PREFACE 4
INTRODUCTION 5
COLONIAL WORK: TOWNS 29
COLONIAL WORK: COUNTRY 54
MISSIONARY WORK: OLD RELIGIONS 80
MISSIONARY WORK: UNCIVILIZED RACES 111
ON THE WORK THAT CAN BE DONE IN ENGLAND 141

THIS little book contains a Series of Lectures which I delivered in Cambridge at the request of the Theological Board, as the Pastoral Lectures for 1896.

I have printed them exactly as they were delivered, in the hope that they may, perhaps, reach a wider audience than that which heard them, but an audience of the same kind.

My object was to put before the men, some of whom might possibly go out to the Colonies or to the Mission Field, a sketch of the nature of the work, and a few rules, of which my own experience had taught me the value.

One or two of my brother Bishops who have read the Lectures in MS. tell me that they will be useful, to put into the hands of men who are applying for work abroad. In the hope that this may be so, I send them forth.

J. R. S., Bp
.
SELWYN COLLEGE LODGE,
CAMBRIDGE,
May, 1897

I HAVE been invited by the Divinity Board to give the Lectures this year on "Pastoral Work as it is connected with the Colonies and with Missions."

I have obeyed this request, though not without much misgiving, because it is in itself a very remarkable one. For it is a striking proof of that lifting of the vail which is going on all round us in our national life. "'Spects I growed," was Topsy's immortal definition of her existence in Uncle Tom's Cabin; and till a very few years ago, very few Englishmen could give a much better account of the way in which our world-wide empire came into [5/6] being. The Briton was very proud of himself. He liked to hear of the drum-beat which was heard round the world, of the flag on which the sun never set, &c., but as for knowing where the drum beat and why, or troubling himself over whose heads the Union Jack flew, that was quite another question. Every now and then a son went out to some remote region, and his family then found out where it was; and now and again a little war showed the Briton as he read his Times that the empire was extending. It was only the other day that a naval officer called on the First Lord on his return from the South Seas, about which he had written some lucid and able reports. He rather expected a pat on the back, and was just a little chilled when the great man blandly expressed his hope that he had enjoyed his cruise in the West Indies.

But if the nation was asleep as to its Imperial responsibilities, the slumber of the Church was still more profound.

My father was consecrated Bishop of New Zealand in 1841. He thus subdivided the Diocese of Australia, which extended from Sydney to the South Pole. And the Bishop of Sydney himself only preceded him by five years. Before his advent, there were but [6/7] three Bishops of the Church of England in all the Eastern Hemisphere. In the Western, there were six: in Jamaica and the Windward Islands, in Nova Scotia (the earliest), Quebec, and Toronto, and Newfoundland.

The Church depended on the State, and the State would not move. It had enough to do to send battalions to take care of all these numerous possessions which the unconquerable instinct of our British race was perpetually amassing. As long as it could keep the drum going and the Governor's flag flying, it had done its duty, and a few chaplains sent out under the nominal rule of the Bishop of London was as much as any one could reasonably expect. The popular opinion as to a Bishop and the nature of his functions was admirably expressed by a bluff old sailor who was Governor of New Zealand when my father arrived there in 1842. "What is the good of sending us a Bishop," he cried, "when there is no road for his carriage to go on?" The answer came a few days afterwards. He was aware of a very travel-stained man who stood before him in a tattered apron, and a battered, though orthodox, shovel hat. It was the Bishop of New Zealand, who had walked 150 miles across country by native [7/8] paths to pay his respects to the Queen's representative.

This story marks the beginning of a new era. The Church had awakened to her responsibility, and was going henceforth to do her work in the Church's way. The Colonial Bishoprics Fund, of which the Bishop of New Zealand was one of the first-fruits, sowed Bishops broadcast throughout the Colonies. It is an interesting study to glance down the lists of Colonial Bishops in Crockford, and to notice how earnestly the Church took up this long neglected work, and what splendid men she enlisted for it. In 1842 Austin was sent to British Guiana to be the Apostle of the Indians of the interior, and of the Chinese who flocked thither. He died the other day, just after he had completed his fiftieth year as Bishop, so beloved that the Colonial Legislature voted him £10,000 on his jubilee, as their unanimous testimony to his services. In 1842 also went out Nixon as Bishop of Tasmania; the Bishopric of Gibraltar was founded to care for our scattered brethren along the shores of the Mediterranean, and gave rise to a famous witticism of the Pope, "That he had been informed that he was in the Diocese of Gibraltar;" the Bishopric [8/9] of Antigua was founded. In 1845 Chapman, a well-known Eton Master, was sent to Colombo. 1847 was the Annus Mirabilis, Charles Perry, Senior Wrangler and Fellow of Trinity, went out to Melbourne, carrying with him as a cherished possession the Bible which the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Undergraduates had presented to him for the best attendance in chapel of all the Fellows of Trinity; Augustus Short, an Oxford First Class man, to Adelaide; Walter Tyrrell, to Newcastle; Robert Gray, to Cape Town. They were all men who have left their mark on the dioceses over which they presided. And it is interesting also to note that they represented every school of thought in the Church. Short and Tyrrell were representatives of the then Standard of Moderate Churchmen; Perry was a strong Evangelical; Robert Gray, as you know, was the strenuous opponent of Colenso, and one of the great champions of the High Church Party. The Church thus gave of her very best for the work, and the zeal shown was not confined to any single party in the Church; all alike recognized the need, and readily sent men, who as readily went, to found and mould these infant dioceses. I need not [9/10] weary you with further details of this kind. It is enough to call your attention to the fact that this was no mere spasmodic action. Since 1841 there have been seventy-nine new Bishoprics created, the nine dioceses have grown to eighty-seven, and instead of sending out a few scattered isolated clergy to do the work as best they might, the Church does not hesitate to follow her ancient custom; and now sends the Bishop first, often with a very scanty band of clergy and with the most inadequate means, to occupy the ground she would win for her Master. And although she feels at every turn the effects of her past neglect; though, alas! she often finds that she is not first in the field, but has to contend, not only with infidelity and heathendom, but with the rivalry of other bodies, whose zeal and organization have outstripped her own; yet still her men win ground, and if they can draw from the Church at home an adequate supply, not only of money, but, above all, of men, may yet be able to compass the work which lies at her door.

In the following lectures, it is my aim to show what the extent and needs of that work are. I desire, God helping me, to show its grandeur and its responsibilities. Grandeur, [10/11] for never had a nation such a task before it as that which lies on England to-day, never had a Church so fair a field on which to show how faithfully she can obey her Lord's command.

Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin! Shall that be the writing on the wall when England's race is finished? Shall it be said of her and of her Church at the Judgement-day, that she has been weighed in the balances and found wanting? That to her was given the fairest field and the greatest influence of any nation that the world has ever seen; that she carried everywhere her free institutions, her love of liberty, her obedience to law; that the energy of her race founded new provinces everywhere and held nations in subjection; that her ships penetrated and her flag flew in every sea and in every land; but that with all this there went also a cold-hearted neglect of the God who made her great: that the State could elicit devotion, sacrifice, aye, and the characteristic of our race, a boundless power for rule, but that the Church lagged far behind? But a few years ago, this verdict was true. The scale of neglect swung perilously low, the scale of action almost touched the beam. 'Thank God, it has altered now. Men's eyes [11/12] are opened and, at least in part, they see their responsibility. The Church is striving to recover some of her lost ground, and to occupy posts which may prevent her losing ground in the future. And it is for us to try and realize this, to throw in something which may weigh down again that balance which still trembles on the poise: our influence, our prayers, perhaps our lives.

This is the sole reason why I dare to stand before you to-night. I do realize this. I have seen the work, and I know the needs. My earliest youth was passed in a struggling colony. In that same colony I saw, as I came fresh from Cambridge, my father striving, as every colonial Bishop is striving, to meet with most inadequate resources the needs of his scattered flock. His want of men brought me to his side, turned from another profession. But God gave me other work, and the best of my manhood has been spent among the wildest heathen, so that I can speak of them also. And it is because I have this experience, because I have learnt also from my brethren in the great colonies near which I have served, of the ever-present care which weighs them down, that I try, to make you share the conviction which I feel.

[13] God knows what He has in store for each of you. He will call you as He pleases. But calls do not supersede individual judgement and preparation. You may not even be in a position to distinguish between what seem conflicting duties, unless you can judge with tolerable accuracy what are the circumstances and what the duties which you will have to face. Pressure of friends, strong enthusiasm, misguided estimates of your own powers, may bias your inclination. And therefore my aim in these lectures will be to put before you as clearly as I can these two distinct, yet cognate branches of Christ's work, the Colonial and the Missionary, so that you may have at least some help in understanding what the calls of each are; and if you are moved to offer yourself for either branch, may be able to judge what training will best fit you for it.

I proceed then in this introductory lecture to sketch out the broad outlines of the Colonial and Missionary fields, and in the subsequent lectures I shall endeavour to fill in the details.

There are three great divisions into which the work may be divided:--

First and foremost. The pastoral care of the great English-speaking races, which like [13/14] a wave are spreading over so many parts of the earth.

Secondly. The spreading of the Gospel in lands which are purely heathen and non-Christian.

Thirdly. We have to deal with a very large number of dioceses where both problems have to be faced at once.

The first of these is represented by our great colonies in Canada and Australia, and now mainly also by New Zealand, though the work originally began there in the purely missionary work of the Church Missionary Society to the Maories before the advent of any white people. But the Maori race has, alas! so decreased, and the white population so multiplied, that it is mainly for the latter that the chief work of the Church has to be done.

South Africa and parts of Canada illustrate the third class.

The second comprises all the purely non-Christian world. But here we find two very clear and distinct classes of work.

In one, you have heathens untouched by civilization, with rude and barbaric worship, mostly of the fetish or of the ancestral type. This class is represented by the great [14/15] congeries of tribes which inhabit Central and Southern Africa, by the tribes of North America, the Patagonians of South America, and by the Islands of the Pacific.

The other class is a far more difficult one to deal with, and requires far more delicate handling. In it you meet nations and peoples who possess and love old historic religions. These look back to times when our islands were to the civilized world as Uganda or the Solomon Islands are to us now; but in which they can point to an advanced civilization and a complete religious philosophy. To the Brahmin of India, the Buddhist of Ceylon and Thibet and Burma, to the Confucian of China, Christianity is not an old but a new thing. They meet it, not as a superior revelation, but an inferior. What it has of good, they say, can be found embedded and enshrined in their own systems, systems which are hoary with the mark of age, and strong, not only in the religious, but in the social life of the people with which they are entwined.

And lastly, you are met everywhere with the stern monotheism of Mahomet. It claims to be a final revelation which acknowledges indeed, but supersedes Christianity. Its Missionaries are at least equally active with our [15/16] own. And its creed, with its strange mixture of outward observance and sensuous promise, gains a hold on Eastern minds which Christianity has at present failed to obtain. Add to these intrinsic characteristics, that feature which, alas! attends England's progress everywhere, where, the object-lesson of the lives of her own people, the discrepancy between what they profess and what they are, and perhaps worst of all, that supercilious pride of colour which classes every man whose skin is darker than our own under the one contemptuous term "nigger," and with the contempt, is apt to deny him the freedom which we claim so proudly for ourselves, and you will see how hard a task it is that lies before the man who upholds the Banner of the Cross in these lands.

Taking then these three great classes as our basis, let us now investigate their several features.

I. Our English-speaking races.

When England emerged from the wars of the Revolution and the Empire, though shorn of her great colonies in North America, she was still a great colonial power. Canada, stretching to the north of the United States across the American Continent, was still hers. [16/17] Almost all the West Indian Islands owned her sway. The Cape fell into her hands at the beginning of the century.

India was hers, though not the India of to-day. Australia was just colonized as a penal settlement, and the first inhabitants of Sydney maintained a precarious existence, oftentimes by food sent out from home. But none could foresee the vast advance which was suddenly to take place. The voyage to India or Australia took five or six months. The American packets thought they did well if they crossed the Atlantic in three weeks or a month. Ships could carry but few passengers, and men did not lightly enterprise a four months' voyage on salt junk and bad water.

The interior of Australia was supposed to be a desert, and the Blue Mountains, thirty miles from Sydney, bounded alike the views and the aspirations of the colonists. The vast plains of Canada were abandoned to the buffaloes and the wild Indians who chased them.

Suddenly all this was changed. Three great factors exercised a mighty transformation on the world's surface.

The first was an all-potent one, conquering, changing everywhere--steam. The second [17/18] was more local, in that it did not apply to all parts of the world alike, but where it did, was of resistless force--gold. The third was also local, and less fitful and transient in its operations, and this was "wool."

For my purposes I will take the last first, as it began to be potent in Australia at least before the discovery of gold or the introduction of steam locomotion.

I shall not attempt to write the history of any of these things: what I want to look at is their effect. But two facts will show the change that has taken place within the century.

In September, 1800, there were in the Colony of Australia, according to a return made to Government, 4,958 souls, of whom 3,545 were victualled from the public stores, and 1,413 supported themselves. The sheep owned both by Government and individuals were something under 6,000. At the last wool sales held in London I saw a calculation made that a rise of 1d. per lb. in the price of wool made a difference of £2,000,000 to Australia alone.

This was not, of course, effected in a day. But when once the genius of the people discovered this source of wealth, their energy carried them far and wide over the vast [18/19] continent, ever opening out new "runs," ever enlarging the wide circle of sparsely inhabited country which stretched like a fan round the large towns. And then (I am still following the fortunes of Australia), a new discovery poured population over it.

In New South Wales, and later on in Victoria, the discovery of gold set men's hearts on fire. Shiploads of emigrants hurried out, each hoping that his shovel and his pan led to fortune. The ships that brought them were deserted by their crews. Towns, banks, buildings, sprang up as if by magic. Melbourne, which in 1851 was a mere collection of huts on the banks of a muddy stream, suddenly became a great capital. And even when the rush subsided, steady mining industry took its place, and the towns, thus founded, were consolidated.

The same process went on in New Zealand. I saw myself a vast population spring up on the Thames Goldfields in 1867, and had personal experience of the golden bait which drew such crowds, by crossing over with two working men who had each made £60,000 in a few months.

In 1877 I saw what mining industry could do and realized how hard it was to reach its [19/20] adventurers with religion. I was in charge of a small town in Otago, itself far away among the hills, and once the centre of a great alluvial mining population. This had ceased, but deep mining was going on in all the valleys surrounding the town. To one of these I had to go. It was a twenty-mile ride along a narrow path scarped on the hillside above a deep ravine. I could have kicked my shoe at any time into the river below, and I may add it was the only time in my life that I was thankful, when I came to a place, that there was no congregation. My host, the manager of the mine, met me with profuse apologies. There was a mistake in the day and so on. "So we can go home at once," said he. The camp, where we were standing, was on the brink of a deep ravine through which a river flowed. Just at our feet, it was joined by another stream, and on the crest of the tongue of land thus formed, was the manager's house. It is twenty years since I made that ride, but I have never forgotten it. The road to the bottom of the ravine was steep, but it wore the semblance of a road. On the other side there was no road. The point of land was as steep as the roof of a house, and we [20/21] had to go all round it before reaching the Plateau. The manager apologized, a heavy fall of rain had washed the path away. He rode up unconcernedly; I dismounted and towed my horse, and expected every moment to see him go and myself after him into the torrent below. That was in daylight, but if the congregation had turned up, I was to have ridden that road in the dark. Yet up this path they had conveyed heavy machinery for a crushing mill, and many hundred men were assembled there in full work. And now remember that this process, which I have merely touched upon, is going on still all round us, and mostly in territories where the British flag flies.

The Cape has given a new name to the slang of the Stock Exchange. The quotation of "Kaffirs" tells us how, far and wide through the goldfields of South Africa, men are congregating after the treasure, hidden so long, but now brought to light. "Westralians" tell the same story of the youngest of our free colonies. It was but a few months ago that we sent out a Bishop from Cambridge to the charge of that enormous diocese, and he told me as he left, that he was going to meet an influx of a thousand souls a week.

[22] But the change does not end here. All through these years, the mighty power of steam has been effecting a great though silent revolution. It has aided these other works. It has borne the workers to the field. It crushes the ore at the mine. It bears it to the ocean. It transports it to the market. But it has done more than this. It has itself been the great creator. It, and it alone, has put vast tracts of the world's surface at the disposal of mankind.

For thousands of years the great prairies of America rolled out in endless billows to the West--like to the sea in their vastness, and the ever-receding horizon which bounded them: unlike, in that they forbade rather than assisted commerce and civilization. But in a moment all this is changed. Across these plains there run two glittering bars of steel, and presto, the old order changes. The desert of yesterday is the granary of the world to-day. The farmer of Manitoba swamps his English brother with grain, grown on virgin soil, 2,000 miles from any port. Cities spring up, provinces are founded, and all along the mighty way of iron, there settles, as there settled along the waterways which preceded it, an ever increasing population.

