as snapped it up at once in order to impress you with the gorgeous
spectacle. How often, too, one is made to feel that the blatancy of
the infidel lecturer, or the flippancy of the sceptical debater, is
simply a matter of ready-made clothes. The awful grandeur of the
subjects of which they treat has evidently never appealed to them.
They are merely echoing quibbles that are as old as the hills; they are
wearing clothes that may have fitted Hobbes, Paine, or Voltaire, but
that certainly were not made to fit their more meagre stature. Doubt
is a very human and a very sacred thing, but the doubt that is merely
assumed is, of all affectations, the most repellent.

If some suspicious reader thinks that I am overestimating the danger of
wearing ready-made clothes, I need only remind him that even such
gigantic humans as James Chalmers, of New Guinea, and Robert Louis
Stevenson feared that ready-made clothes might yet stand between the
Church and her conquest of the world. Some of the missionaries
insisted in clothing the natives of New Guinea in the garb of Old
England, but Chalmers protested, and protested vigorously. 'I am
opposed to it,' he exclaimed. 'My experience is that clothing natives
is nearly as bad as introducing spirits among them. Wherever clothing
has been introduced, the natives are disappearing before various
diseases, especially consumption, and I am fully convinced that the
same will happen in New Guinea. Our civilization, whatever it is, is
unfitted for them in their present state, and no attempt should be made
to force it upon them.'

With this, Robert Louis Stevenson most cordially concurred. Nobody who
knows him will suspect Stevenson of any lack of gallantry, but he
always eyed the arrival of the missionary's wife with a certain amount
of apprehension. 'The married missionary,' says Stevenson, 'may offer
to the native what he is much in want of--a higher picture of domestic
life; but the woman at the missionary's elbow tends to keep him in
touch with Europe, and out of touch with Polynesia, and threatens to
perpetuate, and even to ingrain, parochial decencies far best
forgotten. The mind of the lady missionary tends to be continually
busied about dress. She can be taught with extreme difficulty to think
any costume decent but that to which she grew accustomed on Clapham
Common; and to gratify her prejudice, the native is put to useless
expense, his mind is tainted with the morbidities of E