Missionary Work in the New Hebrides.
REV. J. G. PATON, of Aniwa, who has been a missionary for twenty-seven years, gives the following summary of the work in the New Hebrides Islands, in the Home and Foreign Record of the Church of Scotland: "God has granted wonderful success to our mission, begun thirty-seven years ago among naked savages, without a written language. Then, war was the common state of society, and all killed in it were eaten by the warriors. They were all cannibals; infanticide was common; aged and sick parents were often destroyed by their children, and widows were strangled at the decease of their husbands; and all the horrors of heathenism were delighted in by the whole population. Now, of the twenty different languages spoken on the group, ten have been reduced to a written form; and the Bible, in part or in whole, is now translated into, printed, and read by the natives of those ten languages. Six missionaries were murdered, and two of them and many native teachers were eaten by the savages; many others died in beginning the work; but now we have fifteen islands occupied by missionaries, eight thousand islanders under Christian instruction, and seventy thousand beyond, all waiting, ready, and pleading for the missionary and the gospel. The whole field is white to the harvest. Among the eight thousand natives worship is regularly conducted, morning and evening, in every family, and God's blessing is asked on all food. . . . The Christian natives, without help, build their own schools and churches, and are nobly trying to pay for the printing of the Bible in their own languages; and to carry the gospel to the surrounding heathen tribes and islands. The blessed effects of the gospel teaching on the islands we occupy have led the whole group now to long and cry for its light and blessings."