It was, with variations, the same story all over the world. Despite difficulties. Christianity annear ed to have made advances everywhere during the second half of the ninete enth century. To the shrewd and analytical observer the salient fact remained the almost unrelieved failure of the missions to penetrate the heartlands of the great imperial cults: Islam, the Hindu family, Confucianism , Buddhism or for that matter, Judaism. But among the primitives and the pagans, the hills tribes and the mountains, in swamps and islands - everywhere where cultural standards were low or imperial religio ns had not yet penetrated Christi anity made spectacular conquests. And even in India, China and Japan, and in cities throughout the Moslem world, the Christians could boast of flourishing, if select, Christian communities, well-staffed and amply-financed missions, and an air of confidence and hope for the future. It is true there were critics, eager to pounce on any missionary detected in an un-eva ngelical posture. Missionaries tended to take too easily to firepower, Francis McDougal, first Bishop of Labuan, reported of an attack by pirates in 1862: 'My double-barreled Torry's breechloader proved a most deadly weapon for its true shooting and certainty and rapidity of firing.’ In East Africa, the year before, Bishop Mackenzie's battles against the slave trading Ajawa, which involved burning villages, brought haughty protests from the High Church party, which kept aloof from missionary work. ‘It seems to me a frightful thing,’ grumbled Pusey, ‘that the messengers of the Gospel of Peace should in any way be connected, even by their presence, with the shedding of human blood. . . . The Gospel has always been planted not by doing, but by suffering. . . .' The missionaries retorted that this was bad history, and most of them were only too glad to invoke military aid on occasion. The Reverend Denis Kemp, from the Wesleyan Gold Coast mission, asserted, in Nine Years at the Gold Coast (1898): '| should consider myself worse than despicable if! failed to declare my first conviction that the British army and navy are today used by God for the accomplishments of His purpose.’ They were also under fewer illusions than those at home about the virtues of their ‘charges’. The Reverend Colin Rae, from the Anglican South Africa mission, spoke for the majority: ‘The native must be kept | under control, and subjected to discipline, and the keynote must be work! work! work!" How much discipline? There was constant criticism of Catholic missions for inflicting corporal punishment on natives. But then, so did all colonial (and native) governments; and, it soon emerged, so did Protestant missions, especially the Scots ones. In 1880 there was much criticism of the Free Church of Scotland mission in Nyasaland, which had a pit-prison, and where a man died after receiving over two hundred lashes. Andrew Chirnside reported to the Royal Geographical Society: 'Flogging with the whip is an everyday occurrence, three lads in one day getting upwards of 100 lashes; and it is a fact that after being flogged on several occasions, salt has been rubbed on their bleeding backs.' He claimed he had seen a man executed without trial. In 1883 there was a similar case in Nigeria where a woman died after she had been beaten and had red pepper rubbed in her wounds. These cases were rare, and caused uproar. More damaging, in the long run, was the gentle deprecation of missionary work by travelers like Mary Kingsley, whose Travels in West Africa (1897) was a huge success; she hinted that the natives were probably better if left alone, polygamy and all, and she poured scorn on missionary efforts to dress African women in the asexual 'Mother Hubbard’. In general, though, missionaries were held in high esteem, and reporting on their work was almost universally favorable. The pattern of hero-worship was set by the Livingstone legend, and in the late nineteenth century they provided a new type of hero for European, and still more American, society. Their competitors for fame, imperialists and business tycoons, had their opponents; but to all except a tiny minority, the missionaries seemed harmless as well as valiant. Biographies of well-known missionaries sold in large editions, and formed a special department of literature. S. W. Partridge, the leading performer in the field, wrote no less than thirty-six; and they often had children's editions. For the Catholics, the missionary became a new type of saint, and even the Protestants indulged in hagiography. There were children's 130