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Updated: June 7, 2025
This was the island whose very position was unknown when my uncle visited those seas, and for long afterwards lay sunk in heathen darkness. It had now become the very centre of Christianising influences, whence rays of bright light were emanating and reaching the farthest islands of the Pacific Ocean. I have seldom seen a more attractive-looking spot than Raratonga appeared as we came off it.
At times he would see them in his sleep, baskets full of gems, heaps of barbaric gold and guerdon of fair women slaves, all given by heaven to the true soldier whom it had charged with the sacred work of Christianising unbelievers by means of massacre and the rack.
From this south-west corner of Scotland he spread the faith, we are told, throughout the southern Picts, that is, as far north as the Grampians. This Christianising of the Picts may not have been very lasting. Patrick more than once speaks of them as the apostate Picts. It did not prevent their ravaging Christian Britain, denuded of the Roman troops. But it had a great influence in another way.
But some people said we were fighting for equal rights; some said it was to insure good treatment for the natives; some thought we were Christianising the Boers; one man told me "the Boers wanted washing." Those excuses may have been false and hypocritical, but, at all events, they were tributes to virtue. They were a recognition that the old motives of Empire no longer sufficed.
They were clever educated men who had given their lives to christianising brainless savages in a sparsely settled country; and any news of the outer world was very welcome. They pushed back their hoods and sat about the boys, their faces beaming with interest and amusement as they listened to the adventures of those wayward youths.
The idea of restoring to Africa recaptured natives and manumitted slaves was broached in 1770 by the Rev. Samuel Hopkins, of Newport, R.I. The scheme for 'civilising and christianising' the natives assumed organic form at Washington in 1816.
But interwoven with this anglicising tendency, which was also, by the bye, a Christianising tendency, was a strong disposition, derived from the Rousseau strand, to leave other peoples alone, to facilitate even the separation and autonomy of detached portions of our own peoples, to disintegrate finally into perfect, because lawless, individuals.
The "fiestas" are supposed to have a good effect in Christianising the natives, and the saints' calendar has been considerably enlarged in that pseudo-holy land.
But it seems to me that the soothing and civilizing, and in due time Christianising, effect of personal intercourse cannot begin better than through a woman, herself of the working class, who has struggled as these poor souls have struggled, and conquered, more or less, where they are failing.
Carey and Marshman were not in Calcutta, otherwise they must have realised even then what they left to Duff to act on fourteen years after, the importance of English not only as an educating but as a Christianising instrument.
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