number of persons, and those, be it remembered,
chiefly men who do not now go to church
because the present arrangement is too long for
them, and too full of perpetual repetition,
would probably attend divine service, and so
would the weak, the infirm, the diseased. It
would be possible to take children to church
and expect them to behave well during a
service which would not be long enough to weary
or discourage them. While with regard to the
sermon, those persons who wished to hear it—
a willing, not an unwilling, audience—would
attend the service to which it belonged, and those
who were not disposed to hear it could stay away
without being excluded altogether from a share
in public worship. The additional reason which
has been lately urged for this change, namely, the
relief which it would afford to the officiating
clergyman, and the improvement which such a
relief might be expected to induce in his voice
and delivery, seemed the only link wanting to
make the chain of argument in favour of a
division of the present Church services, complete
and unanswerable.

Who knows what good might accrue to the
new generation from the adoption of a system
which should leave them free to look upon a
church as something else than a place of suffering
and restraint? Who knows but that the
desire to hear, might be awakened by the
withdrawal of a forced and unwelcome instruction?
Who knows what you who read these words,
and I who write them, may have lost, by being
driven in our time to such expedients for
getting through the service as have been hinted
at in this paper, or how long it takes for such
impressions and associations to be dispelled
from our minds?

NEW ZEALAND.

But a few years ago in the world's life, if many
in the history of a nation, a party of civilised
gentlemen landed one day on the shores of a
savage isle. The civilised gentlemen were
learned, skilled, and radiant—they stood on the
very pinnacle of human progress—knew all that
was to be known of human life—had fathomed
the lowest depths and soared to the upmost
heights of science—they were kings where all
other men were slaves, and gods in a world of
barbarians unreclaimed. The inhabitants of the
savage isle were painted, rude, untaught, with
lax laws and doubtful morals, unskilled in arts,
unlearned in letters, poorly fed, scantily clothed,
not housed but only sheltered, a mere stalwart
race of ignorant barbarians with fine forms, good
muscular development, and future capacity; but
as far removed from those radiant steel-clad
gentlemen, as is a naked Otaheitan savage from
a fashionable colonel in the Guards. Yet those
radiant gentlemen have gone; they are swept
from the face of the world, and lie buried fathoms
deep in the past of long ago, never to be brought
to life again, or to take part in the history of
humanity; but the barbarians are the masters of
the world, and that savage isle the centre whence
emanate the laws and the destinies of nations.
Will the same drama be played again with a
different impersonation of the characters? or is
the balance of modern civilisation hung with
such weighty chains that it can never be pulled
down again by barbarism? Will, for instance,
the Englishman and the Maori repeat the old
story of the Roman and the Anglian?—the one
carrying the light of civilisation with a high
hand through the darkness of barbarism, finally
to lose himself at that mysterious point of glory
beyond which no nation has yet passed—the
other taking up the torch and flinging the rays
farther abroad, perhaps even back to the old
land, now lying in gloom, where that torch was
first lighted? Or will the stronger element
destroy the weaker? Will the Christian man
annihilate, not reclaim, the heathen savage?
And will the result of British rule in New
Zealand be the destruction of the native race,
and no absorption or amalgamation at all?
These are interesting questions. They are, at this
moment, being asked in stern and earnest fashion
by the men who are engaged in what is called
the Waitara War—the latest outgrowth of the
struggle going on between the British settler
and the Maori holder.

There seem to be three parties in New
Zealand; the missionary party, the settlers' party,
and the Maori party; and all three have different
views, and are not able to agree upon any one
point whatever—as is the characteristic of
parties in all time. There is the most likeness
certainly between the missionary party and the
Maori; the one wishing to do, for the sake of
its own special manner of action and to uphold
certain favourite theories, what the others
demand from patriotism and the pride of race and
the natural impulse of a brave man's self-esteem.
The missionaries would keep the natives apart
and exclusive from the settlers—would have
them converted by grace alone and not by
works—influenced by spiritual teaching only,
and not by the material lessons of social
civilisation; they would pluck them as brands from
the heathen burning, and parade them before their
subscribers at home as evidence of missionary
zeal, and proofs of the crying need of heathendom
for fresh exertions; while the Maoris would
keep themselves apart from a certain patriotic
pride, and in the hope that some day they may
rule their own land in their own way, adopting
such laws of their stronger brethren as seem
good to them, and gathering into themselves the
foreign element that has visited their shores.
The settlers, on their part, desire the land for
themselves and their heirs, and see in the
Tasmania of the future only a new home and a
wider field for the wandering Anglo-Saxon
colonist, little recking if the means be the utter
ruin and decay of the ancient people, without
even the saving grace of that flattering word,
"absorption." This is what the American is
doing with the Indian; and, indeed, "to improve
the race off the face of the earth" seems the only
thing ever thought of for all aborigines by the
colonising nations of the nineteenth century.