’The common presents that our elder scholars take or send to their friends include large iron pots for cooking, clothing, &c.  They build improved houses, and ask for small windows, &c., to put in them, boxes, carpet bags for their clothes, small writing desks, note-books, ink, pens.  They keep their best clothes very carefully, and on Sundays and great days look highly respectable.  And for years we know no instance of a baptized Melanesian throwing aside his clothing when taking his holiday at home.

’As far as I can see my way to any rule in the matter, it is this:  all that is necessary to secure decency, propriety, cleanliness, health, &c., must be provided for them.  This at once involves alteration of the houses, divisions, partitions.  People who can read and write, and cut out and sew clothes, must have light in their houses.  This involves a change of the shape and structure of the hut.  They can’t sit in clean clothes on a dirty floor, and they can’t write, or eat out of plates and use cups, &c., without tables or benches, and as they don’t want to spend ten hours in sleep or idle talk, they must have lamps for cocoa-nut and almond oil.

’These people are not taught to adopt these habits by word of mouth.  They live with us and do as we do.  Two young married women are sitting in my room now.  I didn’t call them in, nor tell them what to do.  “We didn’t quite understand what you said last night.”  “Well, I have written it out,—­there it is.”  They took, as usual, the Ms., sat down, just as you or anyone would do, at the table to read it, and are now making their short notes of it.  Anyone comes in and out at any time, when not at school, chapel, or work, just as they please.  We each have our own sitting-room, which is in this sense public property, and of course they fall into our ways.

’There is perhaps no such thing as teaching civilisation by word of command, nor religion either.  The sine qua non for the missionary—­ religious and moral character assumed to exist—­is the living with his scholars as children of his own.  And the aim is to lift them up, not by words, but by the daily life, to the sense of their capacity for becoming by God’s grace all that we are, and I pray God a great deal more; not as literary men or scholars, but as Christian men and women, better suited than we are for work among their own people.  “They shall be saved even as we.”  They have a strong sense of and acquiescence in, their own inferiority.  If we treat them as inferiors, they will always remain in that position of inferiority.

’But Christ humbled Himself and became the servant and minister that He might make us children of God and exalt us.

’It is surely very simple, but if we do thus live among them, they must necessarily accept and adopt some of our habits.  Our Lord led the life of a poor man, but He raised His disciples to the highest pitch of excellence by His Life, His Words, and His Spirit, the highest that man could receive and follow.  The analogy is surely a true one.  And exclusiveness, all the pride of race must disappear before such considerations.