AN UNLOOKED-FOR SPEECH AT A MISSIONARY CONVERSAZIONE.

Southland Times, Volume III, Issue 202, 15 January 1866, Page 3

AN UNLOOKED-FOR SPEECH AT A MISSIONARY CONVERSAZIONE.

I shall not report Joseph's speech at length, still less attempt to follow Chundango in his unctuous remarks, in the course of which he lavished flattery upon his audience to an extent even beyond what they could bear. They swallowed it, however, with tea and ices which were handed round j but I got so worked up at last by a smooth faced man, who was

the sake of the heathen, while he was living luxuriously in one of the most charming little mission establishments ever I had visited, that I made the following remarks : — " Ladies and gentlemen, when I came here this evening nothing was. further from my purpose than to address you. I cannot allow, however, the remarks of the Bishop of the Carribee Islands, of Mr. Chundango, or of Mr. Beevy to pass unnoticed. The Bishop of the Carribee Islands in the course of a very graphic account which he has given you of the progress of conversion in his diocese, and. of the number of interesting and instructive death-beds which he has witnessed, haß entered into a calculation by which it would appear that the average cost of the conversion of a human soul in those islands is a little over £6. Ladies, you pretend to believe that ; but you don't. It would be impossible for you to sit there with strings of lost human souls around your necks, and what would keep an infant school in each ear if you really believed that you could save a soul for £6. You come here and listen to gentlemen who give you an account of the sacrifices they make for the heathen, and of results which do not look so well on the spot as on paper ; and because you throw a pound into that vase in the presence of this company, you think you have done something for them too. " They may give up all,' you say, ' but we can't afford to save more than two or three souls per annum." Ladies and gentlemen, as far as my experience goes, you neither of you give up anything for the heathen. I, cannot, therefore, share in your wonder at the barren results of your missionary efforts. The Church Missionary Society, for instance, offers to a young man of the lower middles (Mr. Beevy's father was a butcher, so I did not like to enter more fully in this part of the subject) the opportunity of becoming a reverend and a gentleman, and thus advancing a step in society. It gives him £300 a-year to begin with, £80 a-year more with his first child, and £10 a-year with each succeeding olive branch. It educates these free of expense at Islington, - and it pays -an indefinite number of passages between England and the mission field, according as the health of the family requires it ; and permit me to say that, if to receive between £400 and £500 a-year in a tolerable climate, with a comfortable house, rent free, and the prospect of a pension at the end, is to give up all for the 'heathen, I have myself made the experiment without pesonal discomfort. Perhaps I speak with a certain feeling of bitterness on this subject, for I cannot forget that upon one occasion, while residing among the heathen, a gentleman who had sacrificed his all for the them, outbid me for a horse at an auction after I had run him up to sixty guineas. With such a magnificent institution as this for supplying ' purse and scrip ' and for ' taking thought of the morrow ' in the way of pensions, &c, tell me honestly whether you think you deserve real, not nominal convertions ? You have instituted a sort of ' civil service,' with which ' you compass sea and land to make one proselyte. You go to him with a number Bibles, Armstrong guns, drunken sailors, and unscrupulous traders — a combination which goes to make up what you call ' civilisation,' and you wonder that your converts are actuated by the same motive which my own servant once told me induced him to leave his own religion in which he could not venture to get drunk, and become a Christian. Do you think it is the fault of the religion that you don't make converts, or the fault of the system under which it is propagated? If you give up the ' enticing word of man's wish dom,' and tried a little of ' the demonstration of the spirit and of power,' don't you think the result would be different ? If you are only illumined by ' a dim religious light ' yourselves, how do you expect to dissipate the gross darkness of paganism? You have only got an imitation blaze that warms nobody at home, and you wonder when you take it abroad that it leaves everybody as cold and as dead as it finds i them. My dear Christian friends, in the face of the living contradiction which we all present in our conduct to the religion we profess, our missionaries can only convince the heathen of the truth of Christanity by living the life upon which that religion is based, by means of which it can alone be powerful, and which is only now not lived by Christians, because, as was prophesied, there is no ' faith on earth.' I have .spoken to you faithfully, even harshly, but, believe me, I have done so in a spirit of love. If you can take it in the same spirit, I shall feel I have done you' a great injustice." — PiwaMty, in Blackwood.