While for several centuries missionaries of every denomination have laboured in Asia in vain, no sooner was Christianity efficiently made known to the New Zealanders, than, catching at once with a remarkable aptitude its leading characteristics, and appreciating immediately its beneficent doctrines, they accepted it; and now, together with other Polynesian islands, New Zealand affords the proudest conquest and the richest harvest of the soldier of Christ. Yet, apparently, for no nation could Christianity be less adapted, and no nation could be expected to afford less hope of speedy conversion. The pagan New Zealander was a fierce, blood-thirsty monster, spending his whole life, and finding all his pleasures, in the most savage warfare. Not content with slaying his enemies in combat, he sat down afterwards, with a joyous enthusiasm worthy of a fiend, to make a feast on their carcasses. Human sacrifices stained his altars, and hideously deformed images pourtrayed his debased notions of a God. On the other hand, the peaceable and mild Hindoos, whose religion forbids bloody sacrifices of any kind, and enjoins the careful preservation of the spirit of life, even in the meanest forms; whose singular traditions of the incarnate Chreeshna seem to point distinctly to a Messiah, and whose remarkable Trimurti, “three in one, and one in three,” seems to open a way to the facile reception of the mysterious doctrine of a Trinity in Unity, have never, as a nation, a province, or even a small village, embraced Christianity.[57] China, which has its similar traditions, whose sages have taught that “The true Holy One is to be found in the West,” and that “Eternal reason (λόγος) produced One, One produced Two, Two produced Three, and THREE produced all things,” and whose calm stoicism and severe morality are so accordant with the external symptoms of a Christian mind, has hardly furnished a single convert, and apparently feels no curiosity about the religion of the Fanqui (white devils). If history is the past teaching lessons to the future, surely our Missionary Societies might take a lesson from these facts, and withdraw their exertions from so hopeless a field as Asia, and expend them on the hopeful soil of Polynesia. Surely if the great Apostle of the Gentiles, who was specially appointed to bring into the fold of Christ “all nations,” was forbidden to preach the Word to the effete nations of Asia, it is not given to his successors to contravene the inspired mandate. Other injunctions of Scripture to the apostolic Church are rightly interpreted as applicable, and to be obeyed by the Church in all future ages; and it is a strange inconsistency, arising from a too warm and enthusiastic desire to promote the kingdom of Christ, fruitlessly to strive, in this instance, against the mandate of the Holy Spirit.