Various prudential hints follow, on marriage and other delicate subjects. The reader will smile to learn that fifty years ago it was a question at missionary boards whether married men were not disqualified for missionary work. It was argued that their wives would be exposed to ill-usage from the natives, and that they themselves would be diverted by the anxieties or the comforts of home from their proper calling. Mr. Marsden combats both of these objections. "It appears to me that a married woman, coming along with her husband in the mission, would have no extraordinary dangers to apprehend from the natives, and would, if a prudent woman, prove the greatest comfort and protection to her husband, sweeten his toils and sustain his burdens." Beyond this even Mr. Marsden's views did not yet extend. The time had not yet come when experience should drive the friends of missions, in the failure of many a plausible theory, to fall back simply on the New Testament, not merely for their principles, for this they did, but for the best and safest precedents in missionary work. They forgot how large a share of the honours of the primitive church in its labours for Christ belong to the weaker sex. That a missionary's wife might be no less, nay in some instances far more, successful than her husband was a thought not yet entertained in missionary counsels. They did not foresee that the instruction of the native woman, and the Christian education of the heathen child, would soon become the special province of the missionary's wife. Mrs. Wilson had not yet arisen "a mother in Israel," nor Mrs. Judson, nor others whose fame is only less in missionary annals, because their work has been carried on in places less interesting, or at least less open to the world's gaze, than Calcutta and Burmah. Nor can we give more than a hesitating and partial consent to some of the following observations: "Civilization must pave the way for the conversion of the heathen. As the natives in these islands are totally unconnected with the commercial world, however friendly disposed they may be towards strangers, they are, nevertheless, in a state of gross ignorance and barbarity. They must, from their social situation, their great distance from the civilized part of the world, be less prepared to receive the gospel than the Esquimaux on the coast of Labrador or the negroes in the West Indian Islands, and other parts of the heathen world where the Moravians in general send their missionaries. The heathens in these islands are, in the strictest sense, in a state of nature. Hence it becomes the indispensable duty of the missionaries to use every means for their civilization, and not to imagine they are already prepared to receive the blessings of Divine revelation."