The Southland Times PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. Luceo Non Uro. FRIDAY, 19th APRIL, 1889.

Southland Times, Issue 10142, 19 April 1889, Page 2

The Southland Times PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. Luceo Non Uro. FRIDAY, 19th APRIL, 1889.

There was a time, and that not very long ago, when Christian missions to savage tribes were ignored if not positively disliked by the politicians even of Christian nations. Missionaries were sometimes actually forbidden to follow their divine calling by representatives of the British Crown, and they had as a rale to bear the contempt and ridicule of the fashionable world. Bat all that is now changed. A cablegram which we published last week Bhows that missions are acknowledged to be of the highest value as a civilizing ageacy. Dr McGregor, the Commissioner in Few Guinea, in his report laid on the table of the House of Commons, says that the Roman Catholic missions of New Gruinea have proved useful pioneers of settlement, and urges an increase of Protestant Missions. Fifty years ago, or perhaps a little more, such a statement would have been received with derisive laughter in the House. Towards the beginning of the century an English clergyman, the Rev. Sydney Smith, contributed a pouple of articles to the Edinburgh Review, in which be strained, and we may add prostituted, his splendid wit for the purpose of turning the missions of the Wesleyan Methodists into ridicule. These articles are still reprinted in popular editions of his works, much to the detriment of the witty cleric's memory. Nay, some forty years later another English clergyman, of a widely different type, the Rev. Charles Kingsley, was in one of his books tempted by the evil custom of the time to sneer at the humble but devoted Baptist missionaries of that time. Kingsley would not have done so in bis hter years, and the pity is that he did not expunge the offensive sentences, which were, we verily believe, a mere inadvertency, from the pages of Alton Locke. But the tide of -public feeling has turned in favour of Christian missions, and very markedly within the last twenty years. It is sometimes said by our Freethought friends that Chris* tianifcy is on a the wane, that men are too enlightened "in this scientific age to follow their fathers in believing the fables of an exploded revelation. So some deluded people talk,blind to what is going on everywhere around them. When Paganism was on the decline in the Woman Empire, the nations in which Christianity was spreading did not go on building temples for the worship of their old deities. But was there ever an age more remarkable than the pi'esent for church building and church organisation at home and missionary effort abroad ? Even if Christianity were demonstrated to be false — a thing impossible to imagine — experience would bid men continue to profess and support it for the pake of its civilising power. Churches, to take the lowest view of them, are a most efficient kind of moral police ; and it is quite certain that bavace peoples could not be civilised or humanised without their aid. But for the missionaries Fiji, for instance, would not have been opened to the enterprise of the European planter and trader. By no other means could the ferocious inhabitants have been tamed into denizens of the industrial world, It is not however by any reasons or motives of this Bort that the zeal of the churches for the propagation of the faith amongst the outcast nations is stimulated at the present time. ■ They still believe in the power of the doctrines which they teach ; and they do not send forth their missionaries to* prepare the way for trading companies and annexing governments. Now however that statesmen recognise the value of missions in that respect, it. ought to be their endeavour to protect thSm in every possible way. Some years ago Professor Newman wrote an article in Frazer's Magazine in which he pointed out that commerce was one of the .causes of the vast amount of cruelty that existed in thejyorld. Trading with uncivilised ' nations certainly does not tend to raise the moral standard of the white man. It has the very opposite effect ; it . mikes sw»g.ej of ouymq C9U&tr?m.en,

heirs of centuries of civilisation though j they be. Many a mission station has suffered severely, while some have been utterly ruined through the traders. We do not refer merely to the kidnapping labour traders Of the Western Pacific.; those agents' of firms at Home who give the natives spirits of the fieriest and vilest description in exchange for their products are every whit as bad. The whole class may be described as natural enemies of the good work^arried on by the churches in savage countries, as has been proved again and again, in Africa, in the South Seas, and in other places. It would then be only fair, to take no higher ground, that the civilising work of the missionaries — - that which alone makes settlement and commerce possible in many parts of the world— should be protected as far as possible frora> the' ravages of such unscrupulous traders.