ler spirits
among the race were drawn also by the social side of the new teaching;
they saw in it a prospect of ridding the land of desolating wars; but in
each case it was the true power of Christianity that operated, not the
adventitious blessings which it brought in its train.

Very interesting, as evidences of the heartfelt piety of the early
converts, are the letters which many of them wrote to Yate on the eve of
his journey to England. There is surely nothing of a merely conventional
goodness about such language as this: "I have this day, and many days,
kneeled down, and my mouth has whispered and has said loud prayers; but
I wish to know, and am saying within me, if I have prayed with my
heart. Say you, if I have prayed to God with my heart, should I say No,
and not do His bidding, as the Bible says we must and tells us how? And
should I flutter about here like a bird without wings, or like a beast
without legs, or like a fish whose tail and fins a native man has cut
off, if I had love in my heart towards God? Oh! I wish that I was not
all lip and mouth in my prayers to God. I am thinking that I may be
likened to stagnant water, that is not good, that nobody drinks, and
that does not run down in brooks, upon the banks of which kumara and
trees grow. My heart is all rock, all rock, and no good thing will grow
upon it. The lizard and the snail run over the rocks, and all evil runs
over my heart."

The anxious and self-accusing spirit which appears in this passage
deepens as the soul passes under the awe of the sacramental presence.
"My Teacher," writes another, "I have been many moons thinking about the
holy feast which Jesus Christ gave to His disciples, and told everybody
to eat it in remembrance of Him. It is not a natives' feast; for in New
Zealand everybody eats as much as he is able, and as fast as he is able;
but this is a feast of belief. If my body were hungry, I should not be
satisfied with a piece like a crumb, nor with a drop that will go in a
cockle shell; but my soul is satisfied, my heart is satisfied, though it
be a crumb and a drop. The thoughts within me yesterday were perhaps
right, and perhaps wrong. I said to myself, I am going to eat and to
drink at a table placed before us by the Great Chief of the world. I
must be very good, and must make myself good within; or, when He sees
me, He will show that He is angry. And then I thought, I will not think
anything that is not right, nor do anything t