[23] And now, remember, that though this has been going on steadily throughout the century, yet the main bulk of it has happened within the last fifty years. I can remember looking with awe at a field of potatoes which was sold for some fabulous sum to feed the miners in the first rush of the Australian goldfields. A living fellow of Sidney, now Archbishop of Rupert's Land, travelled 300 miles in a bullock dray, to reach his see at Winnipeg, which is now the capital of a great province, and the centre of a vast network of railways. Well within the lifetime of all you, the iron road of the Canadian Pacific has joined the Pacific and Atlantic, passing entirely through British territory. Some of you read, while freshmen, of the taking of Buluwayo, where now there is an English Church. West Australia, though long a colony, sprang into existence as it were but yesterday. You have seen Australia so enlarged that the failure of her banking system shook the Bourses, and stayed the development of Europe. Think that all this means labour, all this means men of our own race and lineage; that they are scattered broadcast over the world, and then you will realize how vast is the responsibility on England's [23/24] people and England's Churches, lest this vast scattered multitude should be as sheep without a shepherd.

II. But this responsibility does not end here, it brings with it one which is equally vast.

England goes forth nominally as a Christian nation, and she has within her dominion multitudes of heathen nations who are her fellow-subjects. I wonder if we quite recognize how all-embracing is the franchise which Great Britain extends to the native races which own her sway. An Indian sits at this moment in the House of the Commons of Great Britain, as representative of an English constituency. Maories sit in the Parliament of New Zealand. An Indian coolie who lands in Australia, would, I believe, obtain the franchise there on the same day as one who landed with him who came from the heart of Yorkshire. But do we extend to them the same thought and treat them with the same measure with which we deal with our own flesh and blood? In some cases I believe that the answer is "yes." The Government of New Zealand takes great pains to educate its Maori children. The Government of India spends vast sums on its educational system. But is the nation, as a whole, really alive to [24/25] the tremendous responsibility it undertakes when it thus embraces so many various races under its all-mastering rule? And does the Church as a whole, or do its members individually, really grasp the fact that our Queen is the greatest ruler of heathendom in the world, except perhaps the Emperor of China, and that we are therefore bound, as no other nation in the world ever was before, to try and spread Christianity among them? It is something superadded, if I may dare to say so, to the great command of Christ. That affects all men who name His name equally. But obedience to it may be and is tempered by opportunity, by means of access, by more pressing claims. But with us the duty is imperative. It is there, not because we are compelled to go to them, but because freely, voluntarily, and for our own purposes we have gone, not merely to visit, but to stay and rule. I do not say that it is the duty of the State to found and maintain great Christian establishments in their midst. The State has to keep the peace, to establish orderly government, to foster in every way all that may benefit its subjects.

But if ever Missionary work lay as an imperative duty on all who call themselves [25/26] Christians, it lies on us to-day. We have not to seek whom we shall evangelize. They are there, the stranger is within our gates. Nay, rather we are within his gates. We have gone to him. We have touched him with our civilization, which, believe me, often, nay always, brings as much of evil as of good in its train. We take his land, we use him for our own aggrandizement, and take much from him; and woe be to us if we bring all this to him, and yet leave unsaid and unheard the message of the love of God, which we profess to be the charter of our own national life.

Observe, I am not now speaking argumentatively. I am not concerned at present to meet those who say, "Leave the heathen alone, he is better without Christianity."

I am speaking simply and solely to those who believe in Christ, to those who believe. that He is the power sent of God to raise nations from darkness unto light, and from the power of Satan unto God; and I say to them, to you, and to myself, that we are false to our religion, false to our Leader, false to our God, if when He thus gives us the "heathen for our inheritance," we hang back in listless indifference whether we teach him of Christ or not.

[27] III. Nor does the matter end here. These two burdens are heavy enough, but there is a third which is almost equally heavy. We have learnt lately in one of the most remarkable books ever written what the "sea power" of Great Britain has done for it. And we have before our eyes in the commerce of to-day the result of that sea power. Our maritime supremacy is not measured by our line of battleships alone. Under their aegis, and taught by the instinct of our race, our merchantmen are found on every sea, and lie in the ports and harbours of every land. I believe that I am well within the mark when I say that half at least of the world's commerce is carried beneath the Union Jack. I know no object-lesson which is so vivid, as to be, if only for twenty-four hours, within the Suez Canal. There, as in a focus, you can see how our sound goes out into all lands and our words unto the ends of the world. The ceaseless lines of ocean tramps, or mighty liners, which sweep by you, tell you, as no words can, how the hand of England touches all the world. They come and go unceasingly.

They go "to change." The lands which they reach are not the same after they have reached them. A new light, a new energy, [27/28] a new dominant power has arisen upon them, and with what results? Can we look with complacent pride on the gin cases of the West African Coast; on the Brummagem gun and the ball cartridge; on the labour traffic of the South Pacific, where men to this day call the labour vessels "stealing ships," mindful of how they first knew them? Can we even look at our great factories and trading stations, honourably conducted though they be, and say that this is all a Christian nation need trouble itself to give? Ought we not rather to look on this as the opening which God gives us for higher things? The roads of Rome, the corn traffic of Egypt, the tongue of Greece, the might of the Imperial city, these were the factors which God put it into the hearts of the Apostles to use for the conversion of the then known world? And if then, why not now? Shall we say that the sway of Rome was useful in God's good providence for the spread of His gospel, and yet despair of using our far more widely spread influence for the self-same purpose? Shall Christianity lag behind while commerce leads the way? Shall commerce call and find men willing and eager to obey her behests, while the Church calls, and enlists but few?

[29] II.

COLONIAL WORK: TOWNS.

IN my last lecture I took a broad view of the whole field of work which lies before the Church of England. I am afraid that it was somewhat secular, dealing as it did with wool and steam and gold. But my object was and is to show how this natural and political development carries with it a corresponding need of spiritual development also. Unless men thoroughly grasp the one, they cannot be expected to feel interest in the other. It is only very lately that men have really grasped the extent of British Commerce and the corresponding need of a great fleet to guard it. And in the same way, but in a much less degree, men are only beginning to realize what a tremendous task it is to keep the multitudes of our own countrymen, who swarm like bees into all the waste places of the earth, in touch with God. True it is that all the more [29/30] populous dioceses have their home mission funds and strive to reach their scattered people; but in every case that I know these funds are inadequate, and the supply of men is more inadequate still. When Nelson, in Mahan's words, was wearing out the last years of his glorious life in that ceaseless watch over the French fleet which lay ready for sea in the harbour of Toulon, he wrote bitterly that if he died, the word "frigates" would be found graven on his heart. And so on the heart of our colonial Bishops you would find not graven merely, but burnt in, the word "Men." The want is not so great in the large towns, though there it is bad enough--but, it is in the vast sparsely populated districts of the interior, that the Bishop's heart dies within him as he sees how scanty and oftentimes how feeble are the ministrations he is able to provide.

We shall understand this better if we consider each of the divisions into which the field is divided a little more in detail. You will recollect that we took as our main divisions the Colonial and the Missionary field. I now divide these again into subdivisions: the Colonial Church in the towns and in the country, the mission work among old historic [30/31] races and old historic creeds, and that which is directed to such races as those which inhabit Southern and Central Africa and the Pacific, races still steeped in barbarism.

Our subject then to-night is the work which has to be done for the Church in the great colonial cities.

Now when I speak of these, I can only speak as a witness of the great towns in Australasia. I have indeed been in some of the great towns of Canada, and I have touched at the Cape, but that experience is barely sufficient to enable one to speak ex cathedra about them. I have no wish to come under the scathing ban of Rudyard Kipling, who somewhere describes the British M.P, who flies through a country and then sets himself up as an authority thereon--

"Podgers, M.P., was a liar,
And a fluent liar too."

All I say is derived from what I have seen in the Australasian Colonies, and will require, I have no doubt, considerable modification if applied to other colonies. But still there are so many features which are common to them all, that I hope some of my deductions may prove useful anywhere.

The first and perhaps the greatest point of [31/32] all is that all communions and all sects are in the eye of the law on an equality. There is no State Church. Indeed there is so much rivalry, that on one great occasion when a colony had put forth all its strength to hold a great exhibition, the exhibition was opened without any prayer to Almighty God; not because the people did not want to have such a prayer, but because it was found wellnigh impossible to settle who should say it. And the purely secular system of education in some of the colonies arises from the very same difficulty.

And therefore, at the very outset of your contemplation of Colonial Church work, you are met by a very broad and useful rule for your work here. You have got to find out why you are Churchmen. And you will find this is necessary in two ways: on one side you will have the Roman Catholics, on the other the Nonconformists. Both are stronger than they are here; and for this reason: Here, the Church of England is a very visible body indeed. Her services, her cathedrals, her churches, her ministrations, fill the land. She has her roots in all that is oldest and most striking in England. Her liturgy is used in national services, her buildings tell of national history. She is part of the life of the nation in [32/33] countless different ways. Men are born in her, live in her, die in her, without ever asking why. The very fact of her being so evident, and so comprehensive, has latterly been one of her sources of weakness, as we have within her fold so many who are content to belong to her in name, without really knowing or caring to find out what it is which distinguishes her from others, and makes her special claim to their allegiance.

But go to the colonies, and you will find that the case is altered.

If you talk of age, the Roman Catholic, ignoring the historic lineage of the Church of England, and her direct union with the whole Catholic Church by her Prayer Book and by her ministry, will say, "Come to us. Here are we in union with the oldest Church in Christendom. Here is our hierarchy, here are our sacraments, identically the same as those which you will find all over the world. Members of the Sacred College of Cardinals are our archbishops. Come to our fold--there you find a world-wide Church, an authoritative faith, a valid ministry." And on the other hand, the Nonconformist urges, "Why should you tie yourself to such a body as the old Church of England? It is true that in [33/34] England she has existed long, because she has been upheld by the State. But here she is a sect among sects. Here we are all equal, and it is for you, a free man, to choose that which suits you best."

My friends, if you go into such a community as that, you have to justify your existence. You must know on the one hand how to tell the Roman Catholic why you cannot follow him when he offers you a Church order which in that new land might seem to surpass your own. And on the other hand you must be able to tell the Nonconformist why you cannot put all sects and creeds into a common crucible, and take thence some amalgam of belief which seems to bear the mint-mark, which they demand, of true liberality.

You must be able to teach your people why you believe the Church of England is a true living branch of the Catholic Church of Christ. You cannot do this unless you believe it yourself, and you cannot believe it thoroughly unless you have searched it out for yourself. It will be your strength if you do search it out. I saw the statement of a man the other day about the Episcopal Church in America, that she was strong and gaining ground because she did this fearlessly. She claims to be not [34/35] "a" Church but "the" Church. And she does this in the face of an enormous disadvantage. By the supineness and timidity of the Church of England, it was only very late in the last century that she received her first Bishop.

And this study will fit you for another and a very important part of your duty.

The Church in each of the Colonies is a self-governing body. Here in England we do something, and I hope with all my heart that we shall ere long do much more. But we have not that freedom both of legislation and debate which you will find universally throughout the ecclesiastical provinces abroad. There Bishops, Clergy, and Laity all meet in solemn council to discuss and to settle the foundations on which hereafter a great superstructure will be built.

These conventions and synods of the Churches in different provinces may seem to some a small thing; a few Bishops, a scanty body of clergy, a few faithful laity. But they are in reality very great things. For on the strength of the substructure will depend the stability of the future edifice; and they give scope for the highest powers of ecclesiastical statesmanship, for these men [35/36] have to bring out of their treasures things new and old. Their motto must be my uncle Professor Selwyn's adaptation of a well-known line--

"Nec super antiques stare, sed ire vias."

And the man who brings to such assemblies not merely the enthusiasm of the present, but the trained appreciation of the past, who knows the ancient undying laws so well that he can dare to adapt them, without changing their spirit, to the ever-varying wants and demands of the age in which he lives, does service to the Church of his adoption for which ages unborn will rise and call him blessed. Take for your model those great men who drew up the Constitution of the United States. See how they seized on the great principles of our English Constitution, and yet so moulded and adapted them to their new circumstances, that we, who live beneath the older Constitution, are sometimes inclined to envy the stability which they ensured to the newer one by the safeguards wherewith they have surrounded it. And they were able to do this because they were steeped in the principles of the old; they did not rush headlong into cut-and-dried theories, those banes of constitution-mongers, but with [36/37] patient care and cautious genius, they informed the old with the spirit of the new.

So is it with the Colonial Church. How well I remember my father talking over all his early difficulties. He went out with a splendid patent: "Victoria, by the grace of God," the great seal, and all the rest of it. Great virtue was supposed to attach to these patents; in some minds no one could be a Bishop without one. But there came a rude awakening. Bishop Harper was made Bishop of Christchurch. The Archbishop consecrated him; the Queen gave him the usual patent. And the Crown having done this claimed, as they always do when a man is made Bishop in England, the presentation to his living of Mortimer. "Not so," said Eton College, the patrons, "he is not a real Bishop." The case was tried before Lord Campbell. "He is a real Bishop," said the counsel for the Crown; "he has letters patent, and has coercive jurisdiction." Quid tum? said the judge. He can inhibit a man who disobeys him. Quid tum? He can cite him before him. Suppose he does not come, Quid tum? He can deprive him. And suppose he stays, Quid tum? At last there was no answer to the quid tums. And it came out clearly that there was no [37/38] force behind the letters patent, and that they were not worth the parchment they were written on. What happened? The Bishops resigned the useless form to grasp a reality. They, aided by singularly able lawyers, drew up a constitution, part of which is fundamental and may not be changed, binding them to the doctrines of the Church of England; they called together the faithful clergy and laity, who of their own free wills assented to this. With this body they made laws and canons, and every one who joins that body, and wishes to have a voice in it, signs a paper saying that he will ex animo abide by its laws. And these laws are upheld by the State against the individual; the decisions of its Courts will be enforced by the Courts of Law exactly on the same principles as they enforce the decisions of a committee against the members of a club. And thus you have a free body able to legislate for itself, and to manage its own affairs, but bound in closest union to the old mother Church of England, with the same ministry, the same sacraments, the same heritage of faith.

If you read the history of this creation of a province, the details may seem dry and dull. [38/39] But if you grasp the principles underlying it; if you see how men strove to conserve the old, and yet give force and vitality to the new; how they put all possible obstacles in the way of rash innovation, and on the other hand gave ample scope for legitimate freedom, then you will understand, how these new countries, and these infant dioceses, give opportunities for the display of the highest possible statesmanship and the most accurate knowledge of the principles of the Church.

Here, in this University, you have the opportunity of learning at least the rudiments of such knowledge. History in the abstract is dry enough; and Church history, with its confusing mass of heresies and councils, is drier than most histories. But studies that have a practical bearing soon become interesting, and if you know that some day you may be able to apply principles which you have acquired by somewhat painful research, a new light will dawn upon your work. I am applying this now to the Colonies, but it is true in every part of the Church. And of the reverse I can most confidently assure you, that without such knowledge you will ofttimes be terribly at sea. Again and again in some wild island in the Pacific have I been [39/40] confronted with some subtle question, propounded in all innocence by one of my dark converts, which would tax, and indeed in some cases has taxed, the learning and skill of the whole Bench to answer satisfactorily.

And this grasp of Christian knowledge and of Christian principle will aid you in the great battle of Christian education which has to be fought, not only here in England, but all through the Empire.

Roughly speaking, it has been lost for the present in most of our great Colonies. For secular education the states have made, to their honour be it spoken, enormous sacrifices. I have seen schools in the bush in New Zealand, and in outlying hamlets in New South Wales, which in their order and in their teaching would do credit to any school board in England.

But of religious teaching there is little or none. Some legislatures do indeed allow teaching after school hours to be given by teachers appointed by the various religious bodies. But this has, as far as I know, been of little avail. One body only, to its eternal honour be it spoken, has stood firm. The Church of Rome has never bowed to the storm. When in New South Wales it failed [40/41] to secure from the State any help towards the education of its children, it boldly said that it would undertake their education itself; and it has done so.

We have lagged far behind that noble standard. One cause indeed has been that the Church of England does not put such pressure on its children and their parents as that which is exerted by the Church of Rome. Perhaps we may claim that we breathe a freer atmosphere. It may be so; but if so, then from free men should come a mightier effort than that which has been compelled. But, alas! that effort has yet to be made, and each man who undertakes work in the Colonies should lay it to heart, that he must do something to win back the lost ground; he must carry in his heart the burning conviction that no education is worthy of the name which does not bring up children "in the nurture and admonition of the Lord."

And just now you have your education in this matter ready to your hands. This question is being fought out now in England with an earnestness and a tenacity on both sides which is in the highest degree instructive. In the columns of our newspapers, and [41/42] especially of the Times, you will see some of the ablest men in England threshing out this all-important theme. Learn of them. Read the arguments, and think how you would answer them or support them. There is a match now being played out in England, which for fine play and keen interest far exceeds the finest match of football or of cricket that ever, was recorded. Men are in earnest and the play is keen. It will be yours to fight soon, and you will fight your best as you realize more and more how deep are the principles at stake.

And the greatest of all the principles is one on which you can learn much here. Put briefly, it is this. Can you teach morality without religion? Is there behind our conscience as its author and its avenger a Divine lawgiver and a Divine judge, or are the rules of morality to be gathered empirically from the general consensus of the human race as to the best, the fittest, the happiest? Are they to be taught in our schools as the rules of grammar and arithmetic are taught, or are they to be based on the teaching and enforced by the example of the Son of God Himself?

