HOW PROTESTANT PREACHERS PROPAGATE THE GOSPEL.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IX, Issue 457, 13 January 1882, Page 5

HOW PROTESTANT PREACHERS PROPAGATE THE GOSPEL.

(From the San Francisco Monitor.)

We have frequently called attention in these columns to the fact that Protestant missionaries worked more for their own material benefit than for the advancement of the Christianity they were supposed to represent. This has been proved to be the rule in nearly every land into which Protestant missionaries have penetrated, under the plea of Christianizing pagans, but, in reality, for the purpose of filling up their own capacious pockets and living on the fat of the land. It was so in India, in Australia and Africa, and now we have recent developments which prove the Protestant missionaries of the Sandwich Islands to have been the most relentless, cruel and corrupt body that ever bellowed about the Bible. American Protestant missions have now been in existence in the Sandwich Islands for more than sixty years, and their continuance hai entailed a bodily curse upon the people which is rapidly depopulating the Islands. As early as 1844 there were seventy-nine Protestant prooagand'.sts among the Kanakas, and what has been the result ? Rich missionaries and a- poor, oppressed people who have been robbed of their lands, robbed of their virtue, robbed of their liberties, and then left to die by the road side or doomed to a lingering death as lepers. And all this has been the work of so-called Christian ministers who were reported to their respective societies to be '• advancing the cause of Christ among the Sandwich Island savages." Let us see how these wretched whited sepulchres disgraced the names of Christian and American by their blasphemous use of the name ot God under which to work out their iniquity. Here is an extract from a city contemporary, based on information furnished by a gentleman who wan for many years a resident of the Islands, and who knows whereof he speaks : " One sugar plantation where this slavery is now established in its most repulsive form is what is called Papala, in the Kau district of Hawaii. This is the plantation of the Hawaiian Agricultural Company, and the leading members of the company and of the owners of the plantation are leading " missionaries "of the Island. ♦• Missionaries," as used on the Islands, means not only people whose exclusive mission it is to carry tha word and the grace of God to the pagan and the benighted, but also conspicuous lay members of the tmp church as established in Honolulu by the missionary, pure and ?"|ple, and whose principle mission it is to make money out of the pagan and the benighted. Among these owners are Father Damon, called Father, though a scrupulous Presbyterian, and P. C. Jones of the firm of Brewster & Co., H. A. P. Carter, John Thos. Waterhouse, and Bishop of the firm of Bishop & Co. These are all distinguished members of the Honolulu Fort street church, which is the van-guard and the buttress of true religion in the kingdom of Kalakaua. To simple-minded labourers coming from the uncivilized South Sea Islands, " where every prospect pleases and only man is vile," to other islands where dwell kindly Christians like Damon, Jones, Carter, Waterhouse, and Bishop, must, by a parity of reasoning, be an even more pleasant prospect than the topography of the country. Honolule and Hilo ought to be havens of rest. But they are not— not to any great extent. At the Papala plantation the enforced labourers are housed as at other plantations. Bud* oao-gtory houses fifty feet long by twelve wide have been

erected and divided each into five rooms, each ten by twelve feet. If a labourer is accompanied by a wife and children, even of nearly grown sons and daughters, all arc compelled to live by day and sleep by nicrbt promiscuously in this one room. Where labourers are unaccompanied, each room in filled with them. Each plantation has a manager, whose chief duty appears to be to do nothing except receive his wages. Under him is the head luna, or overseer, who has charge of his labourers as a mass. Next are the under Ivnat, eaoh having charge of a pang of about twenty men. The Ivnas correspond very exactly in the duties discharged by them as well as in their characteristics to the whilom slave-drivers and the "Simon Legrees" of the Southern States. The labourers are compelled to work day in and day out, when not raining too hard to make the work unprofitable from 6 o'clock in the morning till 5 at night, with cessation at mid-day long enough to devour their rations, if they are equal to the task. Only sickness sufficient to make the sufferer incapable of work is accepted as a reason of remission. The luna is the sole judge of the sufficiency of the sickness, and at the eminently Christian plantation of Papala Mr. Jameson says he has seen sickness which was not considered by the luna suffic ent excuse, but which was so »evere that the sufferer had to be carried aDd laid in the six-by-four-foot cell in which those who will not work are kc>t in solitary confinement. And he has seen these same unfortunates, after days of imprisonment have assisted them to the doors of death, again carried to their hovels, little betier than the dark cell, there to die or to convalesce into a worse fate, as chance might decree." It makes us blush with shame when we reflect that the shocking slavery and cruelty described have been perpetrated by hollow-hearted wretches who went to these moment people under the pretext of preaching the gospel of Christ 1 Yet this is the Proteßtant programme in nearly every land where it has representatives, and it serves to show what a sham the whole scheme of Protestantism is, because the iniquities are not confined to any particular sent, inasm ich as " they all do it," and religious ventures in foreign lands have long been looked upon as merely legitimate commercial enterprise to put money into the pockets of the preachers. That this has been the object of Protestant missionaries in the Sandwich Islands is attested by numerous writers as well as by the facts furnished by a contemporary. In 1845 Mr. Meville visited the Islands of the Pacific, and, in bis work bubsequently published, he thus alludes to the cruelty of the Protestant missionaries over the enslaved people : " Not until I visited Honolulu," says this Protestant writer, " was I aware of the fact that the small remnant of the natives had been civilized into draught horses and evangelized into beasts of burden. But so it is I" Sir George Simpson, Rev. Guttavus Hines, and numerous other writers allude to the debased state to which Protestant preachers had reduced the Sandwich Islanders in the same vein, and this latest development is only the sequel to the many chapters of cruelty that have hitherto been written concerning Protestant propagaudism of slavery and sickness among the pagans, who, if not Christians, were at least I purer and better in the sight of God than some of the sectarian scalawags who went there to rob them of their lands and liberties, an] to inflict upon them cruelties that would bring the blush of shame to the cheeks of the greatest barbarian that ever lived. Protestantism, therefore, is the great persecutor of poor helpless pagam ia these modern days.