Missionary journal can see no distinction between regulating a vicious condition of society and the open encouragement and legislation of vice. It views the syphilitic ward of the Queen's Hospital as a direct premium for the continuance of a state of things which the legislature ought, in its opinion, to have made vanish with a magician's wand, or to have exorcised with an apostle's power. It shuts its eyes to the absolute benefits which the community has already received from medical treatment of the disease, both in its terrible and destructive effects on the subjects of it, and the check it has given to its spread even within the twelve months that the hospital has been open for patients. It demands war to the knife against sin and the sinner, -unenquiring condemnation and unpitying punishment. In the meantime government feels its hands strengthened by the approbation of enlightened observers, and by the progress already made in decreasing the power of a scourge which had been steadily decimating its subjects.

But it is to higher influences we must look for the possible salvation and regeneration of the Hawaiian nation. The instrument must clearly be the inculcation of a pure and gentle religion; a holy and exalted doctrine, illustrated and made living by the Christian conduct and self-denying lives of its professors and its teachers. Such influences have already had some weight; but there has been about former efforts of the American missionaries a hidden want,' which shows that vital power is lacking, the loving power which works by assimilation, the leaven which must permeate the mass and take hold of the affections and will of the natives, and convert them not into hypocrites but Christians. Whilst in some districts the more open

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forms of vice have been abolished, and some of the wasting sins which have been alluded to have almost entirely vanished, the bulk of the people are Christians only in name. Independents and Romanists frankly avow the smallness of their success in producing a vital change. There remains for trial the efforts of the English Church. We wait to see what may be the effect on the Hawaiian mind of the beauty of her holiness, which has usually been made more conspicuous and intense in missionary spheres. That religion which bears on its credentials that it is pure, must also show itself gentle. It is not the rod of the avenger, but the staff of the shepherd, which will reclaim the sheep that have wandered, and guard and lead the lambs of the flock. Barnabas may prevail where Boanerges is powerless.

To take the young Hawaiian girls at an age so early that even they have not been contaminated, to keep them as in a parental home, to watch them by day and night, and screen them from sights and sounds of impurity, to teach them to control transmitted passions, and to fill their minds with interesting subjects of thought, to befriend them always, and finally to see them married respectably-these are the means by which the nation must rise in true morality, and become an increasing people—a high and inspiring task to those who undertake it, and in the hands of some Florence Nightingale an instrument of enormous power: a subject of earnest prayer for those who long for the extension of Christ's kingdom, and for the ingathering of the farthest isles in the day when the great trumpet is blown. The painter or the sentimentalist may exclaim against this change of natural habit, instincts, picturesque attitude, this assimilation of the wild and

the beautiful to the thoughts, manners, dress, and expression of a hackneyed Europe. Well, something must be sacrificed. We may have to forsake the temple of art, to dwell in the temple of God. Hawaiian maids may be no longer allowed to rise on the traveller's sight from their favourite streams, like laughing naiads; they must be won from the hula dance, and led away from every temptation, though at some loss of natural beauty and grace. Clothed, and in a better mind, they may themselves consent, willingly, to abandon tastes and pursuits in which they once rejoiced, to learn a more enduring joy in the narrow but not uncheerful path that leads towards the gates of Heaven. Even the simplicity of their flower-garlands it may be found wise to lay aside, though a sigh follow the long-loved ornament, plucked from Nature's own wardrobe; and a loving regimen may find it necessary to teach the Polynesian girls contentedly to walk discrowned on earth, that hereafter their brows may be wreathed with flowers which cannot wither.