Slow and disheartening was their labour for many years, yet so well has that little leaven worked, that, with the exception of the Kai Tholos, the wild highlanders, who still hold out in their mountain fastnesses, the eighty inhabited isles have all abjured cannibalism and other frightful customs, and have _lotued_ (_i.e._, embraced Christianity) in such good earnest as may well put to shame many more civilised nations. I often wish that some of the cavillers who are for ever sneering at Christian missions could see something of their results in these isles. But first they would have to recall the Fiji of ten years ago, when every man’s hand was against his neighbour, and the land had no rest from barbarous intertribal wars, in which the foe, without respect of age or sex, were looked upon only in the light of so much beef; the prisoners deliberately fattened for the slaughter; dead bodies dug up that had been buried ten or twelve days, and could only be cooked in the form of puddings; limbs cut off from living men and women, and cooked and eaten in presence of the victim, who had previously been compelled to dig the oven, and cut the firewood for the purpose; and this not only in time of war, when such atrocity might be deemed less inexcusable, but in time of peace, to gratify the caprice or appetite of the moment. Think of the sick buried alive; the array of widows who were deliberately strangled on the death of any great man; the living victims who were buried beside every post of a chief’s new house, and must needs stand clasping it, while the earth was gradually heaped over their devoted heads; or those who were bound hand and foot, and laid on the ground to act as rollers, when a chief launched a new canoe, and thus doomed to a death of excruciating agony;—a time when there was not the slightest security for life or property, and no man knew how quickly his own hour of doom might come; when whole villages were depopulated simply to supply their neighbours with fresh meat! Just think of all this, and of the change that has been wrought, and then just imagine white men who can sneer at missionary work in the way they do. Now you may pass from isle to isle, certain everywhere to find the same cordial reception by kindly men and women. Every village on the eighty inhabited isles has built for itself a tidy church, and a good house for its teacher or native minister, for whom the village also provides food and clothing _Can you realise that there are nine hundred Wesleyan churches in Fiji_, at every one of which the frequent services are crowded by devout congregations; that the schools are well attended; and that the first sound which greets your ear at dawn, and the last at night, is that of hymn-singing and most fervent worship, rising from each dwelling at the hour of family prayer?