THE PIONEER MISSIONARY: Life of the Rev. Nathaniel Turner, Missionary in New Zealand, Tonga, and Australia. By his son, the Rev. J. G. Turner, of the Australasian Conference. Pp. 335. Melbourne: George Robertson; and Wesleyan Book Depots, Sydney, Melbourne, and London.

This is a most interesting little volume, a copy of which we have just received from Messrs. Walch Brothers and Birchall. The Rev. N. Turner was one of the earliest Wesleyan ministers who visited this island, and who arrived at Hobart Town in the brig "Deveron" about the middle of the year 1822.

He then went to New South Wales, and thence to New Zealand, which after nearly four years' labor amidst great discouragements and imminent perils, he was obliged to abandon in 1827. The whole mission party returned to Sydney in a whaling ship. In the same year he was sent to the island of Tonga to help to sustain the missionary work there. He remained there about three years, and returned to Sydney in 1831; in August of which he received his Conference appointment to Hobart Town, where he and his family arrived on 24th November. "With Messrs. Chapman, senior, Hiddlestone, Hopkins, Mather, Dunn, Barrett, Sherwin, and others, he was at once at home." During the interval since his former visit the population of Hobart Town had increased from 2,700 to nearly 8,000. The names and incidents met with in this part of the memoir are familiar and peculiarly interesting to Tasmanian readers; we annex one short extract: -

The periodical visits to Launceston were increasingly useful. After much effort, and some trial with the government, Mr. Turner obtained a grant for church purposes of an acre of land in Patterson Street, the site of our valuable church property there. The following reminiscence is given to the honor of the Hearer of prayer. "During my last tours to Launceston, a memorable circumstance occurred which ought to be recorded to the glory of God. Captain Horton, of Ross, had for a long time been in a declining state of health, from an affection of the throat, which up to that time had baffled all medical skill. On my arrival, I found him apparently near life's closing scene, and his wife in deep distress. The best skill had failed, and his case was deemed hopeless. We entreated Heaven fervently and importunately for his recovery, and, thank God, not in vain. On my return from Launceston, I found him greatly improved, and was assured that the change for life had commenced shortly after I had left. Captain Horton was spared to honor God with his substance."

With the close of 1835 terminated Mr. Turner's four years' term in Hobart Town, when he once more returned to Sydney, but a few months afterwards he was again despatched, with five other missionaries, to New Zealand where the mission had become sadly disordered. In August, 1839, he was removed from that sphere of labor and once more returned to Sydney, and after tarrying there a short time he was re-appointed to Hobart Town, where he arrived on 9th November, 1839, and twelve months later he was located in Launceston. Here he labored a little more than three years, and was then appointed to New Norfolk, which he left in September, 1846, once more to return to Sydney. Whilst laboring there the state of his health rendered a change indispensable, and Mr. Turner journeyed to Melbourne and Adelaide, and after about a months' absence returned to Sydney.

He was next appointed to Parramatta, subsequently visiting the gold-fields of Victoria, and thus he went on preaching and counselling wherever he was led. A life of such restless activity and excitement at last told on his frame, and he was laid aside. After much acute suffering, and although past three score years and ten, he submitted, on 7th November, 1864, to an operation of lithotomy, which was quite successful, and he appeared likely to recover; but towards the end of the month diarrhoea set in, which baffled the utmost skill and kindest attention of his medical and other friends, and about midnight on 5th November he passed away so peacefully that those who stood by did not know the moment when.

The book will be very welcome "to all who take an interest in the world's salvation," and it has a peculiar charm for Tasmanians, amongst whom the subject of it spent so many of his best days. It contains a very good steel engraving of the Rev. N. Turner.

Most of the old residents in this part of Queensland remember Mr. Turner, who died in this city some time ago. His son, the Rev. J. G. Turner, has now written a life of his father, entitled "The Pioneer Missionary; Life of the Rev. Nathaniel Turner, Missionary in New Zealand, Tonga, and Australia." The work is published for the author at the Wesleyan Conference Office, and by George Robertson, Melbourne. Copies can be had in Brisbane, we believe, of Mr. Steele chemist and druggist, Edward Street.

The "Watchman and Wesleyan Advertiser" gives the following notice of the work: -

An admirable portraiture of an excellent man, the greater portion of whose long and eventful life was spent in pioneer work, first in this country and then in the Southern World, with which is interwoven a graphic account of those fields of labor which he was called to cultivate. Mr. Turner was not a man of vast intellectual power, nor did he possess great scholarship or surpassing eloquence, but he was a plain, earnest, devoted, and eminently successful Methodist preacher, whose one aim it was to save himself and those who heard him. Converted to God in early life, and thoroughly devoted to the service of his Great Master, he, for more than half a century, was steadfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, and the consequence was, he accomplished much more than many men more richly endowed in nature than he, but who have had less singleness of aim and steadfastness of purpose. In many of the populous villages and hamlets of his own native Cheshire, which were in those days "sadly benighted and demoralised, and where it was not known that there was one pious person" when he commenced his work among them as a home missionary; in Van Diemen's Land and New South Wales among both colonists and convicts; in New Zealand, when the natives were in their most barbarous and savage state; in Tonga, before that country had embraced Christianity; and, finally, in Queensland, where, at the ripe age of more than threescore years and ten, he ceased to work and live, he was owned and honored in turning men from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God. "For more than fifty years," said the pioneer missionary, while lying on his mortal couch at Brisbane, in Queensland, prayer and praise being his chief employment, and the sacrificial and infinitely meritorious death of his adorable Lord and sole ground of his hope - "For more than fifty years I have loved and served God; I have made many mistakes, but I am not concious of having once wickedly departed from Him." No wonder that the last words of such a man were, "All is well."