Your whole attitude as teachers, your devotion to what you teach, will depend on [42/43] your answer to these questions; and whether you go or stay, you will find that they will mould the whole of your life's action. And more than this, you will see that you cannot bear Christ's command in its entirety, without also bearing with it a promise from the same Divine source which is its corollary.

It is not enough that your children may be taught Christian ethics, not even enough that they shall be shown a perfect example; but side by side with the teaching part of it, inseparable from it, is the message of the Divine strength. "This is the way, walk ye in it"--was the old law. "I am the Way," is Christ's supplement: "no man cometh to the Father but by Me."

Let me now pass to another aspect of the work that has to be done; and that is, the character of the people themselves as seen in the great cities which have sprung up under English rule. I despair of really doing this, but I must try.

I. And first, these people are undoubtedly Anglo-Saxon. You feel at once when you land that you are with your own kith and kin. The shops wear an English look, the crowd is an English crowd, the British hansom drives you to your hotel; it all seems [43/44] familiar, with a difference, and that difference is mainly caused by the great fact of their environment; they are an old race inhabiting a new country. The race is the same, but the old grooves are not the same. The sense of crowd, of over-population, of ever narrowing boundary is absent. The Briton at home feels that there cannot be much change in his surroundings, though the conditions of life may be altered. The Canadian, the Australian, the Cape Settler looks forward to an almost boundless potentiality. England and her colonies may be compared to the case of a father with a large family of sons. His tendency is to settle down more and more on the old lines; theirs to strike out new paths for themselves. Every conceivable experiment in government has, I should think, been tried at one time or another in our self-governing colonies.

You can imagine the type of man such a state of things would produce, and he is to be found abundantly. A resolute man full of enterprise and go, with somewhat of contemptuous pity for the tardy slowcoaches of the old country, somewhat reckless both in self-assertion and in speculation, borne along by his devotion to the budding, rising colony [44/45] of which he is a member, eager to try the last new thing for her benefit or for his own, very impatient of control which does not proceed from himself, but withal a law-abiding man like his forbears; keen to use his political privileges, feeling himself so much a part of the State that he is ready to use its powers in social life more freely than we have hitherto done. And side by side with this, another characteristic of colonial life strikes you very forcibly. Every man almost you meet is engaged in some business or other. The leisured classes, the people who live on fixed incomes, are few and far between. The race of life is swift. Money and making money is in the air, not more so I suppose than in the business circles of some great town at home, but more prominent as there is nothing to set against it. It is a complaint against the Colonial Church that so few of her own sons enter the ministry. One reason, I do not say the only reason, is the atmosphere in which men live. The commercial spirit is in the air, and the colonies absorb most of their sons to supply its needs. Laymen give time and money, often most generously, for Church purposes, but giving themselves or their sons is not common. The [45/46] boys leave school early, and are dragged into the vortex of the stir around them.

I fancy this is natural. These great colonies are a new thing since Christianity has dealt with man. The Spanish colonies are the only things like them that the world has ever seen. And as far as I can learn, the Spanish colonies had only a comparative sprinkling of white men, managing a large number of natives.

But with our colonies the case is different. Here you find large bodies of civilized men gathered together in settlements, with vast tracts of land behind them waiting to be opened out, mines to be dug, trades to be established. Such is the man and such the race with which the colonial parson has to deal.

To a race like ours, the inducements to aid in this great enterprise are enormous. Every paper you take up tells of the progress of this or that settlement. New country is explored, new mines are discovered, every day. The tendency of men's minds must be to concentrate on these things, and when such a spirit is in the air, it is not to be wondered at, that the mind of the colonial youth turns thitherward instinctively. There are noble [46/47] exceptions, but we cannot wonder at the general tendency.

And therefore it is that the supply of men from the old country, and especially from our Universities, becomes so important. I hope God has it in store for some of you, to show these people, as Cambridge men are showing them to-day, that though it be a great thing, as it surely is in God's providence, to turn these deserts to the use of man, to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before, as their proverb is, yet it is as great (I do not say greater, because God wills both works to be done) to keep those toiling men in touch, if I may say so, with God, to be the bearers of His message and the ministers of His grace to them, and so to work that they may be a great God-fearing, God-loving people.

I hope I have not dwelt too long on this point; let me go on to another which I find fully developed. I am speaking now more especially of Australia and New Zealand; but I believe you will find the same spirit developed almost everywhere among men who change our fogs for a more genial or, at any rate, a brighter climate than that in which we live.

The colonist is essentially a man of sport and pleasure. It will be an interesting study, [47/48] a hundred years hence, to see what effect the sunny climate of Australia and New Zealand has had on our race. I think a change may be traced even now. Horse-racing is a passion. The crowd which assembles on the Flemington race-course, to witness the race for the Melbourne Cup, is relatively far larger than any we see in England.

The State has been known to give a general holiday by proclamation for a great boat-race, and I saw half Sydney turn out to welcome a champion sculler on his return.

"Chips of the old block," say you! Undoubtedly; but the working man rules, and though he works hard while he is at it, he believes firmly in the adage that Jack without holidays is a dull boy, and he takes care that there are plenty of holidays. But behind this pleasure-loving there is a grave difficulty. A good deal of somewhat shallow agnosticism is in the air. Men read and read widely. Man for man, I think the educated classes there, and a very large body of the working men, read more books than a similar set of men would read in England. But I do not think that the same counteracting forces are at work there as there are here.

Here, the ephemeral phase of disbelief, [48/49] however ably advocated, is sure to call up a zealous band of men who attack it, and whose attacks gradually filter through society. I doubt if this reaches much to colonial society. The book of the day is read, and read eagerly. The obiter dicta of some famous man are eagerly quoted, as if they were, the last word that science has to say against religion. The newspaper seizes on some salient point, and it reappears in a hundred paragraphs.

But the cool, steady argument, the testing of witnesses and the balancing of testimony, though it slowly wins its way here, will be almost unnoticed there. To give an example--I fancy that you could easily find many men who had read Supernatural Religion, but few I imagine who knew those trenchant articles in the Contemporary by which Bishop Lightfoot tore that book to shreds and tatters.

And it is here that some of our best men could do such noble work in that calm patient spirit of investigation which Lightfoot stamped on the Cambridge School. It was this which gave Bishop Moorhouse his singular power in Melbourne; a power which I have never seen equalled in any large community. He was not afraid to look a doubt in the face. He did not deride the doubter. [49/50] But with consummate power of argument, of knowledge, and of eloquence, he gave a reason for the faith which was in him. Such gifts are indeed given to few, but to those who have them, few nobler paths are open than to stand in some great rising colony, as the interpreter in new and living language of the research and wisdom, wherewith the scholars of our Church at home uphold with new weapons against ever new attacks, our ancient heritage of the Catholic faith. There is one more training which you can give yourselves here in some measure, and that is in speaking. Men are eclectic everywhere--especially are they there. They will not listen to dull sermons dully put. They are much like the Athenians of old, they crave to hear something new. It is not enough merely to hold and to know the truth; you must express it in a way that will make men listen. You can do something towards that here. Even in the mere faculty of expression, your college debating club, let alone the Union, is no mean exercise. You can there attain confidence. You can learn to rise without experiencing that, as you gain your feet, all sensation has left your head. And if you, will take the trouble to work up your [50/51] subject, you can teach your brain to remember and to reproduce the arguments you have prepared.

And above all, there is needed a spirit of earnestness. We cannot help being in earnest in some measure here: The great social problems which surround us, the mass of poverty, the political questions, the duties and the dangers of our Empire, these are ever with us. It is one of the surprises, which one meets with here in Cambridge, to feel how deep a root they take in the life of even the youngest members of the University. But out there, though they have their trials and difficulties, life is sensibly easier, it is less elaborate, less complex; and therefore hearts are lighter, and the world smiles more brightly. It is a glorious privilege, and you will find how men value it. But it has its corresponding danger. When the world is very bright, men look more on it and forget that it passes away. A lightsome pleasure-loving people is the hardest of all people to deal with. Therefore the man, who goes among them, needs ever to have before his eyes the reality of things unseen. It is his to witness that "the fashion of this world passeth away, but the Word of the Lord [51/52] endureth for ever." This reality can only be drawn from Christ. The Incarnation and the Passion, these teach us the real depth of our religion; and the man who bears witness to Christ amongst a pleasure-loving people must have the evidence in himself that his witness is real. The people of pleasure-loving Corinth listened to St. Paul because he bore in his body the marks of the Lord Jesus. God forbid that any one should attempt to quench the buoyant spirit of enterprise which men feel there. It would be an impossible task, and he who essayed it would only lose influence if he tried. It is the heritage of young nations as it is of young people. The Anglo-Saxon race has been bred in fog and rain, and has been nurtured by Kingsley's north-east wind; and it is but natural that when this race settles itself in a bright and genial climate its spirits should rise with the change. You may see the converse when you meet an Australian shivering in a London fog, and his first question will certainly be, "Do you ever see the sun?"

But nevertheless the old race, nurtured in a hardness both of climate and of circumstances, has much that it can give to its more [52/53] favoured children. Men can learn here more of the deep reality of things. Put face to face with our countless problems of poverty, degradation, and sin, they are braced and strengthened as they seek the aid of God to combat them.

And therefore those, who go out to minister in brighter and happier surroundings, may yet be able to carry with them something of that deep sense of the gravity of human life, which perhaps may be lost sight of in the more easy march of the new world.

I hope with all my heart that our Bishops may be able to arrange that any man who wishes may be enabled, nay, encouraged, to go out to work for a time in the Colonies, and when he comes back may find that such service is counted as being equal, as indeed it is, to the work done at home.

[54] III.

COLONIAL WORK: COUNTRY.

FROM the people of the towns, I pass to the people of the country side, to the great problem which presses with a dull dead weight on all the chief pastors of our Church whose dioceses lie on great continents. Ever before their eyes, there lies the vision of a great scattered flock, wandering as sheep wander in search of new pastures, borne hither in mighty flocks, as some great discovery of gold attracts great masses of population, or, harder still, scattered in hamlets or in isolated stations over the land. "Sheep having no shepherd," these form the real care which weighs down the colonial Bishop's soul.

And do not let it be supposed that I at all ignore the work which is done by other bodies. Often, as I have said, their devotion and their organization outstrip our own.

[55] But never do you see the sad result of our unhappy divisions more vividly emphasized than you do in the scattered populations of the interior. There is a waste of energy and power, of time and money, by five or six different sects, which, if these efforts were concentrated under one church, would go far to supply all that is needed. The Bishop of Ballaarat described this in vivid but true language when he referred at the Church Congress to his visit to some outlying township. "I drive up," he says, "on some Sunday morning to the place, and there I find five miserable and half-filled churches, ministered to by five badly-paid ministers, who have driven up in five shaky buggies, drawn by five half-starved horses." And, moreover, whatever may be the work of others, the Church cannot leave her work to be done by them. Half, at least, of the population are her own children, baptized and confirmed in her communion, and it is her bounden duty to care for them. She dare not shirk this work, she dare not delegate it; and you may see how constant this pressure is by the devices men have taken to meet in some way the want.

An American Bishop, the Bishop of North Dakotah, has put his church on wheels. This [55/56] is dragged here and there on the railways which traverse his vast diocese. It is shunted on to a siding, and the news goes out that the church has come. Often and often, the Bishop told me, he has had that church filled by far more than the total population of the place where he stayed. Observe what that means. It means that the people so welcomed his visit, that from far and wide they came in to join in the services which he provided for them.

Or take my old school-fellow, Bishop Kennion, now Bishop of Bath and Wells. On the river Murray, which flowed for 500 miles through his diocese, he placed the steamboat, Etona, mainly provided by his Eton friends, which plied ceaselessly up and down the stream, bearing the means of grace to the settlers on its bank.

Nearly every colonial diocese, which I know, has its own Home Mission fund, whose sole object it is to provide enough clergy to spend their time in almost ceaseless travelling among the scattered outsettlers. And when the Judge sums up each man's work and weighs it, not the lowest place will be given to many of those devoted clergy who, unknown to the world at large, not doing work [56/57] which evokes any special enthusiasm for those who do it, have gone through perils by waters and perils by land, through heat on the wide plains of Australia, or the Veldt of South Africa; through cold and weariness almost within the Arctic circle, on the prairies of Canada, through perils by sea among the fishermen of Newfoundland and Labrador, in the ceaseless effort to reach a scattered struggling population and to show them that the Good Shepherd cares for them. I think I know something of purely missionary work, and I know something of the sacrifice which it necessarily entails, but I say deliberately, that no missionary lives a harder, a more self-sacrificing, and a more useful life than; that which is lived by many unknown clergy, who in all the regions of the globe, pass their lives, not in winning heathens, but in preventing our own countrymen from becoming heathen.

And now let us look at some aspects of this work, and see what manner of man is fitted for it.

The first type which meets us is the normal one--the ordinary settler. Let me put what I have to say in the form of a reminiscence.

I well remember my first introduction to [57/58] him, at least the first time I was really conscious of his existence. I have reason to remember it, for it changed the current of my life. Just after I had taken my degree, in 1866, I went out to New Zealand to pay a visit to my father, whom I had not seen for twelve years. I had dim visions of what his work was, for I remembered tossing about in a tiny schooner in the heavy seas of the South Pacific as my mother and I went with him round the coast of New Zealand, "yachting" some men called it, but it was the roughest possible sailorizing. My earliest recollections are of a figure clad in shining oilskins, coming down to see how we fared, and then going on deck to resume an anxious watch. Such was the way in which the Bishop visited the scattered settlements in 1853. In 1866 the scene had changed. The long Maori war was almost finished. This had entailed on the Bishop and his clergy, in addition to their other duties, the care of 10,000 troops, which at first came out with few, if any, chaplains. His work among their scattered posts had reduced my father's journeys to a science. He always travelled with a tent which weighed 4 lbs., and some food, and was ready to camp at any moment and to go [58/59] anywhere. Just after I landed, he took me on a six-weeks' tour. I was cook and bed-maker. It was mine to hoist up the little tent, to fill it with fern judiciously arranged, to cut the scanty rasher, and fit it between a cleft fern-stick ready for toasting, and when he came, to do this deftly, so that all the grease might fall on the solitary biscuit which acted as dripping-pan. This was when we camped. Sometimes we slept at settlers' houses, and never did men receive heartier welcome. Sometimes a soldiers' mess welcomed us, and the guard turned out to salute a very travel-stained Bishop, but one who, they all knew had gone through hardship and peril for their sakes. And there I realized how needful this work was. Everywhere we found men winning the land. Here was a settler showing you with pride his scanty clearing in the great forest with a house made from timber which he himself had sawn, and roofed with shingles which he had split. Here were babies of a year old waiting to be baptized. In another place was a wedding, in another more civilized a confirmation.

And everywhere the same welcome, the gladness of hearing the Gospel message. Schemes for buying this piece of land for [59/60] a church, perhaps in another a small church to be opened, a place which we should look on with disdain, but which to them represented much self-denial and much honest work with their own hands.

Ex uno disce omnes. That which I saw is being repeated all over the world, and though men will and do use the services of lay readers, and by their help keep a church and what services they can going in a very surprising way, yet they crave for the visits of the regular clergy, they must have them for the Sacraments of the Church; and a regular, though often an infrequent, visit by the priest of the district is a sine qua non to keep them from drifting, either to other denominations which may seem to serve them better, or too often into godlessness, not rejection of God, but sheer indifference.

We, in this land of spiritual plenty, can hardly realize what the need is, and still less do we realize the power for good that a man can exercise, who thus devotes himself to the care of these souls scattered in the wilderness.

It is like the life that so many of them lead, a true shepherd's life; very different indeed from that which faces the man who works among the cultured population or amid [60/61] the crowded population of a great city, but a work which, when done in perfection, calls into play very high qualities and develops a capacity for resource and tact which is of great price. A good bush clergyman is a man whom men emphatically respect. You hear of him and his ways. He wins men by showing that he can and does live a life as hard as theirs, and that he lives it for the sake of God and for their souls.

The very fact that a man has ridden or driven 80 or 100 miles merely for the purpose of holding a service, administering the Communion, baptizing a few children, is sufficient proof that, in his eyes at least, these things are important. Those North American Indians felt this when they watched year after year, on a certain day, for the figure of a horseman, who always appeared to his time on a certain point in the horizon. At first they wondered why be came, they speculated whether he would come again, but they did not listen to him. But when for the seventh year in succession they saw the well-known figure approaching, they said, "We must listen to this man, he must have something which he believes in to tell us, since he comes so pertinaciously to tell it." And thus Bishop [61/62] Whipple won them. And with them he won also the rough back-woodsmen who lived along the frontier. They too felt the influence of a life lived, not for self, but for them. I am told that in that country none dared to breathe a word against the saintly Bishop. One man tried in some public meeting to earn, as he thought, cheap applause by sneering at him. The words were not out of his mouth, when he was aware of a rougher and a tougher man than he standing over him, with the stern command: "You, sir, just drop that; Bishop Whipple is a friend of mine."

