XIII.
Odium Theologicum.

It has been the fate of all Churches to be tempted with the apple of temporal power; to lack the moderation to thrust it aside; and to fall by tasting of it. The errors that once ruined the Church of Rome—that may yet destroy her successor in England—may be watched in miniature in the South Pacific. There is something in the education of ecclesiastics, no less than in that of soldiers, that unfits them to wield the civil power. The messengers of peace and of war are prone alike to strain the authority committed to them, perhaps because they believe that the world has the same instinct of obedience as a regiment or a congregation. As in the fifteenth century the Popes, the successors of Peter the fisherman, exacted the obeisance of sovereigns, so (to strain a comparison) the followers of Him who took the world for His parish claimed from the chiefs of Tonga the same marks of respect as were paid to them by their own vassals. They mistook the enthusiasm of a hysterical people for a permanent warmth of devotion to the new faith, forgetting that the very suddenness of their conversion marked them with the brand page 205or Athens,—a people ever running after some new thing. While they were complacently receiving the homage of their flock, when they reproved the chief Vuke for presuming to stand in their presence; when they humbled the chiefs and exalted the commoners; when they taught their flocks the rudiments of a representative government; when they allowed the natives to see their thirst for money, they were infecting their cause with the disease of which it is now dying: while they wrangled with the priests of the rival Church, and taught the natives that to worship their crucified God with a visible crucifix was a degree lower than the heathenism they had cast away, they drilled with their own hands the holes by which their ship has foundered. There are many who blame Mr Baker only for the deplorable state of things that has made the Wesleyan Church in Tonga a byword throughout the southern hemisphere. Baker was not alone to blame. He must share the responsibility with the founders of the mission who begat the traditions of temporalities exacted by the ministry, of intolerance of rival creeds, and of the auri fames which their successors have inherited.

It is difficult to say which mission is most to blame for the unseemly antagonism which they displayed towards each other. The Wesleyans have reproached the Roman Catholic priests with having joined and assisted the king's enemies in a rebellion against his authority, and so justify themselves for reviling them to the half-converted natives. The reproach seems to me to be in a great measure undeserved. The Trench priests found that the Protestant missionaries had failed to convert a large body of the natives,—that they had even sanctioned an attack upon page 206them by the forces of the Protestant chiefs. What more natural than that they should take their message to the heathen who had refused Protestantism than to natives who had already accepted it? What more natural than that they should retaliate with the same weapons for the slanders heaped upon them? Is there a sadder picture in mission history than this, of men charged with the message of peace and love, choosing this distant field to fight out their old quarrel, forcing their half-savage converts to take sides with them, proclaiming aloud their divine message of peace and goodwill, and whispering gross slanders of one another into the wondering ears of those whom they were sent to teach? Had they made the civilised world the umpire of their quarrel, we might have deplored the evil chance without blaming the combatants, but since they chose to submit their theological disputes to the judgment of half-tamed savages, no censure can be too severe for them. It is no compensation that they are punished for it, that in slandering one another they have damaged the cause of both for all time. Savages are logical: it is because they are too logical that we class their intelligence as inferior to our own. These men came to teach them peace, and bade them love one another, and with the same breath they declared that the other foreigners who were preaching the same doctrine were liars and worse. If these foreigners, they argued, thus disagreed among themselves about their religion, how was it more true than the teachings of their own priests? If, while commanding to love, they could thus hate one another, which of the commandments of God need be read literally? The seed of the odium theologicum never fell upon page 207a more rankly fertile soil than in Tonga. As soon as the people had grasped the idea that their foreign leaders were not themselves above criticism, they rushed into the field of sectarian strife with the same savage ardour that had fired them in battle a few years before. The Gospel was true, but its evangelists were fallible. They did well enough as leaders of the Church forces, but they were open to the free criticism of their own followers.

Such is a fair translation of passages selected from this remarkable document, which, it is to be feared, will be criticised by others than the priests in the terms anticipated by the writer in answer No. 237. Mr Moore, who prostituted his excellent Fijian scholarship to such an end, does not bear the odium of this production alone, for, with a few redeeming exceptions, none of the missionary body have had the taste and Christian feeling to withhold their approbation. The pamphlet was widely distributed among the natives, but whenever the priests could hear of the existence of a copy, they immediately bought it up.

