Ill Manning s ' Old New Zealand' 329 



Few missionaries have ever understood the fact 

 that they had to do with the egg-state of the human 

 mind, — a state in which, though they might make 

 very decent omelettes, the production of beefsteaks 

 was impossible. And it is owing to this error of 

 theirs that they have presented us with so little 

 available ' baby-thought ' in those wondrous cata- 

 logues of subscribers which they call ' Reports,' which 

 indeed they may be, but more of the names of the 

 paying converters than of the number of the paid 

 converted. If the affair was not strictly religious, it 

 would be called hard names, more particularly by 

 those who begrudge the wasted opportunities of the 

 well-salaried missionary, whose contributions to real 

 science might have been beyond counting. Their 

 idea, when they had a straight or true one, seems to 

 me to have been that the ' native ' they had to handle 

 was not a human being, not only immature, but 

 destined to remain so, as long at least as he remained 

 here ; but a grown-up creature, fully developed in 

 iniquity, and replete with the highest form of devil- 

 doctrine, requiring only to be emptied like a jug, and 

 refilled with new and recondite teaching of whatever 

 peculiar form of ' faith ' the operator happens to have 

 handy, in order to become at once the spiritual equal 

 of races who had undergone countless ages of 

 hereditary development. They might as well have 

 begun at the beginning, and tried to train a pariah 

 dog to point partridges, instead of using the pointer 

 of a hundred sires, whose very puppy instincts were 