"A friend of mine" there is the secret of such work. Put it one way, and we smile at the idea of that man of strange oaths, with hands perhaps not unstained with blood, claiming the Bishop as his friend; but reverse the thought, and you will see how well the Bishop followed in his Master's steps. That man felt that he came as the friend, perhaps the only one, who cared for his soul; that he braved hardship, perhaps danger for him; that he did not despair of him, but sought him out by the command and in the spirit of Him who came as the "friend" of publicans and sinners.

[63] I think that anecdote shows the depth of the work that has to be done, and another that I heard only a few months ago from Bishop Ridley of Caledonia may help to show that such work. is not in vain.

He told me how, not very long ago, he and his wife went up to look after some Indians who lived near a very rough mining camp.

It was a long journey, by canoe, I think, for six days up a river, and then a long weary tramp up into the heart of the hills.

They soon won the Indians, and the testimony of the white men to their work was, "What have you done to these men? they are like no other Indians that we have had to do with, they are so changed."

And then the white man thought that what helped the Indian might help him.

They crowded to the Bishop and his wife, and they too were changed. The principal saloon of the place shut up in despair, and there in what was the best room in the place the Bishop held his services, the bar was his pulpit and his reading-desk, they felt the love which had sought them out. And let me tell the sequel of that love. The bishop and his wife came away. They thought to send another clergyman, but somehow he failed. The Bishop [63/64] had to go to Europe, there was no one to continue the work. Mrs. Ridley said, "Let me go," and go she did. And there for over a year that solitary woman, the only woman I believe in the place, lived and worked among white men and Indians alike, untouched and unharmed, because in her woman's love she brought to them the message of the Son of God.

What I have just said will show you a little of what is wanted for this bush work; let us examine it a little more in detail.

Imprimis, you want a man, sound of wind and sound of limb, who, like the Duke of Wellington's army, will go anywhere and do anything. Perhaps the best description I can give you is to show you what you do not want. A veteran Bishop, whose name horses shall not drag from me, once gave me this description of an undesirable recruit. A man joined him, "thirsting," he said, "for work." "Come along," said the Bishop, "I have a splendid parish for you, which will take all your energies." It was a hundred miles square or thereabouts. They reached it and stayed at some settler's house, and next morning the Bishop arranged that they should ride out to see about the place. A very quiet [64/65] steed was provided for the recruit, and when the Bishop appeared on the scene, he found the whole force of the establishment lifting him on to the horse; when there the horse made two steps, the recruit clasped his neck, and the establishment lifted him off again on the other side. He tried on foot for a fortnight, and then wrote to the Bishop to say he must go home, as he found there were not enough church privileges. I daresay he is doing good work in England somewhere, but he was emphatically not the man for the bush.

The man who goes there must be prepared to ride anything, or at least to learn to ride. He must be able to saddle and harness his steed. He must have a keen eye for country and country tracks, he must not be afraid to bivouac under the stars of Australia, or on the Veldt in Africa, or amid the snows of Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador. He must get along somehow, as the people of the country get along.

My friend Mr. Curling was one of the best navigators and sailors on the coast of Newfoundland, and beat a ship to sea through the ice, when the captain would not or dared not take her out.

Mr. Curling has kindly sent me some notes [65/66] on the work in Newfoundland, which are most graphic and instructive, and carry one from the sunny climate of Australia to the icebound shores of Newfoundland and Labrador.

He begins by copying out some of Bishop Feild's rules for the Theological Students at Queen's College. They are sufficiently Spartan.

The Bishop begins by inculcating the duty of being able to help oneself. "It is hoped and expected that every student, in regard to his future calling and manner of life, will be as helpful to himself and others as possible, and not require the presence and offices of servants when they can be properly dispensed with."

The second rule is drastic, and would strike dismay into the hearts of most undergraduates, and I fancy not a few Bishops of the present, day.

"Tobacco in every shape is prohibited."

The food question is thus discussed:--

"Frugality will be promoted by an allowance of simple but sufficient food. . . . Dinner on ordinary days will consist of meat and vegetables, with hard bread, i. e. ship's biscuit. Puddings and tarts occasionally."

He then says, that "fish will be provided [66/67] on days of abstinence." And adds," It will be wise to learn to forgo the use of milk, because not only at sea, but in many out-harbours we cannot procure it.

"For the same reason the students should accustom themselves to hard bread and fish, the only food to be obtained at particular seasons, or it may be the greater part of the year, in the small and remote settlements."

I quote these, as showing what measure of "hardness" one of the best of our colonial Bishops expected his clergy to experience and to endure.

Mr. Curling's notes show that his prescience was not at fault.

Mr. Curling's parish consisted of two large bays, sixty miles apart, and above seventy miles of straight shore to the north of the Northern bay. This latter stretch had no safe harbours at all, but had settlements of from two to twelve families at intervals of about nine miles. There was no road, and the brooks were hard to cross. To work this he had two schoolmasters, who acted as lay readers, and one missionary student. "During the first year," says Mr. Curling, "I was moving about nearly all the time." Of what travelling meant he gives some touches.

[68] "In January, 1874, almost my first experience with snow shoes, I had to walk back to Bay of Islands from Chaume, at south-west corner of Newfoundland, about 200 miles, with an Indian guide. I carried knapsack, he provisions. Sometimes we reached a 'tilt' in which to camp, at other times we had to put up in the woods." He adds naively, "It is not usual to carry a blanket in Newfoundland." What that involves is a little explained by his note on Temperature, which varied from -20° F. to +35° F. with rain. In the north travelling was easier, as there were dogs, and the knapsack could be carried. Sometimes, in crossing a bay in snowy weather (on the ice, I think), a compass would be required. He adds a note of sound common sense: "A man should accustom himself to do as the people do, and take an oar, and not sit shivering in the stern; and in camping in the woods at night, he ought to help in cutting firewood and carrying it into camp, so as not to get chilled after the exercise of travelling. Even my wife," he adds, "did this."

What the Psalmist calls a "high stomach" is undesirable, and Mr. Curling's words give force to the Bishop's training.

[69] "Much depends upon being able to make a good meal on the people's ordinary food. Fresh meat is quite the exception. Salt beef and some pork, and 'Figgy,' i. e. Raisin-pudding, on Sunday. Salt herring boiled, or codfish, with potatoes, bread and butter, tea and molasses (milk rare), are the ordinary food for week-days, but eggs or a partridge, or some other delicacy, are often reserved for the parson, but very often are not procurable. Once my meal was pancake mixed with seal fat and fried in seal oil. 'Spruce tea' with a little molasses one often has with the very poor."

2. He must be a fact. He is this because he is a punctual man and keeps his engagements. Nothing but a flooded river which no one can cross stops him. I wonder if you heard how one of our latest Cambridge Bishops won his spurs the other day. He had to be at a distant place at a certain time. It was a terrible day--the rain was coming down in torrents, trees and telegraph-posts were down everywhere; the question in the township was--would the Bishop come? At the appointed time there he was.

"Ah," said a man, "I knew you would come. I backed you against the Roman Catholic [69/70] priest, and I have won." The speculation, perhaps, was somewhat out of place, though characteristic, but the story shows what people expect of their clergy, and I feel sure that Bishop Wallis gained much because he kept his promise. But again, the bush parson must be a man of tact and geniality, a gentleman to the backbone. He has to meet all sorts and conditions of men, he has to receive all sorts of hospitality. One day he will stay with a rich squatter, at another with the Resident Magistrate, at another perhaps in a mining camp, in another at a rude country hostelry. Pardon me, if with filial reverence, I turn once more to my father as an example of this. Some natives, who once refused him admittance to their houses, were utterly abashed when the Bishop took up his quarters in a deserted hut usually inhabited by a pig, cleaned it out, strewed it with fern, and passed the night there without a murmur. "You cannot 'unrangatira' that man," they said. "You cannot make him less than a gentleman." And I never saw him more of a gentleman than he was among such circumstances as those I have described. He never gave trouble, he always gave assistance; he made the people at home with him, and [70/71] himself with them; the children instinctively took to him. And yet they all felt that he was there for a purpose. He raised them to his level, and did not descend to theirs; his message was always ready, and men listened to it because they felt he had come to bring it.

But merely being a gentleman under all circumstances is not enough, the bush parson must be a man full of resources. And by resources I mean, not only being able to overcome difficulties or dangers, but being able to utilize to the uttermost the scanty opportunities he gets in many places of doing his Master's work.

And before I proceed to touch on some of these resources, I should like to add one word of grave caution. "Don't you think," said Bishop Carter to me the other day, "don't you think it is very hard sometimes to come to the front with the message you have to give?" I thought so; but I was surprised to find that he thought so. It seemed to me that, by his training in East London, he must have been steeled to give his message under any conceivable circumstances, to any imaginable sort of man. And, perhaps, if the truth were heard from some one who knows his [71/72] work we should find that he does give it. But the fact remains that he finds it hard. And so you young men must lay it to heart that you are there to give your Master's message, and that you will find it a tough job sometimes. But let this cheer you. The men will respect you if you do give it. They expect you to do your work, as you expect them to do theirs. You are the Parson, and this message work is your business. I will dwell a little later on on the heartiness with which it is usually received. I only say now, Don't shirk. Be a man. It is mere folly to bear hardness, if you shrink from doing that you came for, at the end of your journey.

And now as to resources. Imagine yourselves in one of these vast parishes, with a few huts here and there, a small township in this bay, a fisher settlement or a gold mine on that river.

Is it not a contrast to the curate of an English parish, with his schools all ordered for him by an experienced staff, his church close at hand, with heaps of services, his parish room, his district visitors; and perhaps a wise old fogey of a rector over him, to let him make mistakes and get him out of them?

[73] I asked my dear old friend, Bishop Abraham, for a note or two, and here is one of them about his work years ago in the infant Diocese of Wellington.

"Personally," he says, "my most successful work was done when visiting settlers in the interior of the country, and spending one day at least at any house where there were children and labourers within easy distance, and gathering them together for ordinary schooling in the evening, winding up always with scriptural and Prayer-book instructions: and leaving an ample course of lessons, religious and general to be learnt in time for my visit the following year, and eventually confirming and communicating them. In one district it took me twelve years to train up such a body and colony of men, women, and children, whom at the expiration of that time, I confirmed and communicated."

Thus the old veteran of over eighty. Mr. Curling shows how like circumstances beget like methods.

He says:--

"I tried to reach a settlement about 3 p.m. After the hospitable cup of tea, always offered and accepted, the children would be ready for instruction. One would hear the lessons set some five or six months before; part of the catechism, a hymn, some miracles or parables, or [73/74] part of our Lord's life. Each child had one of the penny S.P.C.K. books, which the parents might use, but the instruction was generally oral. Small picture-card rewards were given from time to time, only it was difficult to find room for them in the knapsack. Parents would take an interest in teaching their children, asking whether 'John' knew his lesson, and the results were encouraging."

He adds two remarkable things:--

1. After speaking of the heartiness of the services round the camp fires, or in the kitchen of one of these farm-houses, he says, "Our people who could not read would learn by heart the canticles for matins and evensong, so that we often had a hearty service, with a quite illiterate congregation."

2. "In settlements where only one man could read, and has taught the Church catechism to the children from Sunday to Sunday, without probably a word of explanation, its beneficial influence upon the whole settlement has been most marked."

Such is the testimony of resource in work from New Zealand and Newfoundland.

I heard of a bush clergyman in Queensland who taught a large and scattered confirmation class, almost entirely by correspondence.

The bush parson then must be ever exercising his wits to reach his people, and to give them the old lessons in ever novel ways.

[75] But his resource must not end here. He has probably to do most things for himself.

Curling was a Royal Engineer before he was a Newfoundland Missionary, and he could do most things in engineering and building, but he writes, "Some knowledge of making plans and sections of churches and schools is very useful, and a man ought to know how to keep accounts, so as to provide things honest in the sight of all men." And then he talks of medicine. "This," he says, "including homoeopathy, is most useful, I had almost said, necessary."

I only add, from my own experience, decidedly. But the difficulty is to know what to give.

Anybody can give medicines if he knows what is the matter with a man, the books will tell him lucidly about that; but the symptoms are so horribly alike, so let your medicines be few!

But some things must be done. "I had to amputate," said Curling, "a man's hand, after a gunshot wound, and on another occasion some toes after frostbite. My wife gave the chloroform for the latter. My tools were a tenon saw, a good pocket knife, and a hook for the arteries, made from a fine skewer!"

[76] Yet once more, and briefly.

The bush parson must be a ready man.

"I never knew," said Curling, "when I might not be called upon to go off at a quarter of an hour's notice to baptize, marry, or bury, or to visit a sick person as priest and doctor in one. Such calls are surely God's calls. And one could never be reconciled to them unless they are so regarded, involving as they do the interruption of work, and an absence from home, sometimes of days."

These calls are not free from danger. His friend, Le Gallais, was drowned with all hands in an open boat when returning from one of them. Curling himself was called home to a friend who was dying, from a place sixty miles away. He started at 9 p.m., boiled his kettle in a tilt, with the cold so intense that his vest and shirt were frozen together. Walked all night, and all day, and finally lost his way five miles from home, and had to camp dead beat in the snow, getting a fire only with their last match!

My friends, you will see from this that this work is no child's play. It calls forth all the energies of a trained, highly educated, man. It needs all the powers of endurance, of pluck, [76/77] of resourcefulness, that can be exercised. I have given you but one or two specimens which lay ready to my hand.

But remember that there is a call for men who will do it, from every part of the world's wide surface, from the Coolgardie Goldfields, from the prairies of North America, from the Veldts of Africa, from the burning plains of Australia, from the timber woods of Canada, from the ice-bound shores of Newfoundland. The Church asks for some of the strongest and bravest of her sons to help her in her need. Men do it to win buffaloes and lions. You can read in Milton and Cheadle how an Earl's son did this simply to shoot elk, and grislies; how they lived so long without flour, that when at last they got a Christmas pudding, they ate till they could eat no more, and then, with one consent, as morning dawned, rushed out of bed to eat again. They did this for sport; how many will do it for immortal souls? The souls of our own people, the children of our own race, that they may feel that their Mother does indeed care for them, since she puts such spirit into her servants that they do this thing for her, for them, and for her Lord.

Can any work be more truly Apostolic? [77/78] Read St. Paul's description of his work. "Thrice I have suffered shipwreck, in journeying often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness." Yes, these may be endured still, and are being endured in many an unknown district, by many an unknown man, but they are known, recorded, blessed, by the Master who gives the strength to do them.

Let me quote the words of our last Cambridge Bishop, which I rejoice over, as they show how true are the words which I have uttered; for no sooner does he reach his work than the burning need of which I have spoken fires his soul.

Of the work he says:--

"It is a splendidly healthy life, and the need of gentlemen who can stand outdoor life is immense. The people are most hearty and hospitable, and I can always promise £140 for a deacon and £150 for a priest.

"In country districts he may be lonely, not seeing another clergyman for five or six months in the year. He may have to face a certain amount of manual labour (i.e, groom his own horse, &c.); he may be sneered at as a professional paid agent. He must face this.

"We want young men, unmarried gentlemen. Is there no one who will give five years of his life to the [78/79] work of planting down the Church in this country? This work means the future of the colony. Already the system of secular education is undermining the morality of the rising generation, and mere emotionalism, without the inculcation of morals, is worse than useless."

Thus you see how, directly a Bishop goes out, he feels the terrible pressure; how he recognizes, not only that he has to work for the souls committed to his charge, but that this work is telling on future generations. Done, and done well, it will lay the foundations of a God-fearing race; undone, it will leave that race without that Divine light which alone can make them great.

It is for us to realize this, to realize how vast are the interests committed to our charge; and whether we go or stay, it is for us to see that nothing is left undone which can cheer, strengthen, and sustain those who, in distant lands, thus work for the kingdom of their Lord and King.

[80] IV.

MISSIONARY WORK. OLD RELIGIONS.

I NOW approach the work among the heathen, and first among those races which have some forms of civilization, many of them old and splendid. And I approach it with a feeling of thankfulness. Not that we are doing enough or anything like enough.

But if ever Clough's lines rang true, they do to-day about the Missionary work of Church:--

"Say not the struggle naught availeth,
The trouble and the toil are vain,
The enemy faints not nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.

"If hopes are dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.
. . . . . . . . .

"For though the tired waves vainly breaking
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent flooding in the main."

[81] We look and we see no progress, the great dense map looks black as ever. Lookers on scoff and deride. But look back to the beginning of this century, and see the picture then. In all British India the S.P.G. had not a single missionary. The S.P.C.K. subsidized a few Danish Lutherans. That was all, absolutely all, that we were doing.

