sionary there, the Rev. J. L. Zillman, acknowledges: "I have found it very hard to make them understand divine things."
Such failures are not confined, however, to our gum forests. Perhaps a few millions of practical heathens may be found in Great Britain and Ireland, with all the array of preaching power. "Did the missionaries of New France," asks the historian of Labrador, "after 150 years of zeal and exertion, leave behind them a single Indian tribe whom they had actually converted to Christianity?" While missionaries were jubilant of success, and Père Lallemont wrote, "We have this year baptized more than a thousand, most of them afflicted with small-pox, of whom a large proportion have died, with every mark of having been received among the elect, and of whom there are more than three hundred and sixty infants—gathered by the angels as flowers in Paradise"—we have Baron de la Houtan writing: "Almost all the conquests gained to Christianity by the Jesuits, are those infants who have received the rites of baptism, and those old men who at the point of death find no inconvenience in dying baptized."
The Austrian Mission at Gondokoro among the Blacks of the Upper Nile, after continuing fruitless for thirteen years, was abandoned in utter despair. The Protestant Mission to the Fuegians, conducted by Captain Allan Gardiner, came to an ignominious end in 1851.
But they who ground an argument, upon the failure of such missions, that the tribes are wholly incompetent to receive scriptural truth, are mistaken. Many are the instances to the contrary. I have had personal experience in Australia of the power of religion on the hearts and lives of Aborigines. There is nothing to prove that the Australians and Tasmanians were not human beings, and as such qualified to understand the goodness of God, and feel a love toward Him. There is a poetical account of a dying Karen missionary, from the pen of the Rev. Mr. Mason, which may be pleasing to the reader of this chapter, as furnishing an illustration of the success of endeavours to convert a black race kindred to the Tasmanians:—
"As soon as the sun sank beneath the linden-leaved wood-oil trees, Quala, with the other Karens, lifted up his couch, and laid him down beneath their tall shadows. The mountains, which he was first to cross with the message of salvation, loomed
