'AT SPES NON FRACTA.'

379

forms of vice have been abolished, and some of the wasting sins which have been alluded to have almost entirely vanished, the bulk of the people are Christians only in name. Independents and Romanists frankly avow the smallness of their success in producing a vital change. There remains for trial the efforts of the English Church. We wait to see what may be the effect on the Hawaiian mind of the beauty of her holiness, which has usually been made more conspicuous and intense in missionary spheres. That religion which bears on its credentials that it is pure, must also show itself gentle. It is not the rod of the avenger, but the staff of the shepherd, which will reclaim the sheep that have wandered, and guard and lead the lambs of the flock. Barnabas may prevail where Boanerges is powerless.

To take the young Hawaiian girls at an age so early that even they have not been contaminated, to keep them as in a parental home, to watch them by day and night, and screen them from sights and sounds of impurity, to teach them to control transmitted passions, and to fill their minds with interesting subjects of thought, to befriend them always, and finally to see them married respectably-these are the means by which the nation must rise in true morality, and become an increasing people-a high and inspiring task to those who undertake it, and in the hands of some Florence Nightingale an instrument of enormous power: a subject of earnest prayer for those who long for the extension of Christ's kingdom, and for the ingathering of the farthest isles in the day when the great trumpet is blown. The painter or the sentimentalist may exclaim against this change of natural habit, instincts, picturesque attitude, this assimilation of the wild and

the beautiful to the thoughts, manners, dress, and expression of a hackneyed Europe. Well, something must be sacrificed. We may have to forsake the temple of art, to dwell in the temple of God. Hawaiian maids may be no longer allowed to rise on the traveller's sight from their favourite streams, like laughing naiads; they must be won from the hula dance, and led away from every temptation, though at some loss of natural beauty and grace. Clothed, and in a better mind, they may themselves consent, willingly, to abandon tastes and pursuits in which they once rejoiced, to learn a more enduring joy in the narrow but not uncheerful path that leads towards the gates of Heaven. Even the simplicity of their flower-garlands it may be found wise to lay aside, though a sigh follow the long-loved ornament, plucked from Nature's own wardrobe; and a loving regimen may find it necessary to teach the Polynesian girls contentedly to walk discrowned on earth, that hereafter their brows may be wreathed with flowers which cannot wither.

CHAPTER XXIV.

MISSIONARY ACHIEVEMENT AND FAILURE.

HRISTIANITY has now been on its trial in Hawaii

CHR

for forty years. During all that time, its exponents have been United States missionaries of the Congregational or Independent denomination. For a quarter of a century the Church of Rome has also had a footing in the islands, and during the last ten years has proselytized with activity, and greatly extended the cords of her tent. The Roman Church, however, dwells in lands foreign to the sway of the Pope, as a body of exiles,―or, rather, as a religious clique, differing somewhat in form, under the atmospheric pressure of Protestant opinion, from the perfect development she exhibits in lands which she calls her own. As she does not exert any direct political influence in the Sandwich Islands, her action is to be regarded rather as a large exception than as an operative rule, and we do not at present concern ourselves, except incidentally, with her communion.

But forty years afford a fair opportunity of observing what life and potentiality there may be in the largest and most forcible form of dissent, unimpeded for the greater part of that time by any rival or antagonist,