The whole income of the S.P.G. was £8,000, that of the C.M.S. was £911. There were only two Bishops in all the wide dominions of the Crown out of England, and these were in the Colonies (Nova Scotia and Quebec). Missionary Bishops were undreamt of; and now compare that with our state now. There are at this moment ninety-four Colonial and Missionary Bishops. The Church at home is spending over £500,000 a year in Missionary work. Our Universities have started the great work of the Central African Mission, and have their own special work in Delhi and Calcutta. And above all, there is a feeling in the air that the Church is not doing her work unless she does try to spread the knowledge of her Lord; and more and more of her sons are coming forward in her service. Sons, did I say; daughters also. She has made the discovery, or rather the rediscovery, that [81/82] women must play their part also; and the last martyrs that Christ has called to Himself, were those girls from England and Australia who died at their posts the other day in China. I am not trying to give statistics: they are dry and not over-convincing. All I want you to feel is that this growth, not of funds merely, but of interest, of zeal, and of self-devotion, can be due to nothing else than the good Spirit of our God working in and through His Church. If you want help and strength and faith for this work, look back a little and see that God has blessed and is blessing it, and then read the great vision of Ezekiel. "Son of man, can these dry bones live?" Can the dullness and the deadness be inspired with a strong and vigorous life? When you see that they do live, that there is an exceeding great army, then you will believe that it is indeed the Spirit of God that has breathed upon them, and that they go forth by His guidance and in His strength. Yes, we want that thought. I know full well its power. I have wanted it a hundred times in the islands of the sea when I stood alone face to face with the barbarism, the ignorance, the degradation of the people to whom I was sent. But it is wanted ten times [82/83] more in the face of a strong, ancient religion, which like an old gnarled oak has buried its roots deep in the life and customs of an ancient people.

I think the first thing that strikes men most in the East is its changelessness. As I walked through the streets of Cairo, I saw men doing the very things I read of in the Arabian Nights. Funerals meet you which you seem to read of in the Bible. The dhows in the Red Sea might have made the voyage to Ezion Geber for King Solomon. How is this great dead mass of conservative custom, of caste, of habit, of tradition to be moved? "Not by might, not by power, but by My Spirit," saith the Lord of Hosts. That trust in God's power is the very essence of the missionary spirit. You must have that or you cannot face the task at all. That is the faith, and the only faith, which can remove mountains. The missionary, of all men, must walk in the Spirit.

Now the first and greatest thing that we have to ask for from God in this work is the spirit of wisdom and of counsel. This winning of great nations is like a great campaign, it needs forethought, method, cooperation; and it needs most of all the concentration of the attack on the right spot.

[84] How are we to win our way into the very heart of that great multitude?

Two methods are open to us.

First, we may try to win men mainly by our own personal influence, by our activity in preaching, by arguing in bazaars and public places, by being, in short, the active agents in preaching the Gospel of God.

There are two dangers which attach to this method of working.

The first, that a man, and especially a very able man, is apt to think that nothing can go well unless he does it himself, or at least gives it the closest personal supervision. This danger is present in every form of work, and, as far as I can see, it is especially present when a man of a dominant race tries to do work among men who are his inferiors in that subtle power of race. It is so easy to be dominant, and the curious pleasure attaching to it makes it very hard indeed to avoid. "Bossing" is a delightful occupation. The coach knows that as his wretched crew toils up the Long Reach while he blandly abuses them from his steed; and nowhere is there such a danger of bossing as in missionary work. But bossing means that it quenches the latent energies of those who are bossed. [84/85] They become machines, they are afraid of responsibility, and if left to stand alone they are helpless.

And there is a further and a very important consideration. The boss is a splendid man when he is turning the energies of a people to a fixed and definite object which he has in full view, but which it is not necessary that they should appreciate in like manner. Indian history is full of the deeds of men who have, by the sheer force of will and example, made heroes of the native forces which they have commanded.

Herbert Edwardes, before Mooltan, with his raw levies patient for hours under a fire which they could not reply to; Nicholson leading his Sikhs at Delhi; Kelly and Borradaile taking their men across the snows of the mountain-pass and saving Chitral, are splendid instances of what is one of the most common and perhaps the most glorious characteristic of our race, the art of leading and governing.

But missionary work is more than this. We have not only to lead, but we have to move, and we have to convince. It is not enough to have an aim ourselves, but we have got to make men feel what that aim is; and to make them feel also that what is good [85/86] for us is good for them. It is comparatively easy to lead men in action, and to govern them. To reach their understanding and their heart is quite another thing.

And here the missionary is met with a tremendous difficulty, which is, that he cannot understand the secret springs which mould and govern the native character. He is a puzzle to the native mind, the native mind is a puzzle to him. Herbert Edwardes, who knew Indian character better than most men, says somewhere that he never really reached the bottom of the native mind. The East and the West, the European and the Indian, or the Chinese, look at things from an absolutely different point of view. And my opinion is, that however able a man may be, however well he may know the language he uses, however well up he may be in native customs, he seldom, if ever, really thoroughly understands the people with whom he is dealing. Almost all men of experience that I have met have corroborated that view.

And so this brings me to the second method, which alone appears to offer hope for the conversion of great masses of people, and which, I believe, is the hope that sways most missionaries to-day. It is this: that [86/87] the function of the missionary is not so much himself to try and convert, as to thoroughly train, and fill with his own spirit, those who shall convert their own people. For these ancient races, aye, and for the uncivilized also, we want great teachers, and we want great faith. Great teachers, men, that is, who feel the full force of Christ's teaching in their own souls, and then are able to fill others with it, not only in the letter, but in the spirit. Men who live with their scholars as a father lives with his children, and absolutely fill them with himself. This was Christ's own way. He spake as never man spake; but even He made but a transient impression on the multitude. But He chose His agents, brought them into closest intercourse with Himself, and they went out full of their Master's spirit to win souls to Him. You will find a glorious example of this sort of work in the life of Bishop Patteson, and I can bear testimony to the wonderful power with which he impressed himself on his boys. They drank in what he taught them, and they reproduced it among their people as even he could hardly have done.

Here, then, surely is work that you can do here. You can learn to teach; not the mere [87/88] technicalities or the mere knowledge, but the very spirit of the thing. You know how here some men move you; how they fill you with their own zeal, their own high purpose; how they lead you on from step to step; how they make dull things seem bright, and show you the bearings of things which seemed almost insignificant. Try and learn their secret, that when your turn comes you may use it.

And then, if you go out, have faith. Yes, tremendous faith, and tremendous self-suppression.

You may have to believe that it will be worth your while to go on with the drudgery of slow, patient teaching, and then see half your labour lost at the end by the fall or the lapse of some of those you thought most promising. What faith you will need to go on doing this, instead of doing the more brilliant work of preaching, arguing, controverting. I do not say that you are not to do some of this, but I do say that in your schools, and in your own room, you will do your most important work. For who can tell how soon these schools of the prophets may not produce some master-mind, who may set all India in a blaze?

Men tell me that India is ripening for some [88/89] great change, that men's minds are stirred and uneasy, that modern science and European philosophy are shattering the old dark superstitions, are throwing down barriers and removing obstacles. The widespread system of Government education has not left things as they were. There is a void; there is a shaking. In such a condition, a great prophet sprung from their own race, conscious of a great message, and expressing that message in a way which appeals to every fibre of their own character, would work a mighty revolution.

Gautama and Mahomet show us what the power of such a man is.

I do not think that we English can produce, or ought to hope to produce, such a man of our own race; but the thought that it is possible that we can train such an one, bring him to Christ, fill him with Christ's spirit, instruct him with Christ's doctrine, and then, when the Spirit calls him, send him forth, such a thought as this would inspire every man, who volunteers for service in India, with an almost boundless hope and energy.

And just now we have an example to stir, us up. I was present on the 28th at a solemn meeting at the S.P.G. House to send forth a new Bishop to Japan. [89/90] Thirty-two years ago I rowed against Bishop Awdry in the race at Putney, and was well beaten. Here am I with my missionary work behind me, and I bid him farewell as he goes to his. It was a stirring sight to see a man actually working as a Bishop here at home, throwing up this work, the first, I believe, who ever did so, to go out to that far distant land.

But what a glorious possibility he carries with him! An Oxford First-Class man, head of a theological college, he bears with him not only the zeal which sends him to the front, but the trained skill which may make his bishopric most memorable. The Japanese have sent to Europe for their tutors in everything, and we all know with what skill they have used their teaching. But always, when they have learnt, they have discarded their teachers and have gone on by themselves. Has the call to this man come from God? Is he the trained teacher sent just at the right moment, not to found and build a weak exotic Church governed and directed by strangers, but to bring to bear that twining which God, through all these years, has been giving him, so that from him may spring up among that wonderful people, a race of teachers born of the soil, Japanese of the [90/91] Japanese, who may touch their brethren's hearts and build them up into an empire that has its faith in God?

A missionary then among these races should aim at being a teacher above all other things. And this means a strong, clear grasp of the essentials of our religion. All that you can learn here of the struggles of the early Church will help you there. The Eastern mind now will look at Christianity as the Eastern mind did then; and the man who knows what arguments were met of old, and how they were met, will have a very firm standpoint when the same old attacks crop up in a new form. I do not think I need dwell on this, as it is so obvious; but it is well to grasp the fact clearly, as it shows how men of the greatest intellect, and not only of intellect, of the greatest grasp of character, may find work in such missionary fields which will give them scope for truest exercise.

But do not let me be misunderstood. I do not say that there is no room for any one else. Do not let me deter one single soul from entering on this work who feels called to it. These vast, dense masses have their depths of ignorance and of lack of culture as every nation has. There is plenty of work for [91/92] what the Bishop of Derry calls "the plain man," the man of sturdy common-sense and sufficient education, though perhaps destitute of any great brilliancy.

The message of Christ does not depend on the keenness of the argument with which it is defended. It depends far more on the way in which it is put, and the life of him who puts it. And a man who feels that Christianity is his own life, and can express in words why he feels it, will go far to win men's souls to a like faith.

And that leads to the second point, which seems to me of very great importance, and that is a knowledge of the religion which you are attempting to supplant. The time-honoured method of St. Paul seems to be always the right one. When he saw the altar of the unknown God at Athens, he at once used it as the text of his sermon. But how? Not, at first, in a root and branch attack on the whole religion of Athens, but by recognizing that in this religion there was a want. You are very god-fearing, he cried; you have altars and. temples in abundance; but by your own showing they do not fulfil all that you want, for you are still seeking. "As I passed by, I saw an altar with this [92/93] inscription, To the Unknown God. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you."

This seems to me to be the great principle on which men should act in dealing with great historic faiths. Run full tilt at them, and you instantly excite the very strongest prejudices of which the human mind is capable. Recognize them as being, what indeed they are, the search of the human mind after God, and then show what they lack, and that you can supply that which is lacking. It is not so much that you recognize all that they may have in common with Christianity, but that you find out what they fail to give to the common need of humanity.

Let me give a case in point, which may show what I mean. A most able man told me this story. Some years ago he was in India, editor and proprietor of a great Calcutta newspaper. His cashier was a well-educated. Hindu, and a very clever one, so clever that my friend found out afterwards that he had swindled him out of a large sum without detection. This man had an only son, whom he had educated as highly as he could at the Calcutta University. The lad had done well, and was going to England to complete his [93/94] education as a doctor. Just before he was to start he was suddenly taken ill and died. His father instantly threw up his appointment, and went off to one of the Hindu sacred cities, Benares I think it was, stripped himself, and sat down in the dust loaded with chains, and sat there, I believe, till he died. The reason he gave to my friend was this "In some former existence I must have committed some terrible crime, I know not what; it is unexpiated, and therefore this terrible punishment has fallen upon me. All I can do is to try and expiate it now, lest worse things should befall me hereafter."

St. Paul spoke of the "Unknown God," but that vague belief seems to dwindle to nothing before this awful dread of an "unknown crime." And yet this very dread seems to give you the handle you want for your purer teaching. Many a missionary would rejoice, especially among wild people, if they could find such a sense of the guilt of sin as this involves. In my islands, it was always our hardest task to teach this sense of sin. It had almost to be created. But here you have a feeling of guilt so tremendous that the man shrinks from nothing if only he can expiate it.

[95] Sir Charles Turner, late Chief Justice of Madras, told me a yet more horrible story of two sons who were tried before him for the murder of their father. It came out at the trial that this father was conscious of a similar crime, and had made his sons heap firewood over him, drench it with melted ghee, and then set fire to the mass in order to save him from future woe.

Suppose, then, that you know this belief, not only as a fact in the Hindu system, but have traced it out in its bearings on their character and action. Have you not a message which you can give them with immense force, both as to the justice and the love of God?

The justice; for you will not deride this sense of guilt. You will not say Christ has made sin easy, or this sense of guilt is not a true conception of man's relation to God.

But you will at the same time be able to show that sin to be sin must be the conscious act, and that, for such acts, there is pardon and peace in the expiation wrought out for man by the Incarnate Son of God.

That sin-stricken soul seems to cry, "Miserable man that I am, how can I work out my atonement?" and he answers by grovelling in the dust. "You can work it out 'in Christ,'" [95/96] is the Christian's answer. By union with Him who bore our sins in His own body on the tree; who offers His life of perfect obedience, and with it our imperfect obedience; who cleanses us from guilt, and at the same time fills us with a new and living power of holiness.

You will find much to help you on this subject in the Report of the Missionary Conference, 1891.

Sir M. Monier-Williams deals with Hinduism in a paper which is itself so condensed that it is almost impossible to analyze it with clearness. But you will find it the clearest exposition I have ever read of that strange complex system, in which, as he says: "Polytheistic superstitions, priestcraft, caste-craft, and an intolerable burden of religious observances have overlaid a philosophical system which, in its primary ideas, is the simplest and most purely spiritualistic, and in one sense the most absolutely monotheistic, of all non-Christian creeds." And as you read his account you will see what a wide gulf separates your mode of thought from the educated Hindu, and his again from the creed of the uneducated worshipper. And herein lies the difficulty of the missionary. If he assail with [96/97] fierce invective the gross superstition, the grievous idolatry which he sees rampant around him; if he label the whole religion with the one contemptuous word heathenism, then the educated Hindu tells him that this idolatry is but the use of symbols to connect the uneducated peasant with the idea of the work of God which is present in everything, and which is indeed God. "We," cries the educated man, "are not idolaters; we worship the one God through them or symbolized by them."

Vague attacks, therefore, which do not really reach the root of the system against which they are directed, really do more harm than good. And so Sir M. Monier-Williams' words bear out what I have endeavoured to put before you.

"Surely," he says, "no missionary, however faithfully militant, ought to make the mistake of despising his adversary. He ought rather to set himself to penetrate the inner meaning of the system which he is sent to controvert. . . . He ought to look out for and thankfully accept as a foundation for his own superstructure, every fragment of the living rock of truth which may be visible here and there amid the shifting sands of Pantheistic error" (p. 98, 1. c.).

And to the same purpose is Bishop Copleston. Speaking of Buddhism as he has seen it in [97/98] Ceylon, he too shows how there is an educated and an uneducated Buddhism. The former, he says, is not so much a religion as a philosophy; knowledge is what they profess, and the dogmas are chiefly negative, the denial of Christian truth.

But the lower Buddhism as seen in Ceylon is pure superstition. Here the worshipper fears innumerable supposed powers. His Yakun are not necessarily malignant, but they must be appeased or charmed away. Hence innumerable dances round a sick person or incantation by a Buddhist priest, who recites charms from the sacred books which no one understands. But there is nothing in this subservience to these supposed powers thus treated to form any keen sense of right or wrong. The Sinhalese believes that for what we are now an unknown past is responsible, and that our future depends mainly on whether we kill animals or not. There is no sense of guilt; religion is not with him as with the Hindu a matter of supreme importance; it does not connect him with the Divine. He likes to listen to argument; he applauds it, but it does not touch him in the slightest.

You will see how great is the importance of knowing this frame of mind and thoroughly [98/99] understanding it, for it guides you in your method of attack. The Hindu has a keen sense of sin; the Buddhist has little or none, the ordinary Buddhist that is. How are you going to move him?

Bishop Copleston answers this question by saying that the evidence of design leading up
to a powerful Creator is the method which reaches most hearts.

For once the need of a Creator is admitted, it must also be admitted that Buddhism knows Him not. There is the weak spot, and from that the rest of the teaching may be continued. "My boys," such a teacher would say, "may or may not become Christians, but it is impossible that they can remain genuine Buddhists."

I have dwelt on these two religions, thus explained by men who know them so well, as good examples of what I have been trying to impress on you as to the method of attack. It comes briefly to this. Look for the strong points--"the rocks in the shifting sand," Monier-Williams calls them--and use them as stepping-stones to your own higher and purer faith; and look also for the weak points, that in which they fail altogether, and therein show the superiority of your Christian faith [99/100] to meet the natural, though perhaps dormant, needs of the human soul. And remember that, above all, you have in the Person of our Blessed Lord the strongest of all arguments. It was on Christ Himself that the Apostles relied. It was Christ who exemplified the beauty of the doctrine He came to teach. And as Western science and Western philosophy shake the credit of the legends of the Eastern superstition and Eastern Pantheism, as their dry light penetrates into the dark places and shows men how much there is that is impossible in their ancient creeds, so do they shine more and more clearly on Him who came as Son of Man to show men what His Father willed them to be; and as they look on Him, the perfect plan, so gradually (the progress must be gradual) will they learn to see in Him the glory as of the only-Begotten Son of God.

From religion I pass to customs, and here again you will need all the power of your discernment to learn the intricacies of native modes of life, interwoven as they so often are with the religion of the people. What is and what is not lawful? That is the question which is always recurring, and nothing else presents so many difficulties.

