I was not long in finding out how true the statement is that ‘There is a work to be done by missionaries which people in Christian lands hardly dream of. They have to create a moral sense before they can appeal to it--to arouse the conscience before they can look to its admonitions to enforce their teachings. Heathen consciences are seared, and their moral perceptions blunted. The memories scarcely retain anything we teach them; so low have they sunk, that the plainest text in the whole Bible cannot be understood by them. It is hard, until one goes to a heathen country, to realize how much civilization owes to Christianity.’ I found when I came to teach my own children the elements of religious truth, how quickly they apprehended them as compared with the Malagasy children; but they had been born with a measure of a mental and moral nature to which the Malagasy children were utter strangers. The Malagasy have the capacity of our Covenanting and Puritan forefathers for sermon hearing, and four sermons a Sabbath--two in the morning and two in the afternoon--of an hour each was the common thing, until the practice had to be abandoned for lack of preachers. My wife was often asked in those earlier days if I was quite well, because I had not preached quite so long as usual. Even to-day, the modern sermonette prepared for ‘home consumption’ would meet with but scant courtesy and little mercy at the hands of a Malagasy congregation. In my visits to the outlying congregations of the district I was at first much struck with the appearance of many village pastors and their wives. They were nicely and neatly dressed. The husbands wore clean white cotton pants, white shirts, and white _làmbas_ (cotton plaids); while the wives had pretty print dresses and white _làmbas_. After a few visits it occurred to me that there was a striking sameness about the dresses of the pastors’ wives; but the obvious explanation was that they had probably all come from the same piece of print.