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Show BY PATH AND TEAIL. 107 upon savagery anything approaching a high civilization, yet in thirty years these devout priests had changed these children of the desert and the mountain from eat ers of raw meat, stone tool users and grinders of acorn nieal in rock bowls to tillers of the soil, weavers of cloth, workers in metal, players on musical instruments and singers of sacred hymns. The consecrated man who entered upon the territory of a savage tribe to make to the owners of the soil a proclamation of the will of Jesus Christ, knew from the history of the past that he might be murdered while de livering his message. His mission demanded from him unflinching courage, good health, a living consciousness that the eye of God was upon him; demanded, in fact, that he clothe himself in the garments of the hero and the martyr. We must remember that by nature the missionaries were men like others of our race; swayed by the same impulses; animated by human hopes; agi tated by the same fears; subject to the same passions. But the practice of daily self- denial and self- sacrifice; the crucifixion of the flesh with all its earthly appetites and desires; indifference to worldly honors and worldly rewards, contempt for the vanities of society, a " life of hourly intercourse with heaven, and a supreme purity of intention raised them in time unto the plane of the super natural. Outside of the immediate companions of their order they were unknown, they coveted obscurity and were satisfied to be forgotten of men. " It is possible," writes Marcus Aurelius, " at once to be a divine man, yet a man unknown to all the world." It is impossible to study their lives and not feel that they were men eminently holy and of tender conscience, men acting under the abiding sense of the presence and omniscience of God, living in his holy fear and walking |