[101] On the one hand, a custom may be pronounced social, not religious, which really has its roots in the religious instincts of the people. If this is allowed, you will find that, after a time, the permission carries with it, in the native mind, a tacit assent to the religious use on which it is really based, and when at last you strike at it, the opposition raised is fiercer by far than it would have been had you opposed it from the first.

And, on the other hand, you may denounce a purely social custom, as being heathenish, and thus render still more difficult the rejection of purely heathen ceremonies, as men will be unable to understand why you condemn what they feel is innocent, and thus be led to doubt your judgement or your sincerity.

It is most difficult to arrive at the mean of these extremes. I was struck, when collating the returns made to the Board of Missions, at finding how widely various missionaries differed from each other in India on these subjects, some denouncing that which others allowed and almost approved of.

You all know how here, and still more at a great public school, young men cling to what they believe to be their privileges, [101/102] and how bitterly they resent any encroachment on them. And this will help you to understand how puzzled and angry a native convert must be who suddenly finds that what he has hitherto considered praiseworthy, or at least fully allowable, is condemned as on a par with customs which both heathen and Christian would alike condemn.

And out of this arises another warning, which may be helpful. Reasoning, albeit almost unconscious reasoning, is based on premises, and, unless the premises are thoroughly understood, the reasoning deduced from them is often apt to appear illogical. And thus arises a snare into which men fall with great ease. They see men acting in a way which they cannot understand, and straightway condemn the act as pure unmitigated folly. And thus they set down the men who so act as unreasonable and unthinking idiots. A good correction to this habit of mind is to consider that what you do appears often essentially mad to the native mind.

Cricket has gained ground in India of late years, but it requires nor great stretch of imagination to call up the feelings of a staid old Brahmin, when he saw eleven young fellows rushing madly about after a leather [102/103] ball in the blaze of an Indian sun. I once saved an opossum which my boys had shaken down from a tree, when I discovered that it had a young one in its pouch. The boys obeyed my behests, but I heard again and again how utterly incomprehensible my conduct appeared to them in thus rejecting, or causing them to reject, such a toothsome morsel as fate had put in their way.

And so the aim of the missionary ought always to be to try and understand the ground of any action which appears to him surprising. No man likes being thought a fool. You know up here how you all hate a man who is sarcastic, and sarcasm is at its bitterest when it exposes folly; and it is well to remember that this feeling is not peculiar to our race. A man who goes about trampling on old habits and modes of thought, of which he does not in the least understand the origin, and classing them all under the one significant title of "rot," will do more harm by exciting prejudice than an army of saints can undo. And this roughshod mode of proceeding is eminently characteristic of our English race.

We have been discussing lately the question "why England is not loved." I believe the [103/104] real answer to that question is, "The Englishman is so absolutely unsympathetic." He rarely troubles himself about men's feelings and springs of action He is just; he is kind; he is devoted to duty. But he does not understand, and often he does not care to understand. Now that may do very well for a governing race, but it does not do for a race that has to win men, and missionaries have to win men.

Many races are like children. Thwart a child's sense of justice, and it will never trust you. The child has worked out its conclusions after its own fashion, often from very imperfect knowledge, but they satisfy it; cross those conclusions roughly, thwart them, ridicule them, and every fibre of its nature tingles under the jar. Any one who has had to do with children will tell you how often they have been surprised by a passionate burst of tears, when they have been unconscious of any offence, but have found afterwards how they had run counter to a line of conduct which the child had thought out for itself. And so it is with races with which we as foreigners have to deal. We must try to understand them, to put ourselves in their places, to feel as they [104/105] feel. And is not that, in one word, "sympathy"? Is it not the spirit which runs through the whole description that St. Paul gives of charity?

I am afraid I have run on too long on this, but it is so all-important that I could not help dwelling on it. And what I have said is the outcome of my own experience. It is the expression of regret as I look back upon many an act of--what shall I call it?--ubriV, done consciously or unconsciously from not understanding; and also, now and then, on triumphant satisfaction, as I recall how a thorough understanding of the way people were looking at things had enabled me to act wisely and well.

There comes out of this another question, which I may just touch on. It is this:

Is it advisable for a missionary to assume a native dress and live a life exactly like one of the natives around him?

I answer, "No." You are an Englishman coming to teach natives, not an Englishman wanting to become a native.

"Quod non es simulas dissimulasque quod es."

I do not think a European can do this thoroughly, and I do not think it advisable if [105/106] he could. His mode of life is probably higher than their mode of life, and I do not see that much is gained by deliberately adopting a lower standard than that which has become a second nature to yourself. There is teaching to be given by a simple, but refined mode of life, as there is by any other form of example; and I should be afraid, by my own experience and by what I have seen in others, lest he should deteriorate by the mere force of his surroundings. There is a terrible danger in this. It is very easy to sink. I have seen men among my islands who by residence there had sunk a good deal lower than the lowest of the races by which they were surrounded. But if you do not live quite as they do, you must live with them. The missionary's home should be right amongst his people, and he should be always accessible.

If there is danger on one side of coming down too much to their level, there is equal, if not greater, danger of living so far away from them, so far removed, that is, from their life, that they shrink from entering within the sacred circle.

A missionary must so live as to distinguish himself, and be distinguishable in the native mind, from the ordinary run of civil and [106/107] military officials with which he is familiar. I do not know enough of life in such countries to say definitely how this is to be done; all I can say is, it has to be borne in mind always and at all times. And this is one of the reasons why community missions appear to offer a very great advantage in working. As a body, missionaries can be very accessible indeed. Does not our college life exemplify this? A college is a community where every one has his own work to do, and, while doing it, is accessible to those whom it concerns. And a community of missionaries is a college, and being so, its members can readily be reached by all who want to reach them. I can imagine that it is less formidable to a native inquirer seeking out a man in his rooms in such an institution, than calling on him at his own house, under the eyes of the Mem Sahib and all the rest of the family. Not that the Mem Sahib has not her part to play, and does play it often to great advantage. I know what married women have done, and can do, in missionary work, and far be it from me to decry their works.

But this accessibility is only one of the advantages of the community life. The greatest of all is, I think, its force. A body of men [107/108] working together for a common end, in such a place as India, are stronger far than such men would be if scattered singly through a wider area. To begin with, they utilize force. We are not all alike, nor have all the same gifts. In a community, each man's peculiar talent can be used to the prosecution of a common end. You must have gifted men in it to lead and direct, and for some special branches of the work, but the "plain man," of whom I have spoken, has his place also.

And, secondly, men thus working together can keep up their own spiritual fire. The domination of heathendom is a depressing thing at times, and men need seasons of special prayer, with help from each other to aid them to face it. The little band of brothers enlisted in a common cause can have their own times of prayer, of worship, of council, and go forth to their work refreshed. Nor is the common intercourse to be despised, that life of fellowship, which we University men have been trained to, and prize so highly. I well remember in the isolation of our island life, when we were often months without seeing a white face, the delight it was when two or three of us could get together on some round of visitation or school inspection. We worked [108/109] like horses, but the work did not seem half so hard when we shared it with others, and cheered each other in that free merry intercourse course which does so much to lighten the toil of life.

And, lastly, these community missions are strong attacks. One white man dropped into the midst of a million or so of heathens, isolated, solitary, is not, however good and able he may be, a strong manifestation of the power that sends him forth. But a strong, well-organized community is an evident fact. It is a centre from which influence flows, and to which men come back for strength. Its influence is felt far beyond the actual range of its teaching. And therefore I hope that, whatever else Cambridge undertakes, it will always keep its Delhi Mission fully and amply supplied with men.

The fact that there is a Cambridge Mission to Delhi is itself a striking one. Cambridge is not an unknown quantity in the East. Their sons come here, and they bear back her name. And, therefore, it is all-important that this mission in Delhi, at the old seat of the Empire of the Moguls, should testify, as the Oxford Mission testifies at the new capital of Calcutta, that the ancient Universities of [109/110] England can give of their best to set forward the kingdom of our Lord. Mr. Lefroy is coming home shortly, broken down by the ceaseless strain which he has borne so splendidly. We shall hear his voice here in Cambridge, and I hope that one fruit at least may come of these lectures, that some men's hearts may be ready to listen to his call.

I am afraid I have kept you too long already, but the subject is so vast that I have only touched the fringe of it. If you wish to know more, read the report of the Missionary Conference, 1891, published by the S.P.C.K. It contains more on missions than any book I know. There you will find, condensed into the shortest, pithiest form, the knowledge, the plans, the hopes, the fears, of some of the ablest men who are at this time conducting the missionary work of the Church abroad.

As you read, you will see how vast that work is, what its needs are, and how inadequately they are as yet met, but you will see also with what splendid vigour and insight that work is being done.

[111] V.

MISSIONARY WORK: UNCIVILIZED RACES.

I NOW come to missionary work among uncivilized races, such as those among whom so many years of my own life have been passed. And I fancy that, in dealing with it, one of my greatest difficulties will be to be clear. It is all so familiar to me, and deductions seem so easy from facts which are A B C to me, but are not necessarily known to others, that I confess I have a feeling of dread lest I should not be explicit enough.

Now the first thing, as it appears to me, is to have a clear idea of what these people hold. As in the old historic religions, on which I dwelt in my last lecture, we found that it was of the utmost importance that you should know something at least of their history, and of the various shades of their creed, so, with uncivilized races, it is of the utmost importance [111/112] that you should understand, not so much what you have to supplant, as what you have to supply. For though their creeds may have little hold on them from a moral or a religious point of view, yet in another way they have a very tremendous power indeed. They hold to their old creeds, not so much because they love, as because they fear. To the Hindu, as we have seen, the past is real as bearing on the present, and the present real because it affects the future. The wide expanse of time through which the soul has passed, accumulating or expiating guilt, must tinge the view of life which every Hindu entertains.

I do not think that you will find any such apprehension of moral guilt among rude races. I certainly never found it among the islanders of the Pacific. The only trace I ever knew of a sense of guilt incurred by what we should call "sin," was in the islands of Florida and Ysabel. There the natives were afraid to swear falsely by Doula, the deity who ruled over the powers of the air and sea. You will find him represented in the form of a fish-hawk in most of the ornaments wherewith they adorn their canoes, bowls, or neck ornaments. And his penalty for perjury, uttered in his name, was merely physical [112/113] death. There was no thought of anything further, at least as far as I was able to discover. And even in his case, my friend Dr. Codrington, who knows more about such subjects than any living man, thinks that he only represents a disembodied, not a pure spirit, like the rest of the "tidalos" whom they worship. That is, that he represents the spirit of a man who once lived on earth. And if this be so, then the punishment ensues, not so much from any moral guilt in the lie, as from the wrath of him whose name has been taken in vain. But however caused, the fear is very great. Mr. Penny, one of my colleagues, once stayed in a little village. While there he lost a towel, and upbraided the chief for not keeping order in his village. The man felt it deeply, and, while Penny slept, set himself to work to discover the culprit. At 2 a.m. he woke Penny up in triumph, and gave him back the missing towel. He had found it by an exhaustive process, exhaustive in more senses than one. He had simply gone the round of the village, and sworn every one by Doula that he had not stolen it. At last the culprit was reached. He refused the oath, and handed over the towel, and was probably well fined for his pains.

[114] This is, as I have said, the only penalty, that I know of, attaching to what we should call "moral delinquency." But when you come to live in the midst of heathendom, you find all round you a sense of fear, of which no one can have the least conception, unless he has experienced it. What I tell you about it, I must, of course, draw from my own experience, but I can say this, that I have compared notes with men working in many different quarters among similar peoples, and I have found exactly the same experiences. The methods of belief and of sorcery may vary, but the result is certainly the same. Fear of the supernatural, that is the predominant note of all heathen life amid uncivilized races.

The process of creation of deities is, in my islands at least, an easy one. But it implies one very characteristic feature. Each man is supposed to possess, in a greater or less degree, a certain mysterious power, above and beyond himself, which we used to call "Mana." If this is present in large measure the man becomes great. His arrow flies true and the wound is deadly. His crops grow, his pigs are fertile, he becomes great in power and in substance. How this power originates or whence it is derived they do not stop to [114/115] inquire. I think it goes back through long ages to a higher knowledge of a supreme being, of whom this dim and misty reminiscence remains. But be that as it may, there the power is. Now, if the owner of this power dies, his spirit does not cease to exist. It remains disembodied, and the "Mana" still attaches to it. But it has become much more effective. The untrammelled spirit has much freer powers of locomotion than the embodied one. And thus he becomes a supernatural power, whose aid may be invoked, and whose resentment may be dreaded. His powers are tested. His name is invoked; he is asked to decide whether some action may be undertaken, say a warlike expedition. If that is successful, he is installed as a deity, and every fresh success is attributed to him. I traced the history of one such deity named Ganido, and found by the names of his priests that were given me that he only lived four generations ago.

It is easy to imagine the result of this. There are "tidalos" innumerable, and each ex hypothesi is invested with the characteristics that he bore on earth. He is not necessarily malignant, but he may be, and often is. Sometimes he acts merely on his own [115/116] motion. If a man is sick, he thinks that he has offended his "tidalo," and straightway tries to propitiate him, while at the same time he runs away from him, and hides. At other times the spirit inhabits a grove, a stream, or an island, and woe betide the unfortunate wight who goes too near him. One very malevolent spirit inhabited a little lake, near which a road ran, and had a partiality for shadows; and people passing by looked carefully at the sun, and took care that their shadow did not fall on the lake for the "tidalo" to catch; if it did, they died to a certainty.

But these spirits could not only be malevolent proprio motu; they could be invoked by their proprietors, not only for legitimate strength, if I may so term it, in battle, or for help on a journey, but to destroy the enemies of their worshippers. And hence arose an ever-present sense of sorcery and witchcraft.

It is not too much to say that in some islands no one of any importance was ever supposed to die a natural death. In all cases witchcraft was supposed. There was always, or almost always, some link which bound the sorcerer to his victim. A lock of hair, a crumb of food which he had tasted, was quite [116/117] sufficient. Charms were said over it, and the victim died.

It made doctoring a somewhat perilous amusement, because, if the man got worse, you were held responsible, not only for the action of the drug itself, but for the supposed intention with which you had given it. I once had a very serious scrape because I gave some medicine to a great chief, who got worse after it. And when I gave him some more (very nasty), which with the greatest pluck he took, I had to taste it myself, and all my boat's crew had to do the same, to show I had no evil intent.

From this sketch, you will easily perceive how this spiritual fear lies at the root of much of their physical fear, if I may use such a term. For, as every death has to be avenged, and every death is supposed to be caused by nefarious means, it matters not whether a man is killed by an arrow, a ball, or a tomahawk, or by the more occult process of sorcery. The only difference is, that in one case the author of the deed is known, in the other, he has to be discovered by some form of divination. But the result is the same, death by the avenger or blood. And thus arise half at least of the desolating feuds which spring up between [117/118] villages. A man dies, he has to be avenged; a man is pitched upon by some form of occult inquiry, he is shot; and in his turn he has to be avenged, and so the game goes on. I remember once anchoring off a village, and hearing that a man had died that morning. By noon a man had been shot to avenge him, and by night another man had been shot to avenge him, and so the game, with lives as counters, proceeds till they weary of it, give each other pigs, and make peace.

You can see from this brief explanation what a terrible load of fear rests on the native mind. How, ever present with him, there is a sense of the supernatural, but a supernatural not only endowed with the evil passions of humanity, but capable of being invoked by living men when their own evil passions of hate and anger are excited. I do not think that any one can quite realize this, living in the atmosphere that we live in. A terrible curse may make us shiver, but we really heed it very little, as we attach no importance to the prayer to the powers of evil which a curse really is.

But when the curse is attached to what is believed to be a reality; when a threat of occult harm is believed to be capable of being [118/119] executed by unseen power; when a man, as he feels some sickness creeping over him, believes, either that he has mortally offended his own tutelar deity, or worse still, that some unseen power, resistless and inexorable as fate, is being exercised against him by his enemy; then you can understand how deep and terrible a hold this may take on the imaginations of men; how men may seek to use it against others, and may burn to avenge its use, when employed against themselves or those they love.

I must add also one consideration which arises from what I have said. The obstacle which holds men back from Christianity is not conviction, but "fear." Given that you believe that the spirits you worship are easily offended, and that they can and do avenge any insult offered to themselves; given that the acceptance of Christianity means cutting them off root and branch, what more deadly insult can be conceived than this acceptance of Christ? The convert bids defiance to a deity whom all his past training has taught him to dread. He has to face his wrath and believe in the protection of a new God. We read with interest the struggles of a Newman or a Manning as they give up their old faith and plunge into the flood of a new system. But, [119/120] in all honesty, I believe the heathen has a harder task.

The Hawaian Queen who stood on the edge of the crater of Kilaulea, and as the waves of molten lava dashed at her feet, braved with contemptuous scorn the deity who ruled them, and whom all her ancestors had worshipped, gave proof of a moral and a physical courage which has never been surpassed. And every heathen convert does the same. He braves the wrath of him whom up to that moment he has dreaded unutterably. Therefore, do not wonder if men hesitate; if they shrink from facing such a tremendous risk. And remember also that you must ever be on your guard lest they consider the sacraments of the Church as charms against this risk.

And this will show you clearly the strength of the Christian teaching which you bear to them, and, what is more, will teach you how to apply that strength.