As lately as the end of 1892 a Mr Chapman, one of the Wesleyan missionaries in Fiji, whose excuse for his conduct was that he was returning evil for evil, translated to a public meeting of Fijians, which Roman Catholics were compelled to attend, some revoltingly horrible stories, printed by Father Chiniquy, the Canadian priest who left the Roman Church after fifty years ministration as a priest, and published two of the most obscene books in the English language. The priests, conceiving the stories to be applied personally to two of their number, sued Chapman in the Supreme Court of the colony, and though they lost their case, they had the satisfaction of hearing page 210the defendant's conduct reprobated by the Chief-Justice as it deserved. Nothing abashed, the Wesleyan body rallied to the support of their calumnious brother, and appealed to the public to subscribe the costs of his defence.

Gradually the fervour of the first converts gave place to the mere heat of partisanship. The Churches flourished simply from their rivalry with each other. The Wesleyans poured their offerings into the missionary-basins as a defiance to the taunts of the Roman Catholics. The Catholics flocked to the church festivals to prove the superior attractions of their form of worship. But after the fall of Bea, and the consequent conversion of the heathen to one Church or the other, the active quarrels between the two missions began to die down. The Wesleyans were the strongest, and the Catholics saw that they could gain nothing by over-zeal in proselytising. The king and most of the influential chiefs were on the other side, and the attractions of pictures, music, and processions in their services did not outweigh the pleasures of being allowed to pray and preach, which were permitted to every Wesleyan who had a turn in that direction. As an intelligent Wesleyan in Fiji once put it in accounting for the popularity of his Church, "among the Catholics there is no torotoro (promotion). In our Church we may hold family prayers twice a-day, and one may be a local preacher without ever entering the ministry. If that is not enough, one may enter the ministry and at last be ordained like the white clergy, and may preach continually, waxing hot in the discourse. The Papists have none of these pleasures. They may only listen to the priests without ever being allowed to preach."

The Wesleyan missionaries had made two mistakes they had humbled the chiefs, and they had vilified their rivals. They were now to make a third. Political power was in their grasp, and with the fearlessness of deep ignorance they rushed on their doom. Brought up in Australia to believe that universal suffrage and representative government is the nearest approach to Utopia attainable by mortal man, they persuaded the king and chiefs against their better judgment to exchange the ancient communal system for a bran-new constitution on the English plan. Those who have seen the machine at work in the Australian colonies will know best how it was to behave in Tonga. They had sealed the fate of their own cause. The commoners, accustomed to let their chief think for them, now found themselves free to think and act as their inclinations led them, and the first result was a weakening of the influence of the missionaries, who began to find the smattering of education they had given to their native helpers a source of danger. The native ministers had a vote in their district meetings, and began to exercise it independently. Awkward questions were whispered about salaries. What was the difference between the foreigner and the Tongan, that the one should have £200 a-year and a wooden house, and the other £20 and a grass hut? When Mr Baker brought his acquisitive genius to bear upon the system of mission collections, the conference in Sydney had still the absolute disposal of the funds, and the country was annually drained of many thousands of dollars over and above the cost of local expenditure. Demands were not unnaturally made for a share in the disposal of this money, and, as I have page 212related elsewhere, the Conference unwisely resisted the demand for home-rule until it was too late, and Mr Baker had gone over to the enemy and founded the Free Church. Then all the dormant fires of sectarian hatred burst out afresh. The majority of the native ministers, tempted by the promise of higher salaries, went over in a body to a Church in which they had greater liberty, higher pay, and a satisfied feeling of patriotism. They scarcely needed Baker's encouragement to persecute the minority that remained faithful, for they knew that upon the universality of the new Church depended their appointments. The old, regarding them as traitors, would never have taken them back except at a great disadvantage. So they persecuted, and thereby awoke in their opponents all the obstinacy of the Tongan character.

The old Church flourished under persecution as Churches always have flourished. Left contemptuously alone, it might possibly have died a natural death: under the shadow of a promise of martyrdom, some of the vigour of its lost youth returned to it. But the life-giving fire was party spirit, not religious feeling. From the establishment of the Free Church dates the real overthrow of devotional earnestness among the Tongans. The change had been long impending, for the temperament of the people is incapable of a steady warmth. A fire of enthusiasm that had blazed so fiercely must needs soon smoulder away into ashes. Henceforward the form only survived-the spirit had burnt itself out. With the Free Church a fourth party, who mockingly called themselves the Lotu jio or "Looking-on Church," came into existence. They were the lukewarm, who page 213had now an excuse for declaring their indifference. For the sake of peace they professed to belong to the Free Church, but they attended none of the services, and in reality they belonged to no Church at all. The Roman Catholics, as neutrals, sucked no small advantage out of the quarrel, for they opened their doors to all those who feared to be Wesleyans and refused to be Free Churchmen.

