The service of the Church of England was read by Mr. Summers. Hypatia was touched by the manner in which the responses were made by young and old. Nowhere in the world could more earnestness have been shown, less apparent wavering from the appointed ritual, which was wholly in the Maori tongue. She had made sufficient progress in the language to follow easily--a task lightened by the preponderance of vowels and the disuse of the perplexing consonants so frequent in European tongues. A greater advance can be made in Maori in a shorter time than in almost any living language. There is much of the _ore rotundo_ claimed for the noble fundamental languages, which now only survive among degenerate descendants of the orators, warriors, statesmen, and artists, who, while they rolled out the sonorous sentences, swayed the known world with their pre-eminence in arts and arms, speech and song. The prayers of the Anglican Church were concluded. Then the great apostle of the South Seas ascended an ornate pulpit, the gift of a few English friends of Mr. Summers, the carving of which had much impressed the native congregation, themselves by no means without practice in this ancient section of art. In his sermon--short, fervent, and chiefly persuasive--he appealed to those better feelings which the teaching of the missionary clergy, of whatever denomination, had been chiefly desirous of fostering. "What," he asked, "had been the condition of the tribes before that great and good man Marsden, the pioneer pastor, came among them? War unbridled, ruthless, remorseless, with its accompaniments still more dreadful--slavery, torture, child-murder, the eating of human flesh, practices which, to their honour be it spoken, the Maoris as a nation had discontinued. Were they not ashamed of these things?" ("Yes, yes!" from the assembled crowd.) "Who had taught them to be ashamed of these things? The missionary clergy, the pakeha from beyond the seas. Who had given them the seed, the grain, the potato, the domestic animals, the tools of iron, from which they now reaped such abundant harvests and stores of produce? Bread, flour-mills, garden-seeds and vegetables,--all these came from the pakeha. Who taught them the use of all these things? The Mikonaree. He laboured with his hands, he lived poorly, he coveted nothing for himself, he only held a small portion of their waste lands on which to grow food for himself and his family.