Page:Madagascar - Phelps - 1883.djvu/87

 When leaving Tananarivo, and while passing through the market-place, they saw, as a parting scene, and as a horrid comment on their benevolent efforts, ten Christians who were being tormented and killed.

Madame Pfeiffer asserts that the London Missionary Society had sent a chosen member to forewarn the Queen of Mr. Lambert's designs, to assure her that the English government desired ardently to continue the same friendly relations with her country which had existed in the time of George IV., represented Mr. Lambert as a spy in the employment of the French government, and predicted that he would speedily make his appearance, accompanied by a body of French troops, to depose her in favor of her son: that the missionary read a long lecture to Prince Rakoto on the exceeding turpitude of his conduct in meditating a revolt against his royal mother, declaring that the English government had been so shocked by the news as to put on mourning: that the Prince consented to excuse himself, by asserting in reply that had he indeed intended such an act he would have merited reproach; but that such was not the case, as he merely wished to deprive the Queen of the power of perpetrating cruelties, every other privilege being retained by her, and as for himself he asked nothing at all: that the missionary had boasted everywhere that he had been invited to Madagascar by the Queen, and that he had been favorably received by her and the Prince, while the facts in the case were that after a short stay at the capital of four weeks, he was ordered to leave, against his remonstrances on account of the unhealthiness of the season, the Queen being highly exasperated against him for distributing Bibles, and the Prince resenting his behavior toward Mr. Lambert.

We mention these charges merely to show more clearly to the mind of the reader the great temptations to which missionaries are often exposed, to interfere with political matters, and thus to overlook the first great principle of their Divine Master, who rejected the offered control of all the Kingdoms of the world. If there has been any one thing that operated more than another to destroy the usefulness of the Romish missionaries in their long labors in the East, a field that has been open to them more than three hundred years, and in which their success in spreading the Gospel has amounted to little, or nothing, it is a neglect of this vital principle, and an exhibition, on the other hand, of a great aptness to proceed at once to meddle with the political relations of the countries which they