RELIGION, PAST AND PRESENT, 61 



distant Polynesia the great truths of Christianity as taught 

 by the one Church which speaks with the consciousness of 

 claimed infallibility, I am lost in admiration. These men have 

 no comfortable homes to repair to after a few years' labour 

 under sunny skies ; nor wife nor child to solace them during 

 that labour. For them life is indeed a following of the Cross, 

 which is sustained by the certainty that a crown will follow in 

 God's good time. The labours of the servants of the Propa- 

 ganda Fide are little known to the world, but they are regis- 

 tered by Him who knows His own. Barely supported, hardly 

 thought of by the bulk of Europeans, the silent work of the 

 French missionaries in Fiji goes on, and they care little for 

 human praise or human blame. Though, as Mr. Litton Forbes 

 says in ' Two Years in Fiji,' they are the most careful civilisers 

 of any religious teachers in the South Seas ; their business is a 

 school for eternity, and when their life's class-time is over, they 

 know they will reap their reward. 



The Fijians have among them legends said to be handed 

 down from time immemorial, which are strangely analogous to 

 certain portions of Mosaic history. One is, that in ages past, 

 the sea suddenly came right over the land (Na Viti Levu), 

 drowning all inhabitants except a few who escaped in a large 

 canoe, and others who at the time were gathering yaJca * on a 

 high peak not submerged. The canoe had been built on an 

 inland height, though why there, and for what reason, their 

 history sayeth not. When the inundation occurred, a number 

 of men and women got into and launched it, several being 

 crushed in the process. May there not be some connection 

 between the old Fijian custom of launching a chief's canoe over 

 human bodies, and the progress of the Hindoo Juggernaut car 



* Yaka is a fibrous plant from which the most durable fishing -nets are 

 made. 