It is a compliment to the Rev. J. E. Moulton to say that, in their hour of need, the Wesleyans were unfortunate in their champion. They wanted a rough handed fighting man, cool, thick-skinned, and not over scrupulous, who would meet such a man as Baker on his own ground, and fight him with his own weapons. They had instead a gentleman and a scholar, full of generous impulses and enthusiasm, a born teacher, whose field was the class-room, not the atmosphere of low political intrigue. Against each successive outrage his only resource was protest; and until it was too late and he had earned the king's enmity, he failed to see that calm good-humoured toleration of insult might have under mined Baker's influence where indignant remonstrance only served to strengthen his position. He left all the fighting to his coadjutor,—a gentleman with a natural turn for litigation, whose ill-directed efforts, while they embarrassed the native Government, inflamed the chiefs of the Free Church against the people he was endeavouring to serve.

These missionaries were unable to realise that the steadfastness of their followers was obstinancy under the lash of persecution rather than the fire of religious page 214conviction. The tenets of the new Church were the same as those of the old, and therefore no conscientious scruples could have weighed with the inflexible minority. They were held really by the natural repugnance of every man of independent character to being bullied into doing a thing he has at first refused. But the missionaries expected that, as soon as the removal of Mr Baker put an end to persecution, the people would flock back to their old Church. They were bitterly disappointed when they found that very few of their old adherents cared to do so. The truth was that the old Church had become unfashionable, now that its members could no longer have the distinction of aspiring to martyrdom. Indifference had permeated the new Church and the old alike. People still went to church because the king did, and because it was the sole opportunity for the display of new clothes; but they dropped religion from their conversation, and spoke of their respective Churches only as political organisations. The Wesleyan Conference had withdrawn Mr Moulton, and substituted for him one of their ordinary ministers, ignorant of the Tongan language and character, who found himself confronted with an unexpected difficulty. The returned exiles from Fiji, of whom the majority of their leading men were composed, had been spoilt by the fuss that had been made over them. Their natural conceit as Tongans had been so fostered by their admiring friends, that they would no longer submit to the control of any foreigner were he a hundred times their minister. Perhaps the antagonism to Europeans, which the early missionaries in their war against the traders had so industriously cultivated, was page 215partly responsible for this. The missionary found himself outvoted by the members of his own district meeting, and the last vestige of the power of the missionaries was gone.

One of the strangest features in this struggle of opposing forces was the unwitting modification in the Christian code as taught by the missionaries themselves. The people were polygamists. Their climate, physique, and mode of life conduced to incontinence, which, however, was kept in check by a severe social code of their own. This the missionaries swept away. For the dread of immediate physical punishment which the people felt, the missionaries tried to substitute the fear of retribution in another world,—a contingency too remote to have much weight with them. The standard of social morality, never very high, was at once lowered, and the astonished missionaries tried in vain to stem the flowing tide with every penalty they could invent and enforce. Gradually their own sense of proportion became warped. The seventh commandment overshadowed all the others in their mental horizon. The police, taking their cue from the Sunday sermon, let felons go their way, and spent all their energies in tracking down philanderers. Even the Legislature, copying the early missionary codes, gave such a prominence to offences against the social laws, that, provided a man kept the seventh commandment in its widest application, he might commit almost any other crime in the calendar.

