Attacks on Missions. 189 
them credit anything favourable to missions, however good the 
authority? They will readily believe any story, however ab- 
surd, if it be unfavourable to missions; and missionaries 
themselves are loaded by them with offensive epithets, and the 
whole affair is denounced as a concocted business for the 
benefit of the churches at home and the lazy fortune-seekers 
abroad. 
Now these attacks are for the most part so utterly wanting in 
sense and manliness, and so transparently false to anyone who 
calmly and candidly observes the real working of a mission 
body, that they merit nothing but silent contempt. No doubt 
some who have visited the actual field of mission labours have 
written unfavourably regarding them: but generally they were 
but casual visitors, unacquainted with the people or the mis- 
sions, and sometimes, in the words of the well-known traveller 
and author, Charles Darwin, “disappointed in not finding the 
field of licentiousness quite so open as formerly, they will not 
give credit to a morality which they do not wish to practise, or 
to a religion which they undervalue, if not despise.” These 
words were written of visitors to some island in Eastern Poly- 
nesia—Tahiti I believe. 
But to come to the New Hebrides. There are eleven mis- 
sionaries at present on the group, supported by various Presby- 
terian churches and governed by a Synod composed of the 
various missionaries, which meets annually. A mission vessel 
is also supported by the churches, for the benefit of this mis- 
sion, and also a certain number of native teachers. The whole 
cost of the mission is say, in round numbers, £5000 per 
annum. 
Twenty-five years ago there was no missionary on the group. 
All the natives were alike—heathen cannibals of the worst 
stamp, having lost all that civility and hospitality that Cook 
ascribes to them, through the Ad and humane treatment of 
