You will have noticed from all this how the religion of the aborigines, like all heathen religions, is based, wholly on fear. There is only one religion, the religion of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is based on Love. This is the religion we want to teach them. It alone, we know, can change their lives and drive out that awful fear. How it is changing them you will learn in the next few chapters. "The Christians," said a traveller in North Australia one day, "always look so happy. The frightened look is altogether gone. You can always tell them." The man who said this was, I am sorry to say, a Christian only in name, and had long been known as a strong opponent of all missionary work among this poor unhappy people, but this makes his words all the more remarkable. They should help to stir us up to do much more in the future than we have done in the past, and make us keener than ever to put forth all our efforts to spread the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ among them that His beautiful light may shine more and more in them and that men may take knowledge of them that they have been with Jesus.
CHAPTER XIV YARRABAH
There is an old Persian story, which some of you may know, of a wonderful magic carpet on which one only needed to stand in order to be spirited away to some other land to which one wanted to go and see strange scenes and unwonted sights.
Let us take our place on this magic carpet and utter the correct formulæ, and in a few moments we shall be far away in distant and beautiful Yarrabah on the North-eastern shores of Queensland. The name means "beautiful spot," and it is, indeed, a lovely part of wild Australia where the tropic sun looks down upon beautiful palm-trees and where birds of the gayest plumage make their home, and where the coasts are washed with coral seas.
GIRLS' CLASS AT YARRABAH SCHOOL
Yarrabah is a mission reserve which the Queensland Government gave to the Australian Church about twenty-five years ago. It covers about sixty thousand acres and no white man except the missionaries is allowed to make a home upon it. Its beginnings were most discouraging, and nothing but the indomitable faith of the first missionaries could have kept them to their work. The tribes settled on the "reserve" were extremely fierce, and within a week or two of the actual founding of the mission three men of the tribe were killed and eaten. The native who was more responsible than any others for these acts of murder and cannibalism was some years afterwards converted to Christ, baptized and confirmed, and has for years been a respected and trusted Christian. It was among such tribes that the missionaries went and made their home. Thousands of people would have been afraid to have ventured amongst them, but the missionaries (and there was a lady in their number) were so full of the love of Jesus and so earnest in their desires to win these poor degraded tribes for Him, that they never stopped to think about being afraid. It was very different to going and settling down in some town or village in China or India where there were other white people near and the dangers were not so great. There were very few white people, and probably no white women at all, nearer than Cairns, thirty miles away to the North. Only the wild monotonous bush was around them and fierce cannibals from whom at any moment a poisoned spear might come. At first all the missionaries could do was wait. A rough little house was put up close to the sea where they lived, said their prayers, and waited. After a while a few natives came and built their mias near the missionaries' home. They soon came to see that these were kind, good people who only wanted to be friendly, and little by little they began to give their confidence. Soon a little hospital was erected where sick aboriginals were attended to and healed, and a little school where the children whom their parents allowed to come and live with the missionaries were taught. To-day, about twenty-two years after its first founding, Yarrabah is one of the most wonderful industrial missions in the whole Island Continent. Please take note of those words "Industrial missions," for I want you to remember that it has been found that it is very little good indeed teaching the children or the men and women of wild Australia about the redeeming love of our Lord Jesus Christ unless they are at the same time taught the duty of honest and useful work. The mere preaching of the Gospel and the provision of a place of worship which would be enough among a more civilized people is very far from enough in wild Australia. So all missions in that land are what we call industrial.