There are not a few who laugh at teaching Christianity to these simple folk, and ask scoffingly if you expect them to understand the mysteries of the Athanasian Creed. The answer of course is "No"; it is no subtlety of religion that we give them, any more than we teach the depths of our religion to our [120/121] children. But we do teach them that which supplies the very answer they need to all this grovelling fear, and we do bring them a life and strength which they need to raise them to higher things. It is worth while tracing this out a little in detail, as it may help some of you hereafter.

We teach the Fatherhood of God.

Bear in mind what I have endeavoured to put before you as to the ever-present sense of supernatural power dispersed among countless half-malignant deities, and then see what a glorious message this is. We speak of God, eternal, omnipotent, who holds the sea and land in the hollow of His hand. We dwell on His might, His all-sovereign sway. He is pankrator, The All-ruler.

And yet in the same breath we teach, "our Father which art in heaven"; the love, the care, the tenderness of our heavenly Father.

And as we speak of His love, we speak again of the proof of that love. How do you know that God loves us? Is there any other answer than that which must suffice for the wisest of men or the rudest savage? "God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son." Once I was teaching by means of a magic lantern on the then wild island of Santa Cruz. [121/122] Round me stood armed men wondering at my words. Last of all, there shone out on the screen, in the still darkness of the tropical night, the single figure of our Lord on the cross. I can feel, even now, the hush that came over the dark crowd as they gazed, and I told them that that was the proof; He who hung there, hung there for them, and was the Son of God.

But this is not all. In that death of Christ, we have the teaching which can show them what sin is; and in the life of Christ, we can teach them the beauty of Christian manhood. He went about doing good. Doing good; but how can we do good? How can we resist? Men ask this as they begin to believe and feel what sin really is, and how hard a struggle it is to conquer it. And then mark how glorious is the teaching, and how it fits in with all their original ideas. They, before they went to fight, sought the seclusion of some wood, and there, by prayer and sacrifice, besought the aid of the deity they worshipped. Now as they go out to a harder fight, and as they begin to recognize how hard the struggle is, we tell them of the might of the Spirit of God. In Him and by Him they can conquer.

[123] And thus the creed, which seems so hard, is really found to fulfil all the aspirations of men. It gives them what they need, and, believe me, I have seen its strength.

So much, then, for the teaching. Now for the method you have to employ.

On this point I may quote a very interesting note with which Bishop Abraham has furnished me, as it contains the gist of the whole attitude of the missionary towards his people. He says: "I remember many years ago, when your father had established St. John's College near Auckland, and was trying to introduce industrial occupation among boys, men, and women, hearing him base his principles of missionary work on those of the two sacraments, and thereby reconcile the then much-debated question of combined or distinct evangelization and civilization.

"While he felt that the Gospel was the great end to be aimed at, he also saw that that end could not be reached without simultaneous or even preliminary secular teaching and methods of civilization. From the very first opening that he had of dealing with the natives of a heathen island, as soon as any of them came on board the Undine or Southern Cross, he made his own party on [123/124] board sing a hymn, and kneel down on deck and say a prayer.

"He illustrated this by the principle of the initiatory sacrament of water, the free, pure grace of God unalloyed by any human adjunct, which primary principle was to be the root and basis of all future advancement. But from this root, through union with Christ, was to spring forth all duty to man, all communion of saints, and the oneness of humanity. And this growth and increase was to his mind typified by the other great sacrament of love, the Holy Communion and union with Christ maintained by the bread and wine. But both these elements required man's co-operation. The bread could not be produced without the steady daily, perpetual industry and intelligence required in farming, &c., and the wine not being everywhere producible, requiring knowledge of languages, intercourse by land or sea with other nations; in a word, commerce.

"On these two principles of free grace and God's employment of human and natural means, he, and Bishop Patteson after him, insisted on the necessity of the missionary qualifying himself first in many ways, physical and mental, so that he might approach the [124/125] heathen not only from their spiritual but from their material needs."

This long extract is interesting, as it formulates in a clear way that need for material as well as spiritual uplifting which is becoming more evident to us every day in all religious work.

The men who are working in East or South London feel it, as their clubs, and exhibitions and lectures, and acting, and what not, show, as keenly as do the missionaries in the heart of Africa or in the Solomon Islands.

And the point I am pressing is, that these things are not merely useful, but they are necessary.

Let us take two or three things on which you can easily learn something now which will do you yeoman's service in any work which you may hereafter undertake.

1. The first is language; and by that I do not mean philology, though the more you know of that the better, but the art of acquiring and distinguishing uncouth sounds. I speak feelingly, as my ear was my bane all through my missionary life. I have lived as much as most people on islands where I was pioneer, where hardly a soul understood me, and I understood not one word. I have preached [125/126] a sermon by means of two small boys who were far too shy to stand up before their countrymen in the open, but could just manage to translate my words if they were allowed to hide under the table. And I will back myself, under such circumstances, to pick up a fair speaking vocabulary, which will pass muster, as soon as most people. But there I stop. I could not hear, not even languages which I catechized in and preached in. An unexpected sentence, though I knew every word in it, was a jumble of sounds. When my boat's crew were talking fast round me, I felt as a parrot must feel. I fancy this is somewhat peculiar, but I have heard many people say the same of themselves.

Now to meet this I am able to give you the advice of a very competent authority. Mr. Pilkington, whom we have all heard with so much pleasure, has been good enough to send me the following note. (I may observe parenthetically that he commenced his studies by attacking the mysteries of Irish brogue.) He says: "Study phonetics experimentally, i. e. find out by practice (i) how you produce sounds, (ii) the difference between sounds and kindred ones, (iii) how to produce new sounds" (pkw, for instance, one of our letters) "by new [126/127] positions of the vocal organs or by new combinations.

"Advantages of this: (i) your ear will be trained, (ii) you will be able to hit new sounds much more easily, (iii) having hit them, you will be able to fix them." He recommends Sweet's Primer of Phonetics, Clarendon Press.

He gives another very clear rule: "Associate sounds, not symbols, with objects (not English words or their symbols). Go from concrete to abstract."

And I would add to this, get some one to talk to you in any language, not your own, of which you know a little. Practise your ear in dividing words which really all run into one another. Every one with a little trouble can get some exercise in this.

2. But with phonetics learn also something of philology. The modern missionary is a translator par excellence, and it requires trained skill, or at least trained skill is of the very greatest use in this work. Bishop Patteson had worked at Dresden under one of the best of Eastern scholars, and his studies there were of yeoman's service in reducing the languages of Melanesia.

3. But when words and translations have been acquired, the missionary often has to [127/128] use his skill still further. Hard by him, there stands very often that commonest of all machines, a printing press. It has been humped up probably on the backs of men, and no greater invention, be it what it may, ever penetrates the haunts of barbarism. We hear a great deal about the power of the press, but I do not think that that power is ever quite so apparent as when you see it used as Mackay, for instance, used it in the early days of Uganda. On the one side, you saw the weak-kneed king, now listening to the new learning, now storming at it, and in his mad rage threatening, and more than threatening, those who sought it; on the other, the two or three Europeans toiling at the wonderful machine which multiplied their words a thousandfold, and not theirs only, but their Master's. And as they work you watch the stealthy approach of lad after lad, eager to get one of those treasured sheets, even though it cost, as it did cost many of them, their lives. We have to think, even as we pass a mighty press like ours at Cambridge, and hear the whirl of the machinery within--we have to think before we recall how great is the power which it exerts; but as we look at it standing out with dazzling [128/129] brightness against the dark blackness of the ignorance of Africa, it glows with a halo almost divine.

It is true that now, such is the easiness of communication, most of the larger works are printed at home, through the S.P.C.K. or the Bible Society; but still, at all out-stations, there is much simple work to be done, parts of Prayer Books, teaching books, selections, especially in their early stages, before the translators are sure of their words; and therefore one of the best things a man can learn is the method of printing. Practice only can make him an adept, but it will save him many a weary hour if he studies under some practical man for a few weeks or months before he has to do his own work at his own peril. And, believe me, there are perils! The man who catches a crab as his boat is just drawing ahead, the coxswain who makes his shot and misses, the field who drops the skier the best bat has hit into his hands and sees him afterwards get his century, feels "anguish"; but there are few things that try the patience more hardly, and produce a feeling of blank despair more surely, than when with painful labour you have set up a beautiful page of type, and are carrying it with [129/130] careful fingers, and securely tied, as you hope, to its last resting-place in the forme, to see one invidious letter jump from its place to be followed by all the others in hopeless, irremediable "pie."

Therefore printing is one of the things you can learn with great advantage. It, though seemingly monotonous, is delightful work; your brain is always at work, "justifying" each line with mathematical accuracy, and in the arranging for the press, the adjusting the gauge, the pressure, and so on, there is room for the exercise of the greatest skill.

I pass on to medicine and surgery, things which an inland missionary will be sure to have to use. There is indeed a counsel of perfection which says that every mission ought to have its own medical men, properly trained and skilful. Undoubtedly; but where can you obtain men sufficient to man all the posts which missionaries occupy? I hope indeed that more and more we shall have such men, and their good is simply incalculable. Nay, more, I hope we shall have a good supply of St. Lukes; men, that is, who have been trained alike to minister to the body and to the soul; but it will be long years before we can hope to see every mission [130/131] station with its own medical men. And if not, you may be sure that the natives will come to you and expect you to doctor them. I do not think you can help yourselves. I know I could not. And I believe it to be possible for a man of ordinary intelligence to acquire such a knowledge of simple surgery and simple medicine as to he able to be of great service in the alleviation of suffering and the cure of disease. A man can learn to set a bone or open an abscess, to tie an artery, to dress with simple lotions the horrible sores which abound; he can treat ordinary fevers, perhaps tackle influenza, as I did myself years ago with great success at Ysabel.

My only caution is: let your medicines be few. There is great virtue in Epsom Salts administered with no niggard hand; Castor Oil, poured out of the bottle into the mouth, can hurt no one; Cockle's Pills, Painkiller, are potent remedies. And, above all, nursing and hot water are unknown quantities in most wild lands. If you can teach, as I have taught, a whole district to put on fomentations, and see them run naturally for an old shirt and a kettle and half boil their patient in an acute attack of pneumonia, you will have done something to save human suffering and human life.

[132] Therefore, learn all you can, and if you can get a course of six months or a year at a hospital, by all means do, as you will find the experience so gained of infinite value.

Of other acts, the name is legion, and you will never be without employment; gun locks, cross-cut saws, planes, boats, canoes, you will be required to doctor them all. If you would know the influence a man may gain in such matters, read the Life of Mackay of Uganda, and see what influence he gained by skill learned as a practical engineer.

Common carpentry is always most useful, both for yourself and your work. John Williams made his own furniture. Steere built the cathedral at Zanzibar, and elicited from the Sultan the plaintive question, "How is it that your roof stands so well? Mine always tumble down."

My father and Bishop Patteson navigated their own ships, and an old sailor said that it almost made him a Christian to see the way in which the Bishop of New Zealand beat his ship up the harbour of Auckland.

And so too with husbandry and agriculture. The Moravian missionaries are a model to all missions in the way in which they train [132/133] their converts in the mechanical and agricultural pursuits.

There is a danger I must mention which requires careful steering to avoid. It is that missionaries, while encouraging such things, should appear to use their converts' energy and new-found skill to enrich themselves. Instances of this are not uncommon, and if done, it raises a bitter feeling of resentment in the mind of the trader with whom the missionary competes. And men must be ever on their guard lest the shadow of such a suspicion fall on them.

I have dealt mainly in this lecture on what you can do here to fit yourselves for such work, if you think you may hereafter offer yourselves for it. But when all is said and done, it comes to this, that you must learn all that you can learn here of what has made our civilization, so that you may apply it to people who have it not. That, which turns you out as a ready man here, is what will fit you for being a useful man there. I do not think that any special training can teach a man to be a missionary; here he must learn to be a "man," and as such he will impress himself on the simple souls with whom he will have to deal. Train every faculty you [133/134] have of eye and ear and hand--all will come in useful. You will excel in some one line, but you will find use for all. You know the omnium gatherum cupboard that some men have, in which they collect all sorts of things, useful and apparently useless, in the firm faith that some day they will be wanted. The missionary's mind must be of that sort, ever learning, ever storing up skill and information which he may some day have to use.

And now let me add a few hints on practical work in the mission-field, which are, mainly the outcome of my own experience.

1. The greatest. Our Lord's own maxim, "Follow Me." He does not say Go; He says, "Follow."

The missionary must lead. He must never tell men to do things which he is not prepared to do himself. There is all the difference in the world between "go on" and "come on." I do not say that you need necessarily do everything. In all probability, you will have higher work to do than your disciples, and they will gladly recognize this, and save you for it by doing what they can themselves, but they must know first that you are ready to do it. Have ever before your eyes the picture of your Master girded with His towel [134/135] as He washed the disciples' feet in the upper chamber at Jerusalem, and in His Spirit everything you can do will burn with a Divine light.

You are teaching the brotherhood of men; be a brother and not a lord. Your actions will teach more than your words that you and they are one. It is a hard lesson to learn. You feel your superiority in knowledge and habit of command, and they are only too ready to acknowledge it. Encourage that feeling, and there is a gulf which nothing can bridge over. You are with them, but not of them. Show them that you can lay it aside, that you dedicate it all to your Master's service and theirs, that nothing is too high or too low for you to do, and slowly but gradually you lead them also to dedicate their gifts in self-sacrifice to their King.

2: A word of caution. Beware of heroics. I do not say that you are not to feel enthusiasm, far from it. Enthusiasm recognizes the greatness of the command. It recognizes the need, it recognizes the glory of the message we bear. About all these things we can be as enthusiastic as we please.

But there is a danger lest we should colour missionary work with too rosy a tint. This [135/136] may lead us to make a false estimate of ourselves, and also a false estimate of the work.

Missionary work does cost something; there is risk sometimes, there is separation, there are a good many things that are disagreeable. But soldiers, sailors, merchants, orchid-hunters, butterfly-collectors, bear equal risks. And there is just a little danger lest people should attach too much importance to these things, and exalt the missionary above his due value. It is a subtle kind of incense which reaches a man's nostrils very easily, and the aroma is just a little apt to remain in his brain and make him think himself a rather finer fellow than he really is. The great corrective of this is "duty." God calls you to that, just as He calls another man to work in a slum. And the call begets duty just as much in one case as the other. And duty will stand the strain of monotony, of isolation, of queer surroundings, when nothing else will.

For, believe me, missionary work can be as monotonous as any other work. Palms very soon begin to look like other trees, and black faces can bore just as much as white ones. You may have an interesting adventure now and then just to give spice to your work, but they do not abound. It is usually hard, [136/137] uphill, solitary work against an enervating climate, and often you have to ram the spurs in very deep to keep going. But the golden light of duty never fails. Once realize that it is your Master's command to you, a clear unequivocal command, and you will feel your knees strengthened, your soul will be braced, and you will do what lies before you with all your might.

I hope I have not said too much about overrating oneself. Let me give an antidote, a paradox perhaps, but a most necessary caution, Don't underrate yourself.

It is your business to live, if you can, for every year you live you become more useful. And this, not so much because you know the people, though that is something, but that they know you, which is very much more. The recruit, for a year or two, is not much good. Probably, at the end of six months, he fancies he knows everything. At the end of two years, he is just beginning to learn how little he does know. And then he begins to be useful. People begin to understand him, and he them. He is trained. And as a trained soldier is valuable, so is the trained missionary. And therefore it is that it is his duty to take every care of himself. I do not [137/138] say he is to be luxurious or fastidious, but he has no right to throw his life away by carelessness, by undue rashness, or by living in a way in which no European can live in an enervating, fever-stricken climate. If the call comes, then he may and will risk his life freely and without hesitation; but to risk it gratuitously is, to use Talleyrand's expression, not only a crime but a blunder. There are numberless little precautions which take a certain amount of time and forethought, and which therefore most men spurn; but they make all the difference between having a man strong and vigorous to do his work, or being invalided or dying.

I have got to the end of my time, and I am afraid some of what I have been saying has been of the nature of cold water. Let me warm it by a minute or two straight from my own heart. It is my experience that to the ordinary lay mind, missionary work, though he encourages it in the abstract, is, in the concrete, the most incomprehensible thing that a man can undertake. The ordinary layman cannot understand why a man should expatriate himself, and go and live among a lot of niggers. And yet if you question the real missionaries, the men who know what the [138/139] life is, they one and all say it is the most delightful life a man can lead. I will tell you that I sometimes make men stare by saying that I would leave Cambridge tomorrow and go back if I could; and all my old comrades look back on Melanesia with the fondest love. And yet I cannot wholly explain why. One reason is, I think, the loveableness of the people. They are like children, and as children they win your hearts. Another reason is, I think, the insight it gives you into the pure message of the Gospel. Here, in our complex society, influences are so varied and so intermingled that you cannot altogether trace the effect of your words, at least not often. But in a heathen land, there is nothing else, and when you see a fierce head-hunting chief lay it all down, rule his people with justice, go with you to assist you in your work, aid a translator of the Bible in getting the very purest language possible for his purpose, resist all the threats and bribes of his old friends seeking to turn him back, then you feel how real a message it is which you bring. But I believe the real great satisfaction springs from something higher even than this. "If any man will do My will, he shall know [139/140] of the doctrine, whether it be of God." And this surely is Christ's will. It is His last command, our marching orders, and any one who does it whole-heartedly is, I think, permitted to share in some measure that deep joy which filled the heart of St. Paul. "Unto me," he cries, "who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ."

