'Your affectionate Cousin,
'J. C. PATTESON.'
To the sisters he wrote at the same time:—
'I hear from Miss Yonge that Mrs. Keble is very ill—dying. But, as I wrote to her, why should such things grieve us? He will soon rejoin her, and so it is all peace and comfort. He was seventy-five, I think, last St. Mark's Day, and I began a letter to him, but it was not fair to him to give him the trouble of reading it, and I tore it up. He knows without it how I do love and revere him, and I cannot pluck up courage to ask for some little book which he has used, that there may be a sort of odour of sanctity about it, just as Bishop Mackenzie's Thomas a Kempis, with him on the Zambesi, is on my table now.'
Before going forth with this 'lonely watcher' upon his voyage, the description of this season's work with his scholars must be given from a Report which he brought himself to write for the Eton Association. After saying how his efforts were directed to the forming a number of native clergy in time to work among their own people, he continues:—'When uncivilised races come into contact with civilised men, they must either be condemned to a hopeless position of inferiority, or they must be raised out of their state of ignorance and vice by appealing to those powers within them which God intended them to use, and the use of which will place them by His blessing in the possession of whatever good things may be denoted by the words Religion and Civilisation.
'Either we may say to our Melanesian scholars, "You can't expect to be like us: you must not suppose that you can ever cease to be dependent on us, you must be content always to do as you are told by us, to be like children, as in malice so in knowledge; you can never be missionaries, you may become assistant teachers to English missionaries whom you must implicitly obey, you must do work which it would not be our place to do, you must occupy all the lower and meaner offices of our society;"—or, if we do not say this (and, indeed, no one would be likely to say it), yet we may show by our treatment of our scholars that we think and mean it.
'Or we may say what was, e.g., said to a class of nineteen scholars who were reading Acts ix.
'"Did our Lord tell Saul all that he was to do?"
'"No."
'"What! not even when He appeared to him in that wonderful way from Heaven?"