amount depended on the number of pupils attending each school. The healthy spirit of rivalry between the different missionary bodies was tainted by the mundane desire to obtain the largest possible sum from the Government, which could only be secured by showing the largest attendance at school. At first the Government exercised no control over those schools, and took no interest in the mode of instruction. The school that showed the largest attendance received the largest grant, whether the children were well taught or ill taught, or not taught at all. At length, in 1858, the Colonial Goverment passed an Act to the effect that grants would be conceded only to those schools where the children slept on the premises, were taught English, and received industrial training; but little was done to enforce this Act. No inspector was appointed to visit the schools; the only industrial training the children received was in the fields attached to the mission houses, where they were employed much in the same way, and with the same moral results, as those "labour gangs," of which we hear so much at the present day. In the better class of schools the boys were employed in field labour, and the girls in domestic duties; but both met in the same school-room, and mingled together on the same play-ground. The food was insufficient

often inferior in quantity, if not in quality, to that used by the natives themselves. The clothing was mean and sordid; the bed-rooms crowded with children huddled together on the floor, or pressed into narrow bedsteads. Schools of this character could do little to elevate the moral or religious character of the Maori race, or to impart to them a knowledge of the industrial arts; they learned to read and write, but in point of morale the children were much the same as their parents. The moral contamination was not always confined to themselves, it sometimes extended to the missionary's family, and left festering sores which closed only with the grave. The mission schools thus tended to aggravate the evil they were intended to remove, and sank so low in public opinion that Maori parents, even before the war broke out, began to be unwilling to allow their children to attend. When the war broke out, the schools were closed, and most of the young men trained in them joined the rebel ranks, and became adherents to the Pai Marire faith. The half-castes, who took such an active part in torturing Volkner to death, were once members of his own congregation.

A few of the pupils trained in the mission schools remained faithful to the religion they had been taught; the same may be said of all the natives ordained to the work of the ministry. One of the most successful native schools was situated on the Waipa river, and conducted by the Rev. A. Reid, a Wesleyan missionary, who had the self-denial to look, not to immediate, but to future and permanent results, and would re· ceive only a limited number of pupils. Some of these joined the rebel cause, and were taken prisoners; in conversing with them, we were struck with their superior intelligence, and the respectful terms in which they spoke of their religious instructors. We cannot avoid expressing our belief that the missionaries were not so much to blame, in crowding their schools with children they could not properly instruct, as the religious societies which employ them, and have too often a morbid craving for an immediate harvest.

There is a far more serious charge against the missionaries of New Zealand; we mean the purchase of large tracts of land from the natives, not for religious purposes, but for their own benefit. We know of two missionaries who purchased, at an almost nominal price, tracts of land equal in extent to the estate of many an English nobleman. It is only fair to add that the Church

Missionary Society, which employed them, emphatically expressed their disapproval of such conduct. These clerical speculators were naturally confounded with the land sharks from Sydney, and lost all their influence over the native mind. The Maories still remember with bitterness that their natural protectors, in many cases, took advantage of their ignorance. It was like a general shipwreck, when all things become common, and every man thinks only of himself. The missionaries ought to have been on their guard against this grasping spirit, and to have refused to touch the unclean thing. It might be easily shown that by acting otherwise they destroyed their own usefulness, and lost the confidence of the natives. "Bear these things patiently, and look up to heaven for strength," said a missionary to William Thompson, on his complaining of the many grievances his countrymen had against the Pakehas. "Yes," said Thompson, bitterly, "and while we are looking up to heaven you are looking down to earth, and robbing us of our land." He spoke to him, not as an individual, but as the representative of the whole missionary body, and the sarcasm was all the more severe because it was just.

The Wesleyan missionaries took no part in this nefarious traffic; if they bought land at all it was for their respective churches, and not for themselves. On glancing at the list of Church of England missionaries, we find that nearly one half of them, unseduced by the example of their brethren, and the strong temptation thrown in their way, either bought no land, or bought it in such small quantities as to escape the imputation of grasping cupidity among their own countrymen. It was different with the natives, who confounded the innocent with the guilty, and learned to distrust the Protestant missionaries as a body.

The Wesleyan and Church of England missionaries began their labours about the same time, and at first the greatest harmony prevailed between them. In the spirit of the patriarch, they divided the land, and selected separate fields of labour, so as not to clash with one another. Bishop Selwyn, on landing in New Zealand some twenty years ago, overleaped these lines of demarcation, rebaptized the Wesleyan converts, and taught them that their religious instructors had no authority to teach. The consequence was, that the Wesleyan and Episcopalian proselytes, believing themselves to be of different religions, kept aloof from one another, and their religious instructors acted very much in the same spirit. There is usually a

Nemesis in such cases; the Roman Catholic missionaries appeared upon the scene, and took advantage of this estrangement of feeling. They placed Bishop Selwyn in the same category as the Wesleyans he had denounced, and proclaimed that salvation could only be found in their church. The Maori, however, is too shrewd, too intellectual, to adopt the errors of the Church of Rome, unless he be swayed by political feeling, and for many years Romanism made little progress, except in remote districts where the influence of the Protestant missionaries was little felt. Travellers have been struck with the sordid appearance of the Romish proselytes, but it would be easy to shew that their inferiority to their Protestant countrymen was owing to other than religious causes. The head of the Roman Catholic Church in New Zealand is a Frenchman, and most of the missionary priests are French or Savoyard. Being foreigners and aliens, they owe no allegiance to the British Crown; when the war broke out, this fact was very much in their favour; at one time it was thought that the rebels would go over en masse to the Church of Rome. In 1861, at the beginning of the war with the Waikato tribes, a Rununga, or native Parliament, met at Taupo, to decide whether Protestantism or Romanism should be adopted as the national religion. The question was discussed in its political bearings; the theological differences between the two systems were entirely overlooked. The Rununga decided unanimously in favour of Romanism, because the priests of the Church of Rome had taught them that they had no country, that they owed no allegiance to the British Queen, and would offer no opposition to the Maori king or Maori nationality; whereas the Protestant ministers were devotedly attached to the Queen, and prayed every Sunday that "she might vanquish and overcome all her enemies." As the Maories were at that moment her enemies, it was not reasonable to expect that they should continue to pray for their own destruction, and all the adherents of the King movement were recommended to join the Church of Rome. Bishop Pompullier, the Roman Catholic Primate, took advantage of this opportunity, and offered to send a chaplain to the court of Potatao I. at Ngaruawahia. He was too precipitate; the indignation of the Protestant chiefs was aroused; many who had rarely been seen in church for years flocked there and repeated the responses, the one for the destruction of the Queen's enemies included. This outburst of loyal feeling, however, was only tem