’The closing stanzas of the Ordination Hymn in the “Christian Year” comforted me as I read them at night; but I had peace and comfort, thank God, all through.

’Others, too, are pressing on.  I could say, with truth, to them in the evening in the Chapel, “This is the beginning, only the beginning, the first fruit.  Many blossoms there are already.  I know that God’s Spirit is working in the hearts of some of you.  Follow that holy guidance, I pray always that you may be kept in the right way, and that you may be enabled to point it out to others, and to guide them in it.”

’And yet no words can express what the recoil of the wave heathenism is, but “when the enemy shall come in like a flood,” and it has indeed its own glorious word of Promise.  It is like one who was once a drunkard and has left off drinking, and then once more tastes the old deadly poison, and becomes mad for drink; or like the wild furious struggles (as I suppose) of poor penitents in penitentiaries, when it seems as if the devil must whirl them back into sin.  You know we see things which look like “possession,” a black cloud settling down upon the soul, overwhelming all the hopeful signs for a time.  And then, when I have my quiet talk with such an one (and only very few, and they not the best among us), he will say, “I can’t tell, I didn’t mean it.  It was not I. What was it?” And I say, “It was the devil, seeking to devour you, to drag you back into the old evil dark ways.”  “It is awful, fearful.”  “Then you must gird your loins and pray the more, and remember that you are Christ’s, that you belong to Him, that you are God’s child, that Satan has no right to claim you now.  Resist him in this name, in the strength of the Spirit whom Christ has sent to us from the Father, and he will flee from you.”

’It is of course the same more or less with us all, but it comes out in, a shape which gives it terrible reality and earnestness.  Only think, then, more than ever, of them and of me, and pray that “the Spirit of the Lord may lift up a standard against the enemy.”  At times we do seem to realise that it is a downright personal struggle for life or death.’

There the writer paused, and the next date is

’Christmas Day, 1868.

’My dearest Sisters,—­What a happy happy day!  At 12.5 A.M.  I was awoke by a party of some twenty Melanesians, headed by Mr. Bice, singing Christmas carols at my bedroom door.  It is a glass window, opening on to the verandah.  How delightful it was!  I had gone to bed with the Book of Praise by my side, and Mr. Keble’s hymn in my mind; and now the Mota versions, already familiar to us, of the Angels’ Song and of the “Light to lighten the Gentiles,” sung too by some of our heathen scholars, took up as it were the strain.  Their voices sounded so fresh and clear in the still midnight, the perfectly clear sky, the calm moon, the warm genial climate.

’I lay awake afterwards, thinking on the blessed change wrought in their minds, thinking of my happy happy lot, of how utterly undeserved it was and is, and (as is natural) losing myself in thoughts of God’s wonderful goodness and mercy and love.