pelling the little craft with graceful twirlings and balancings of her paddle. Sitting behind is another Maori woman, looking out upon the loveliness of the summer lake with the dark, liquid, melancholy eyes of her race. There is silence, except for an occasional murmured word in the soft Maori tongue. Silently the narrow canoe slips through the water, now in the hot sunlight, now hugging the shore in the grateful shade of the rock cliffs. Far, far away in the mist stretches the opposite shore, and for many miles beyond there is nothing that could possibly remind one of this bustling twentieth century.

The canoe is gliding along in the shadow of the steep cliffs; and my guides tell me in their low, musical voices the histories and traditions that cling about the caves above us. One they told me was the sepulchre of a slave woman whose remains would have been thought to desecrate the ancient tribal cemetery: a great cave that we had passed further down the lake. I looked eagerly at the orifice scarcely twenty feet above us; and with a quick intuitive knowledge of my unspoken wish, the nose of the canoe was thrust inshore, and we clambered out on the rocks.

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Perhaps we see something," said one of the girls, "perhaps, nothing; I do not know."

Up the cliff we scrambled by the aid of the tough creepers, and, courteously holding back, my companions yielded me the first view into the cave. I lifted my head to the cave-mouth and looked. Just below me there lay a small, perfect, woman's skull, with a lock of rusty brown hair upon it: and other bones lay scattered on a rough, brown mat on the floor of the cave. "Ai-ee," came a longdrawn exclamation of wonder from the girls; as together we gazed upon the century-old relic of the slave of their ancestors. Under the régime of the tohungas, the priests of the Maori religion, it was defilement to approach the remains of the dead, and excommunication to touch them. Knowing this, I looked somewhat apprehensively at my companions. But their Christianity stood them in good stead, and they showed no trace of superstitious terror. Indeed their attitude towards the heathen traditions of their race seemed to me an ideal one. They were never reluctant to speak about them, and when they did recount the legends, which often possessed extreme poetic beauty, it was with a half-tender, halfhumorous attitude of mind as of a man who speaks of the beliefs and thoughts of his childhood. "When I was a child I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, but now I have put off the things of childhood." That summed up exactly the attitude of these

Christian natives. One could question them freely about the beliefs and practices of pagan days, and they answered just as freely.

It was from the lips of one of the children of Mary that I learned the past history of a great hollow rock on the shore. It was, so she said, the ancient home of the Taniwha, a dreadful sea monster, which glided forth at night in the form of a star, and brought death to any who set eyes on him. No, he was never seen now, she told me with a humorous twinkle in her brown eyes, "perhaps, though, when he know you here he come out to see you." And before me lies a letter in her careful copper-plate, learned in the Sisters' school: "As for the Taniwha it hasn't come yet. I think he's still waiting for your next return, as he knew that you were very anxious to see his coming." But when they were let alone, and asked no questions, it was not the old pagan legends that came naturally to their lips: it was legends of the Saints. Lying on the brow of a hill with my Maori girl friends, I have heard in their soft-toned, hesitating English the stories of St. Tarcisius, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, St. Francis, and many others of far off days: and, listening, I have reflected on the Church Catholic, and on all she means to her children.

In New Zealand one is too often apt to look upon his darkskinned neighbors with unreflecting contempt. And it gave me many a moment of silent enjoyment to think of the horror and disgust which would have been imprinted on the visages of some of my stiff-necked acquaintances could they have seen my doings at Waihi. A day spent in canoeing on the lake with the native girls, picnicking in the bush with them, or sitting talking to them in their own houses, was closed by night prayers in the little church; and more often than not, by choir practice, in which the whole village joined. After the prayers were concluded, the congregation stood, while one of the girls went to the little American organ in the corner and played hymn after hymn. These were generally sung in four parts by the villagers, old and young; and the harmony was supplied by ear, and was invariably correct. The Maori words were sung either to an English hymn tune, or an old native air, or to an air which one of the choristers would sit down and compose, and then teach to the rest of the choir (they thought nothing of this).

One evening at practice, it was shortly before Easter, they were singing a Maori version of "O Filii et Filia" to their own air. Having mastered their melody, I told them I knew another; and playing

the old Gregorian air over once, I found it was quite strange to them. I sang the first verse of the hymn to them in Maori, whereupon the entire village sang the remaining verses to my accompaniment, and perfectly correctly. If their musical gifts would be an acquisition to any white choir, so, too, would their earnestness and reverence. Never an idle or frivolous word was spoken by man, woman or child throughout the practice, and it was concluded by a devoutlyuttered prayer said on their knees before they dispersed.

When we left the church, I was always guided up the steep mountain-track to the convent by two girls, one taking each arm, and left in safety at my own door with courteous good wishes for my night's repose. But even then my pleasant day was not yet over, for I found "community recreation" in full swing when I came back from prayers. We four, the three Sisters and myself, sat in the tiny front parlor, where there was hardly room to move without knocking over something, and for an hour the room echoed to our merriment. Jokes about the little brown school children, about the children of a larger growth down in the Pa, about the extraordinary collection of white people at Tokaanu: I heard more good stories in that little front parlor at Waihi than ever I have heard anywhere else in the same space of time.

