Perhaps at times I have given the missionary less than his due. I stand rebuked by a letter I picked out of a recent Pacific Island Monthly. It quoted an eminent authority who wrote in the middle of the eighteenth century and reminded his readers that the missions had appreciably reduced “the power of an idolatrous priesthood—a system of profligacy unparalleled ... infanticide ... bloody wars where the conquerors spared neither women nor children.... In a voyager to forget these things is base ingratitude; for should he chance to be at the point of shipwreck on some unknown coast, he will most devoutly pray that the lesson of the missionary may have reached thus far.”
The letter-writer reminds us that the author of these words was no missionary, nor was he rated a good Christian. Many called him an atheist or freethinker. He was Charles Darwin.
I have criticized some missionaries as I have criticized some of my own profession. But I have stumbled so often, late at night, into little lonely mission houses, to be welcomed by their poor best; I have depended so much on the missionary’s co-operation in my medical work, and so frequently seen his eagerness to learn the nature and the cure of diseases that were afflicting the tribes, that I do not wish to seem unfair.
I am speaking of the best. And I shall not take back a word I have said in disparagement of the others. Even among the best there was frequent jealousy and backbiting. Opposing missionaries were too often “sheep stealing.” Once on Ambrym I heard Smith-Rewse ask a missionary why he hadn’t been to Vila lately. “I can’t get away,” he said. “Every time I leave, those Seventh Day Adventists steal one of my villages.”
Missionaries are excellent men, average men, poor men and evil men—about like the rest of us. I do not agree with their claims of making such large numbers of true converts; but their claims as educators, humanizers and civilizers are often justly founded. Not so long ago in the Pacific the whole burden of education was left to them. And as humanitarians I praise the Presbyterians in the New Hebrides—without their intervention over the past hundred years the last native there would have died. And I have seen the quiet work of the Melanesian Mission in the Solomons where the workers are High Church, yet drudge and slave with evangelical zeal. The Melanesian Mission, I think, is doing better medical work than any of the other sectarians down there. And, not excepting the devoted Fathers of the Sacred Heart in Papua, I would call the Presbyterians of the New Hebrides the best religious civilizers.
In the Melanesian Mission were educated men and women giving their lives and all for the Cause, which paid them £40 a year. They were often short on equipment, but their hospitals were better than could be expected. Brave people, mostly celibates. I can almost forgive Bishop Baddeley for helping to wreck a great humanitarian plan by writing, in effect, “I will accept no boundaries to the Kingdom of Christ.” Baddeley had served as a colonel in the First World War, and he guarded his boundaries with a soldier’s sense of duty.
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Let me offer the Reverend Frederick J. Paton as the best example of a Presbyterian missionary. A frail-looking man of fifty-eight, crippled by a missing leg and a twisted arm, he took me in his creaky little motorboat over to Onua on Malekula. Before he had unlatched his gate I caught a scent of roses and verbena. The rich soil of the New Hebrides had grown a garden that might have smiled in Kent or Massachusetts. But his fragrant little garden contrasted with the awful untidiness inside his house. Items in the litter were too numerous to mention, except to say that he dined off one end of a long table in his big living room, and the rest of the table was given over to books, binoculars, scraps of food, discarded watches, a typewriter, some clothes—in fact about everything that Mr. Paton had put there and forgotten. He usually did his own cooking, but in our honor he brought in a couple of native teachers who stirred up a frightful mess in a very dirty kitchen. He had a bathtub, which Malakai insisted on giving a triple scrub with disinfectants before he would let me get in. I don’t know where Mr. Paton bathed, but he was always neat and clean, if shabby.
When I talked with him I realized why he was the most useful missionary in the New Hebrides. His father before him was the famous missionary-bishop, and his son Frederick’s life was devoted to distributing the John D. Paton Fund. Mr. Paton was too busy with good works to bother about his surroundings. His doors were always open to stray natives, who wandered in day and night; they just curled up on the floor and slept. While provisions held out Paton never let them go away hungry. This Australian Scot had inherited some money; however, his pocket never held two pennies to rub together.
I think it was his ambition to die poor; but when money was needed for his work he could be shrewd. He would pack and go to Sydney, where a Mission Board was never quite able to resist his plea.