In the early days the missionaries were a political power. Long before the Treaty of Waitangi was signed they had attained a supreme and widespread influence among the tribes. As has been already noticed, it was their desire to have formed a Christian Maori nation, under their own ægis; and, to effect this, they seem to have disregarded the wants of their own countrymen. But all this is retrospective matter, with which it is not now necessary to deal. Neither may I revert to the action of missionaries in the young days of the colony, either with regard to the general government, or to the land-sharking attributed to certain of their number. Too much acrimony has been given rise to already by the discussion of such topics. The missionary influence has now less practical power, perhaps, than clerical direction in England. Only among secluded hapu (communities) is anything resembling the old force to be found, and there it is necessarily limited and localized. It is felt more among the elders than among the younger generations, who have learnt to read and write, have mixed more with Pakeha, and whose minds are consequently more open, and less inclined to accept spiritual authority as absolute. Their conceptions are not the same as their fathers', to whose minds Christianity came as a new form of tapu, and to whom the missionary appeared as possessor of a more powerful mana than the tohunga. Sunday is a kind of tapu day with the Maori. They are often more Sabbatarian than Scotsmen, and more pharisaic than the Pharisees themselves. To the letter of the law they pay the minutest attention, whether they estimate its spirit rightly or not. But there is great diversity of character in this as in other matters, and what is recorded of one tribe or community will not always apply to all. The perfect equality with the Pakeha that the Maori enjoy, and the degree of education that has grown up among them, have produced effects. Among others is a gradual change from fervour to hypocrisy, and from an exaggerated piety to a lesser regard for the forms of religion. Year by year fewer tales will be told of Maori affectations, simple pieties, or childish formalism. Religion is often the fashion in some of their communities, and is entertained with the most rigid observance. Travellers coming to a Maori kainga upon a Sunday, have been denied shelter and food until sunrise on Monday; and, when Monday came, they have been cheated by the same tattooed Pharisees, who were too sanctimonious to sell a potato to a hungry traveller upon the Sabbath, or to help him build a hut as shelter from the wind and rain.