To these humble requisites, it appears that a missionary ought on occasion to be able to add those of a prime minister and lawgiver.  Angadhohua, a bright, clever lad, only too easily led, was to be instructed in the duties of a chief; Mr. Patteson scrupulously trying in vain to make him understand that he was a person of far more consideration and responsibility than his white visitor would be in his own country.  The point was to bring the Christian faith into connection with life and government.  ’Much talk have I had with John in order that we may try to put before them the true grounds on which they ought to embrace Christianity,’ writes Mr. Patteson, when about to visit a heathen district which had shown an inclination to abandon their old customs, ’and also the consequences to which they pledge themselves by the profession of a religion requiring purity, regularity, industry, &c., but I have little doubt that our visit now will result in the nominal profession of Christianity by many heathen.  Angadhohua, John, and I go together, and Isaka, a Samoan teacher who has been a good deal among them.  I shall make an arrangement for taking one of their leading men to New Zealand with me, that he may get some notion of what is meant by undertaking to become a Christian.  It is in many respects a great benefit to be driven back upon the very first origin of a Christian society; one sees more than ever the necessity of what our Lord has provided, a living organised community into which the baptized convert being introduced falls into his place, as it were, naturally; sees around him everything at all times to remind him that he is a regenerate man, that all things are become new.  A man in apostolic times had the lessons of the Apostles and disciples practically illustrated in the life of those with whom he associated.  The church was an expression of the verbal teaching committed to its ministers.  How clearly the beauty of this comes out when one is forced to feel the horrible blank occasioned by the absence of the living teacher, influencing, moulding, building up each individual professor of Christianity by a process always going on, though oftentimes unconsciously to him on whom it operates.

’But how is the social life to be fashioned here in Lifu according to the rule of Christ?  There is no organised body exemplifying in daily actions the teaching of the Bible.  A man goes to chapel and hears something most vague and unmeaning.  He has never been taught to grasp anything distinctly—­to represent any truth to his mind as a settled resting-place for his faith.  Who is to teach him?  What does he see around him to make him imperceptibly acquire new habits in conformity with the Bible?  Is the Christian community distinguished by any habits of social order and intercourse different from non-Christians?

’True, they don’t fight and eat one another now, but beyond that are they elevated as men?  The same dirt, the same houses, the same idle vicious habits; in most cases no sense of decency, or but very little.  Where is the expression of the Scriptural life?  Is it not a most lamentable state of things?  And whence has it arisen?  From not connecting Christian teaching in church with the improvement in social life in the hut and village, which is the necessary corollary and complement of such teaching.