[141] VI.

ON THE WORK THAT CAN BE DONE IN ENGLAND.

I HAVE been specially urged not to omit giving in these lectures some sketch of what may be done at home to further this missionary spirit in the Church. And indeed this lies at the root of the whole matter. For unless the Church is fully alive to her responsibility, it is useless saying what has to be done, as there will be neither men nor money to do it.

Duty. Now the very first thing that has to be done, is to establish in your own hearts and in the hearts of others the great fact that this work comes to each of us and to the Church, not as a matter of predilection or emotion, but as a simple paramount duty. It represents our obedience to a simple and unqualified command.

The benefit of missions may be arguable by [141/142] those who do not belong to Christ, it is not arguable by those who acknowledge His Divine authority. We have nothing to do with results, it is ours to obey. We can no more question the orders of our Divine Captain, and discuss their applicability, than did the aide-de-camp who bore the famous order to the Light Brigade, or the officers and men who executed it.

"Theirs not to reason why."

The only argument that has any semblance of plausibility is that we are in fact obeying the command by caring for the teeming masses at home, and that we have no strength to spare for anything else.

The answer to that is twofold.

1. That as far as we can gather from the teaching of the Holy Ghost Himself, given in the earliest days of the Church, this ought not to weigh at all.

We have one pregnant and all-sufficient example. The Church had begun to win its way in the great city of Antioch. There was a growing band of enthusiastic converts who had attached to themselves, or had received from others, the great name which we all bear, "Christians." Outside them was a vast unbelieving multitude, far greater in [142/143] proportion, I fancy, than any similar body we could find at home to-day, and certainly with far less opportunity of grace than have even the dwellers of South or East London. They were ministered unto by a small but very distinguished body of men. Among these were two apostles, St. Paul and St. Barnabas. We can imagine what a power they were for good. The one with his rugged impetuous eloquence, which carried all before it like the rush of a flooded torrent; the other uplifting souls with the grace of his sympathy and consolation, resembling the same river as it flows in gentle but life-giving stream through a plain, which it fertilizes as it flows. We can imagine the power of these two men. We can imagine how men clung to them; how all-important they seemed in that growing work. And yet it was these two that the Holy Ghost selected, as the men of Antioch ministered to the Lord and fasted, and sent them forth, never to work again in the same manner in the midst of the men who loved them. I say it was an answer to the prayer and fasting of the Christians of Antioch, for doubtless they had prayed that they might know what things they ought to do. And the answer came, short and clear, "Separate [143/144] Me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them." There is the reply; the reply, as I have said, of the Holy Ghost Himself, who simply chose out the two best men the Church of Antioch possessed. And there is the example for all time of that Church, who gave them up without a murmur.

2. But there is a second answer to this objection which I think we can deduce from the experience of this century, nay of all centuries.

It is this. The surest way to beget life and zeal at home is to be in earnest about the work abroad. My mother always puts it in this way: "If the extremities are warm the heart will be warm also." Take the beginning of this century, when, as I have shown to you, there was hardly any missionary work being done by the Church of England. What was its state at home? Was there life? Was there earnestness? Was there any systematic care for God's poor? Was there anything but a cold dry formalism? Take the close of the century as we see it now, when though still the foreign work is not half enough done, yet every day sees more and more men doing it, and also the ablest men of the Church, of every school of thought, trying to do this [144/145] work more thoroughly. Look at this picture. And then look at the home work of the Church. Has that suffered? Is it worse done because the other is better done? Is it not true that it also has increased a thousandfold? Take the two facts we had lately, side by side as an example. In the Town Hall, Mr. Pilkington telling an enthusiastic audience of work done in the heart of Africa; while in St. John's Hall, the Bishop of Rochester was telling of the work of College Missions sent from Cambridge to help him in that awful charge of 1,800,000 souls in South London. In 1800 no one dreamt of doing either of these things. In 1896 they are done as a matter of course, and are only samples of countless other works wrought everywhere.

No. The answer is plain. Christ blesses those who obey Him unhesitatingly, who trade abroad with the talents that they have; and from the Church that does not use them He takes away even that which it seems to have.

This sense of duty, then, is the first thing you must acquire yourselves, and which you must inculcate on all who will listen to you.

But duty is a rational thing. It arises when facts are known and weighed at their proper value.

[146] Mere abstract duty is a very hard thing to realize. It requires knowledge to call it into efficient play. It is one thing to talk of abstract duties in the Union, or even in the pulpit, it is quite another to be in the midst of them, and feel them pressing on you with a concrete force. Some of you must know men, whom you have seen glorified as it were by realizing what the work is, say, in the heart of a great city.

So it is with missions. To stir up our own will and that of others we must know about them. They contain history to be learnt like any other history, principles to be deduced from facts as in other branches of practical investigation, and method to be worked out as in any other part of the Church's work. Take the case of a great statesman working out a complicated problem in our political life. Listen to him as he puts what he wants to be done before his hearers. See with what painful care and lucid accuracy he investigates and marshals the history of the movement of which he is the champion. The speech runs so easily that, as you listen to it or read it, you fancy you know all about the subject; your brain grasps the salient points, and you chuckle quietly to yourself [146/147] as you think what a clever fellow you are to have such a very clear idea of what is to be done. In reality, most probably, you had not the least conception of what had to be done, but the speaker's skill in giving you the leading points and in helping you to make deductions from them, has led you on, on a comparatively easy course of logical deduction, until you arrive at the conclusion to which he wishes to lead you, and which you almost unconsciously adopt as your own.

Now compare this with the ordinary method of missionary work in our parishes. I get about 200 letters a year, saying, "Will you come and give our people a stir in missionary work?" I go. The people are interested and attentive, but they are listening to a mere isolated experience, they have no conception that what they hear is really only a part of a great field of work. I have to spend half the brief time allotted to me in a sort of geographical and ethnological exposition. The next man, who comes after an interval of a year, goes through much the same experience, and if either of us is dull, the listener goes away and says he cannot support that mission, it has been so badly advocated.

Now it is quite right, that men returning [147/148] from foreign work should recount, as St. Paul and St. Barnabas did, to those who stay at home what God has done by their hands. But it is not right that it should be left to them entirely, as is too often the case. It is just as much the work of the parish priest to preach the duty of missions, and to make people understand how that duty affects them, as it is to preach any duty whatever.

I am thankful to say that this work is being far more widely understood than it used to be. Among other agencies the Junior Clergy Association of both the great societies have done much in breaking up the ground. Hardly a week passes now that I do not get a letter from some one, saying that he has been assigned Melanesia as his particular field, and asking me to give him information. And here, all of you, whether laymen or clergymen, can do immense good. First, get a general survey of the whole work. You will find the Digest of the S.P.G. help you much in doing this. Then when you know what is being done and where, select some particular mission or group of missions as your field, and make yourself master of its history, its aims, its method of working and the results. If this were done in every parish [148/149] in England, the gain to the Church abroad and the Church at home would be enormous. The returning missionary would find people who could sympathize with and understand his work, while at the same time he would stir up their zeal and enthusiasm by telling them of the power of the cross of Christ.

And you may enlist in this service intelligent laymen. They are always telling the clergy that the Church of England does not give them enough to do. What better work can you give a man to do than by saying to him, "My dear fellow, I am terribly busy. I have sick to visit, schools and sermons galore. We are going to have monthly teachings about missions in the parish. I wish you would get up Japan; here are the books, do set to work on it?" Another would do India, a third Uganda, and so on. You know how well lectures on the history of the Church have answered of late years, how men have found that lectures on the past and the growth of the Church in this land have proved most attractive. So will lectures on the present growth, if worked out systematically and well.

The place of these lectures is also worth thinking about. In the winter they can very [149/150] well fill up one of the long evenings in the schoolroom or parish-room. An attractive programme, dealing with various fields of work in succession, and illustrated now and then by magic-lantern pictures, which are as a rule easily obtainable, will do a great deal. And in the summer, a garden lecture is very attractive. I know of one clergyman at least who uses his garden systematically for such purposes. And I can imagine, in country parishes, few better ways of spending a Sunday afternoon or evening, according as you have early or late evensong, than by gathering the folk together to talk over the work which, under far different conditions but for the same Lord, is being done in distant lands.

One such gathering stands out vividly in my memory. It was in one of the Dens or "Denes" of Kent, i. e. one of the villages which had grown up in the clearings made in the great forests which in Anglo-Saxon times covered the land. There for ages men had gathered to worship God; ofttimes in fear and trembling, as the storm of some fierce invasion broke on the coast, and they were only safe because of the thick belt of woodland which hid them from the foe. Here church after church had been built; from the first, [150/151] made probably of rude slabs adzed from whole trees, such as you may still see at Grinstead in Essex, to the one which shone in the summer evening light above our heads, as we gathered in the churchyard to listen to my story. The old oak which sheltered us from the sun had seen generation after generation pass beneath it, till they came in their turn to rest in their last sleep beneath its shade. The whole scene bore witness to the past and gave the theme which told how I had seen men doing as their ancestors had done; winning a home in the midst of some great forest; spreading with an ever-increasing growth till they had conquered the land; how the church which once stood there was but the prototype of many a little shrine built by strong but rude hands in Canada, Australia, or New Zealand; and therefore how we could help to spread the knowledge of that God who for long ages had made His dwelling-place with them. And this I can say for myself, who have attended as many missionary meetings as most men, that few have moved me or helped me more than did that village gathering, taught by one of the best parish priests in England not only to enjoy their own blessings but to hand them on to others.

[152] But this is but a step to a yet closer knowledge, which I hope ere long many of the younger clergy of the Church of England will obtain. I think I alluded in one of my former lectures to the very remarkable movement which has lately taken place in the diocese of Durham. There thirty of the best of the younger clergy have written to their Bishop, and asked him to put their names on a private list, to be kept by himself, of men who are ready to go out for a certain number of years to work in the colonial or the missionary field. They say, and say truly, that a man is not always the best judge of what he is fitted for. He may not feel that the call that comes to him from this or that society is a real call to leave work in which he is most deeply interested and absorbed. He ought not to be called upon to make the election himself. But he is quite ready to go where he is sent, if he is sent by authority. And so they say if the Bishop will say to such an one, "X, I think you are the man who could do good work for a few years in such and such a diocese. I know it is in urgent need of men"; then if such a call came to any one of them they would recognize the "order" at once and go.

[153] "We say," they conclude, "that we cannot judge for ourselves the comparable needs of the foreign and home policies of the Church. We note that it is not expected of the private soldier in an earthly army to select his own post and his own manoeuvres. We do not think that it should be always left to private soldiers in the Divine army of aggression to do so. We think that those who stand on the Church's watch-towers may be willing to organize and direct us if they are convinced that we are willing to obey orders, and thankful to have them to obey."

These are splendid words; none more stirring have been heard in the Church of England for many a long year.

For they evidence--

1. A recognition, as indeed is expressly stated in the earlier part of the letter, that the home and foreign service of the Church are one. They have the ring of true catholicity; they no longer bind down men within the narrow ring of the Establishment, but they recognize that in every land and in every clime that Church has work to do. And also they feel that work done anywhere is work done for her.

2. They recognize the principle of obedience. They feel and they express that the soldiers of the Cross are soldiers--men under authority to go, if they are bidden to go, anywhere and to do anything. If you would wish to see [153/154] what a contrast this spirit is to the spirit that was found in old days--may be found still, for aught I know, in some few--read Miss Austen's account of Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice. Such words are absolutely impossible in his mouth. His words, thank God, are equally impossible in the mouths of the men who wrote that letter. "'We are ready to go where we are 'sent.'" There is the spirit which is rising in the hearts of the younger clergy of the Church of England, and it is of splendid augury for her future work. And no less thankworthy are the words of our own great Cambridge Bishop, who accepts this offer. I wish I could quote them all, but it would take rather more time than we have. You can find them for yourselves in the Guardian of Feb. 12.

Bishop Westcott says: "Your letter rightly recognizes that our ministerial commission is essentially world-wide even as our Church is, and that the choice of our place of service ought to be made in full view of the whole field." "In many cases," he goes on, "circumstances decide, and decide rightly, the place of a man's work, in others there is relative freedom." In such cases he understands (I abridge his words) that the memorialists think--

[155] 1. That a Bishop, from his age and experience, can know the needs of home and foreign work better than the younger men, and can weigh them more impartially.

2. That acting on his judgement will save them from any misgivings which might arise if the work were self-sought.

3. And above all, that if a Bishop is commissioned to send as well as ordain, he may look for special guidance in this weighty work.

Care will be needed in determining the details of the scheme, but these can be left for future consideration. "It is enough now," he adds, "to say that I accept the charge as a duty of my office." And then he goes on, in words which bear directly on our purpose to-night,--

"I accept the charge with greater hope because I feel that your movement tends to present missionary work as the work of the Church through the spiritual action of its appointed rulers, without disturbing in the least degree the work of the great societies. It shows openly that the work of our Church at home and abroad is one work, one work throughout the world, one in its conditions, its requirements, its qualifications, its outward recognition, so that by interchange of clergy many stations in the mission-field will become, so to speak, outlying parts of English parishes, and the living sense of the communion of saints will be to us even in this form a strength and an inspiration. Men" (this is the [155/156] part on which I lay stress for our present purpose) "united by such a purpose can hardly fail to deepen and strengthen intelligent interest in foreign missions, and without limiting in any way our wider obligations, call out in our whole body a worthier acknowledgement of the primary debt which our national Church owes to our fellow-citizens and fellow-subjects in other lands."

But there is an even more important and more authoritative utterance on the same subject, which I have permission to quote to you. On November 21, 1895, the Federation of Junior Clergy, in connexion with the S.P.G. meeting at Birmingham, passed a resolution in which they stated that in their belief

"There is a growing willingness on the part of the younger clergy ordained in England to devote to foreign service some of the early years of their ministry, and respectfully asked the Archbishops and Bishops to regard such service in the foreign mission-field as if rendered in the home diocese."

To this the Archbishop of Canterbury replies, December 30, 1895--

"I give you the most cordial assurance that if any young clergymen, after two or three years of work in England, so earnestly rendered as to make it clear that their heart and head are given to it, and that they have become familiar with the duties of the priesthood, and spiritually devoted to the charge of them, then go out to work in any of the colonies or India, they will not find, in any diocese I know, anything but a sincere welcome [156/157] and a sense that they have spent time and toil to the best advantage of the English Church and her children . . .

There is one thing which I would suggest to the best of men. It is that while they are away they should take the pains to keep up correspondence with those under whom and with whom they have worked before going out. Not only clergy who omit this, find that it is possible to sever themselves from the interest of their fellow-workers; but the clergy particularly can do much by creating and keeping up in their old town parishes and colleges a lively interest in the great life and surroundings of our countrymen abroad, which it behoves all to know and love. On their first return they would also do well, if it were convenient, to resume work for a while near places where their character and energy were known before. It is better thus to take up threads and bind work together than to begin life anew by a series of breaks. Young clergymen who do this will not find that their work and zeal are unesteemed by their Church any more than by their Holy Master and Lord."

I cannot add anything to these weighty words, but it is well that you should know them, for they represent a new departure in our Church. They contemplate men learning their work, so to speak, in an English parish, and then devoting some years of their life to foreign work, returning after a while with widened views and broader sympathies to carry on the work that has to be done at home. How far this plan will have to be modified for purely missionary work requires consideration.

[158] Learning the languages will require a longer time for those who go to such work than for those who go to our English-speaking colonies. But of this I am sure, that no scheme can be more full of hopeful augury, both for the Church at home and abroad, than this which has sprung spontaneously from the minds of the younger clergy themselves.

They will carry out from England the trained skill which they can acquire in a well-worked English parish; they will bring back to England a breadth and grasp of things which will be of immense service in our more confined life at home. And above all, this interchange of men will draw together, not only the Church, but the colonies and the mother country, as hardly anything else can.

And you, my friends, are going into this brotherhood which is filled with so high and lofty a spirit of duty. In a few years you will be part of it, sharers in its work and in its aspirations. It may be that some of you will elect to cast in your lot for life with those who work in foreign fields. It may be some will join the foreign service order. There is room, ample room, for both services; each will supplement and strengthen the other. In the short service regiments there are the [158/159] permanent cadres, which give consistency to the whole. But whatever you do, and wherever you are, remember that the work, the Master, the objects are all one. Whether we go or whether we stay, we have one common duty, and that is to render this great English race, to which God has given such mighty privileges, and with them such awful responsibility, more true and pure, more God-fearing and God-loving in itself, and to render it a blessing, and not a curse, to the innumerable multitudes of every tongue and people, and race and nation, over which it rules, or with which it is brought in contact.

And I humbly pray that these lectures, all imperfect as I know them to be, may have done something to show you how great the task is, and how glorious the privilege of aiding in it.

OXFORD: HORACE HART
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

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