There was the old woman whom they had christened "the hatrack," because she would sit in the aisle of the church instead of in a seat, and her husband, sitting decorously at the end of his seat, would use the head just below him to hang his hat on for safekeeping. There was the old man who complained to one of the Sisters of failing eyesight, and was in the seventh heaven when she successfully tested his eyes, and got him a suitable pair of spectacles from the nearest town. A month or so later he waylaid her in the Pa, opening his mouth wide to show his toothless gums. "Pakeha eyes kapai (very good)," he said. "You get me pakeha teeth too." It was the same old man who nearly reduced a French visiting Sister to hysterics, by taking her ample veil and wrapping it many times round his grizzled head: all as a token of his extreme respect. There was also the tale of the visitor to Waihi who sought the village with a letter of introduction to the German pastor; and accosted a workman in dungarees whom he found erecting the church. The workman referred him to the convent for information as to the priest's whereabouts, and just as the nuns were racking their brains as to what Father L expected them to tell the man, the aforesaid workman reappeared, smiling in a clerical suit of black,

to take his guest home to dinner. The priest willingly makes his house a depositary for the treasures of any of his flock. But, so said the Sisters, he did draw the line when one of the children of Mary took to walking into his house, and hanging up her precious blue cloak among his clothes for safe-keeping!

Cut off from civilization, and from all communication with other white women; and deprived even of the services of a priest for many months in the year, these three nuns were no less lighthearted than nuns in general the world over. Perched up in their little cottage above the lake, exposed to all the inclemencies of the weather, keeping house, clothing themselves, conducting a school, and nursing the sick of the Pa on the princely sum of sixty pounds a year, the three Sisters radiated the conviction that life was very well worth living. The nearest town was two days away by coach or steamer, so in hot weather fresh meat was out of the question; the fowls refused to lay for months at a time, and the commissariat department was palpably hampered for lack of funds; but the poverty that prevailed was an attractive species, reminiscent of the pages of the Fioretti. And when the clock struck nine, and I retired next door to my stretcher, the low murmur of prayer that lulled me to sleep through the thin partition seemed to strike the true keynote of the day.

The time came when I must leave Waihi, and journey back to the daily bustle of town life. Silently the laden canoe slid through the calm water, weighted down by myself and my modest piece of luggage, one of my kind hostesses, and my two faithful Maori girls, who were paddling me across the lake to meet the coach at Tokaanu. Gradually, as we drew away from the shore, the panorama of the little village straggling up the steep, green hillside grew more picturesque and enticing. Sadly I watched the score or so of native huts, in and out of which I had wandered a welcome guest; the church where I had prayed with my brown brethren; the dear, poor, little cottage convent which had housed me, and the rushing waterfall I had loved so much. Then, shrill and faint, came the tangi, the wail of the women, who stood on their thresholds waving to the departing canoe. "They say their hearts are full of love to you, and of sorrow because you go away," interpreted one of the girls softly. Not more full than was my heart, as I watched the familiar brown faces disappear in the distance, while the speed of five good horses carried me away from them and back to civilization.

THE ONE IDEAL.

BY W. E. CAMPBELL.

ROFESSOR ROYCE has written an important book on The Problem of Christianity.* For many generations books of this kind have dealt too exclusively with the spiritual needs of the individual. Our author has enlarged the scope of the problem. He is concerned not only with the spiritual needs of the individual, but also with those of the community. It is a great thing to see religion thus set forth as a bond between individual and social life. So long as people were so absorbed in the religious problem of the individual, they were only too apt to separate religion and public life. Until quite lately we were always told "that a man's religion was his own affair," as if it had nothing to do with the community at large. Consequent on this presumption, religion and business were almost severed, or at best were united by a bond of "healthy cynicism. This was very injurious to both. At any rate religion ceased to be the strong leaven in public life that it once had been.

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With a view to the remedy of this disastrous condition of affairs, Professor Royce comes forward with a thesis something like the following: A spiritual ideal must now be sought for, which is valid alike for public and private life-one which will unite and inspire them both.

An ideal is something which supplies an urgently-felt spiritual need. In discussing the problem, then, we must ask ourselves: I. Is there an urgently felt spiritual need?

2. Is there an ideal which will meet this need?

No ordinary man, in his senses, has ever believed himself to be perfect. Each one of us knows himself as a being full of human weaknesses-defects of body and soul, of memory, affection and will; our actions fall short of what we should wish them to be, and this quite apart from our sense of actual wrong-doing. In a word, the common sense of mankind accepts the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. Such, I understand, is Professor Royce's conclu

*The Problem of Christianity. Lectures delivered at The Lowell Institute in Boston, and at Manchester College, Oxford, by Josiah Royce, Professor of the History of Philosophy in Harvard University. New York: The Macmillan Co. 2 Vols. $3.50 net.