of them gave them a higher claim to respect.  To do the Maoris justice, they recognised it, and the long journeys which the preachers of peace were able to make from tribe to tribe of cannibals and warriors say something for the generosity of the latter as well as for the devotion of the travellers.  For fifty years after Marsden’s landing no white missionary lost his life by Maori hands.  Almost every less serious injury had to be endured.  In the face of hardship, insult, and plunder, the work went on.  A schooner, the Herald, was built in the Bay of Islands to act as messenger and carrier between the missionary stations, which—­pleasant oases in the desert of barbarism—­began to dot the North Island from Whangaroa as far south as Rotorua among the Hot Lakes.  By 1838 there were thirteen of them.  The ruins of some are still to be seen, surrounded by straggling plots run to waste, “where once a garden smiled.”  When Charles Darwin, during the voyage of the Beagle, visited the Bay of Islands, the missionary station at Waimate struck him as the one bright spot in a gloomy and ill-ordered land.  Darwin, by the way, was singularly despondent in his estimate both of Australia and New Zealand.  Colonial evolution was clearly not amongst his studies.

[Illustration:  CARVED GATEWAY OF MAORI VILLAGE

From a Sketch by GENERAL ROBLEY.]

Colonists as a rule shrug their shoulders when questioned as to the depth of Maori religious feeling.  It is enough to point out that a Christianity which induced barbarian masters to release their slaves without payment or condition must have had a reality in it at which the kindred of Anglo-Saxon sugar-planters have no right to sneer.  Odd were the absurdities of Maori lay preachers, and knavery was sometimes added to absurdity.  Yet these dark-skinned teachers carried Christianity into a hundred nooks and corners.  Most of them were honest enthusiasts.  Two faced certain death in the endeavour to carry the Gospel to the Taupo heathen, and met their fate with cheerful courage.  Comic as Maori sectarianism became, it was not more ridiculous than British.  It is true that rival tribes gloried in belonging to different denominations, and in slighting converts belonging to other churches.  On one occasion, a white wayfarer, when asking shelter for the night at a pa, was gravely asked to name his church.  He recognised that his night’s shelter was at stake, and had no notion what was the reigning sect of the village.  Sharpened by hunger, his wit was equal to the emergency, and his answer, “the true church,” gained him supper and a bed.  Too much stress has been laid on the spectacle of missionaries engaging in public controversies, and of semi-savage converts wrangling over rites and ceremonies and discussing points of theology which might well puzzle a Greek metaphysician.  Such incidents were but an efflorescence on the surface of what for a number of years was a true and general earnestness.