The change in the temper of the people has not taken place without a corresponding change in the spirit of the missionaries. Tonga and Fiji are no longer regarded as the fields for men of special talents. The young men sent page 216there by the Conference in Australia seem to be chosen at haphazard from among the ordinary recruits for the Wesleyan ministry. They themselves appear to regard their mission as a profession rather than as a call, and to attach greater importance to the details of church government than to the spirit of missionary enterprise. Few of them are sufficiently interested in the natives to care to learn more of their inner life than has a direct bearing upon their church membership. I may even say without harshness that their chief efforts are devoted to securing adequate collections, and to defeating the work of their rivals, the Roman Catholics. Prom the 'Methodist Missionary Review' of November 1892 I take the following ingenuous passage from the pen of the most active among the present missionaries in Fiji: "Our average for the past three years has been £1000 a-year. Some of our mountain sections have greatly increased their subscriptions, so that I do not walk hundreds of miles across the awful paths of Colo for nothing." In another place the same writer jocosely alludes to a curious system of remuneration: "Now there arose a new Mission Board over the brethren in foreign fields, and they said-through the General Secretary-'Behold, the children of these missionaries are more and mightier every year; come, let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply and cause a debit balance in the annual accounts. So it has come to pass that the brethren in the foreign fields have been notified that a reduction of five guineas per annum will be made on all children born after the 31st December next." One cannot forbear wondering whether this heartless order had the desired effect.

The experience of Hawaii, New Zealand, Tonga, and Fiji, goes to teach us that the active life of Christian missions in the South Seas is from fifty to seventy years. A mission was founded in New Zealand by Mr Marsden in 1814. The missionaries, being men of a lower class than those who laboured in Polynesia, used their opportunities for acquiring private property in land, a fact that, among a people so earth-hungry as the Polynesians, may have precipitated the crisis. Hauhauism, that strange compound of Christianity and paganism, broke out in 1865, and finally quenched the spark of life that remained to the mission after the war.

The mission in Tonga, founded in 1822 by Mr Lawry, and shattered by the dissensions of 1887, enjoyed an active life of sixty-five years. The Wesleyan mission in Fiji, founded in 1837, is already showing evident signs of decay. I do not allude to the practice of Tuka (Immortality), a pagan cult curiously like Hauhauism, which was put down by the Government in 1887, and has since reappeared at intervals, but to that general inanition that has proved fatal to the Church in Tonga. Nor is this surprising when one remembers upon how slender a base most of these conversions rest. A vast majority of Tongans and Fijians embraced Christianity because, for political reasons, it suited their chiefs to do so. One who was present at the conversion of an entire tribe in Fiji once gave me an account of the ceremony. A great feast was made for the missionary, who took his seat by the side of the chief. The heathen priest, taking a kava root in his hand, thus addressed the ancestor-gods: "This is the paltry feast which we, your poverty-stricken children, page 218have made for you. It is our farewell to you: do not be angry with us that we are going to leave you for a time. We are your children, but for a time we are going to worship the god of the foreigners: nevertheless, be not angry with us!" Then the gods consumed the spiritual essence of the meat, and the missionary and his suite ate its grosser material fibre and enjoyed it very much. To the converted native the heathen gods are not always false gods; they continue to exist, but they have been deserted for a time in favour of the gods of the foreigners. This is why relapses into heathenism on the part of the most promising converts will always be so dangerously easy. The spirits of their ancestors are to them what Baal and Rimmon were to the people of Israel—existing beings, who may at any time become malignant and demand propitiatory sacrifice. With so thin a curtain drawn between the old and the new faith, the fickleness of the natives, and the coolness that always follows hard upon the white heat of conversion, have doubtless each contributed their share to the decay of mission influence; but I venture to assert that the main cause has been the unseemly dissension between the Churches, and the enlistment of the natives in feuds utterly unworthy of the Christianity the missionaries profess to be teaching.

I do not forget that the Wesleyans were first in the field, and that all these evils might have been avoided if, as in British New Guinea, the Churches had agreed upon exclusive spheres of influence, with well-defined boundaries for each mission. But the time for that has gone by, and it remains for the missions to look to the condi-page 219tions of their very existence in a spirit of mutual conciliation and tolerance.

It is an ungrateful task to endeavour to pass a friendly criticism upon so privileged a body as the missionaries. No one has yet attempted it without being accused of blind prejudice or envy that wilfully ignores the good in order to drag into a false prominence the defects from which no great undertaking is free. If I seem to have erred in speaking strongly of imperfections that continue to suck the life-blood of the mission, it is because they might easily be removed if the missionaries could clear their eyes from the petty irritations of the moment, and see that their real interests lie in following the doctrine they are teaching—to have charity one toward another. Their predecessors achieved a great work. They found the natives almost irredeemable savages, and they so far influenced their outward lives that every man, woman, and child in the islands is a professing Christian; but they are going far towards casting away this precious result for want of a little patience and self-restraint. No one can admire more than I the admirable work that has been done: no one can more deplore the waste of so great an opportunity.