‘To be sure,’ is the entry on another Sunday, ’little thought I of old that Sunday after Sunday I should frequent an Independent chapel.  As for extemporary prayer not being a form, that is absurd.  These poor fellows just repeat their small stock of words over and over again, and but that they are evidently in earnest, it would seem shockingly irreverent sometimes.  Most extravagant expressions!  Tutoo is a very simple, humble-minded man, and I like him much.  He would feel the help and blessing of a Prayer-book, poor fellow, to be a guide to him; but even the Lord’s Prayer is never heard among them.’

So careful was Mr. Patteson not to offend the men who had first worked on these islands, that on one Sunday when Tutoo was ill, he merely gave a skeleton of a sermon to John Cho to preach.  On the 27th of July, however, the deputation arrived in the ’John Williams’- -two ministers, and Mr. Creagh on his way back to Nengone, and the upshot of the conference on board, after a dinner in the house of Apollo, the native teacher, was that as they had no missionary for Lifu, they made no objection to Mr. Patteson working there at present, and that if in another year they received no reinforcement from home, they would take into consideration the making over their teachers to him.  ’My position is thus far less anomalous, my responsibility much increased.  God will, I pray and trust, strengthen me to help the people and build them up in the faith of Christ.’

’August 2.—­Yesterday I preached my two first Lifu sermons; rather nervous, but I knew I had command of the language enough to explain my meaning, and I thought over the plan of my sermons and selected texts.  Fancy your worthy son stuck up in a pulpit, without any mark of the clergyman save white tie and black coat, commencing service with a hymn, then reading the second chapter of St. Matthew, quite new to them, then a prayer, extemporary, but practically working in, I hope, the principle and much of the actual language of the Prayer-book—­i.e.  Confession, prayer for pardon, expression of belief and praise—­then another hymn, the sermon about forty minutes.  Text:  “I am the Way,” &c.  Afternoon:  “Thy Word is a lantern unto my feet.”

’You can easily understand how it was simple work to point out that a man lost his way by his sin, and was sent out from dwelling with God; the recovery of the way by which we may again return to Paradise is practically the one great event which the whole Bible is concerned in teaching.  The subject admitted of any amount of illustration and any amount of reference to the great facts of Scripture history, and everything converges to the Person of Christ.  I wish them to see clearly the great points—­first, God’s infinite love, and the great facts by which He has manifested His Love from the very first, till the coming of Christ exhibited most clearly the infinite wisdom and love by which man’s return to Paradise has been effected.