When we observed a band of native converts singing a hymn before advancing to battle we were filled with admiration at their piety, without perceiving that those deeper religious feelings which alone could have produced such a manifestation amongst Englishmen were entirely absent.[3] When Christianity spread through the tribes with amazing rapidity, we rejoiced over their capability for accepting the doctrines of high and pure religion, never perceiving that they accepted it simply because they thought from our superiority in ships, arms, tools, and material prosperity in general, that the "Mana" (_i.e._, luck, power, prestige) of Christianity must be greater than that of their old superstition, and would be quite ready to leave it again when they found out this was a mistake, their minds being as void of the higher religious elements as those of many savages far below them in intellectual powers. When we heard of a native chief supplying his enemy with food or ammunition to enable him to carry on the war we were charmed with his generous chivalry, and immediately endowed him with all the virtues that usually accompany such behaviour in an Englishman, blind to the fact that the chief simply liked fighting as we might like eating or sleeping, and furnished his enemy with arms and ammunition just as we might furnish one's cook with money to buy meat with.[4] [Footnote 3: The Maori notion of prayer reaches no higher than the thing we call an incantation. One day I was talking to the old Pakeha Maori (_i.e._ a white man who lives amongst the Maories) on the subject of missionary labour. At last he said, "I'll tell you a story that will establish your name for ever at Exeter Hall, only you musn't tell it quite the same way that I do. I was here at the time when both the Protestant and Roman Catholic missionaries were first beginning to make their way in the country; and the Maories of my tribe used to come to me and ask me which had the greatest 'mana' (_i.e._ fortune, prestige, power, strength)--the Protestant God or the Romanist one. I was always a good Churchman, and used to tell them that the Protestant God could lick the other into fits. There was an old Irish sailor about five miles from me who used to back up the Roman Catholic God, but I had a long start of him, and moreover _was the best fighting man_ of the two, which went a long way. In a short time I had about two hundred of the most muscular, blood-thirsty, hard-fighting Protestants you could wish to see.