Such is heathenism! Missionaries are sometimes charged with a tendency to give only the bright side of things without much reference to the other. The charge is unjust. Common decency forbids more than a suggestion of what heathenism implies. The missionaries are the ‘messengers of the churches,’ whose task it is to make the darkness light, and their narratives must necessarily bear upon the results of their labours. By God’s good help and blessing, what has been done in Central Madagascar, in the islands of the South Seas, in New Guinea, in Central Africa, in Manchuria, in Livingstonia, and in other parts of the mission field, can be told; while that which the Gospel has supplanted may well be left to be the unspeakable hardship of those who have to face it in the name of their Lord, and of our common Christianity and civilization. A famous missionary once attempted to tell his experiences as to heathenism, and got himself into trouble for his pains. Missionaries give their hearers credit for Christian common sense, and for the knowledge that there is a dark and dreadful side to missionary work, such as to justify the sacrifices of the churches and their agents in undertaking it. One significant fact may be mentioned here. While there was a name for every beast, and bird, and blade of grass, and tree, and stone, and creeping thing, there was not in the language of Madagascar a word for moral purity. Such a thing had no existence until the people received the Gospel, and learned from it to value the things that are pure, lovely, and of good report. [Illustration: MALAGASY HAIR-DRESSING. A HEATHEN WAR-DANCE.] In 1823 the work of translating the Scriptures into Malagasy was begun, and in 1824 Radàma I gave the missionaries permission to preach the Gospel in the vernacular. The natives were not a little amazed to hear a European declaring to them with fluency in their own tongue the wonderful works of God. The mission made very rapid progress for a few years. There were about a hundred schools established in the provinces of Imèrina and Vònizòngo, and some four thousand children gathered into them. These schools were not centres where a large amount of secular and a small amount of religious education was given; they were also preaching stations, visited periodically by the missionaries, where the Gospel was preached and the Scriptures were explained. The truth thus found entrance into many benighted souls, laying hold of them in a way that nothing had ever done before, proving that it was still the power of God unto salvation unto every one that believeth. Many had grown weary of their old heathenism, and were feeling after God, if haply they might find Him.