The book abounds with proof that a great door and effectual has been opened for the entrance of the Gospel into those regions where Mr. Turner's lot was chiefly cast, and that although there were many adversaries and formidable difficulties, yet the Word of the Lord has had free course, and has been greatly glorified. Marvellous are many of the instances of providential interposition and Divine guidance and care which marked the early history of our Australasian missions, as detailed in this wondrous but unvarnished tale; and glorious indeed are some of the illustrations given of the grace and power of the Gospel.

The narrative is full of thrilling and most instructive incident. To a considerable extent it is autobiographical. Some time before his death, Mr. Turner so far yielded to the importunity of his family, as to place on record the leading facts and incidents of his life, not, he says, "to make a book," but to gratify his children and to prevent "an incongruous jumble of events, not quite true in themselves," in the event of any history of his life being written without proper data. Of this narrative the biographer has made good use, and we have a thoroughly interesting and valuable memoir, calculated to serve the great purposes for which its subject lived and labored.

To us it is a matter of great joy that in so many instances, in Australasia as elsewhere, young men are being raised up to carry on the work which their fathers commenced, and that so many of them are worthy of their parentage. We meet with the same names that we were wont to see in earlier days, but they are not the same persons. The fathers have fallen asleep, but instead of them we have their children, who are carrying on the same glorious strife, and who expect to see yet greater things than the past generation ever witnessed.

We predict for this first effort of authorship, from one born on missionary soil and consecrated from his birth to missionary work, an extensive circulation and great good. Every Sunday School library should have a copy. It is especially suited for reward or presentation to young persons interested in mission work. Our young missionaries also, both home and foreign, may read and study it with great advantage to themselves, as well as to those to whom they are appointed to minister. We might have enriched our column with copious extracts, but we forbear, in the hope that our readers will secure the volume for themselves, and read it with the satisfaction and pleasure which its perusal has afforded us.

There are many thoughtful and cultivated people who cannot clearly see the just place or value of missionary influence amongst the list of civilising agencies. They observe that money is subscribed largely for the propagation of religion among the heathen who are assumed to have none, but they regard the mode of investment as one which the Stock Exchange would, and properly, lightly esteem. The connection between missionary subscription boxes and dividends may be admitted to be both distant and indistinct, yet it is quite possible that the existence of a relation between the two could be clearly proven and shown. Were we told off to this task, we should ask for no more valuable book for reference and illustration than the volume before us.

For a great many other reasons we are glad that the life and labors of Nathaniel Turner have been presented to the public. Where a man gives his youth, his manhood, his old age, to one object; labors hard to accomplish it with all the energies of his body and mind, under all circumstances, in health and sickness; and, forsaking all others, keeps only to it as long as he lives, the biography of such a man, if only tolerably executed, cannot fail to be interesting; whether the object has been the manufacture of classical crockery, the manipulation of india-rubber into shoes and goloshes, or the bringing within the pale of Christianity Maories, Polynesians, and convicts. Such a story must have an element of human interest in it of which only downright stupidity can divest it. In the instance before us, the narrator has done his work well, and given to the public not a biography to glorify Wesleyan Methodism, but a volume full of suggestive and instructive history; and the reader will have arrived at different conclusions from us, if he does not admit that he has had an insight into the social, political, and religious life of the Australian Colonies, New Zealand, and of some of the South Sea Islands not possessed before, and enabling him to judge with greater accuracy of present facts and circumstances touching these localities.

In spite of stout old gentlemen who live on their money and want no changes, the way men and things take is anything but a straight line. Every now and then off we all go at a tangent, without knowing well why or where. You will generally, or at least frequently, observe, that at the corner made by our new projection there stands an individual who is the last person in the world from whom was to be expected such an unexpected propulsion. Hand-loom weaving collapses at the instance of a barber. Stage coaches vanish because a working collier says he can substitute for them something vastly better. A clergyman invents the reaping machine. Clergymen find it necessary to re-cast themselves, or else make way for enthusiastic ostlers, and as Sydney Smith angrily styled them, "beatified butchers." Missionary enterprise in India was in the first instance hammered out by a cobbler on a lapstone. All this is disconcerting, especially to people who have "invested," and not less to those whose ideas are jolted when the blackberry bush produces apples, and the apple trees Osage oranges. They may say it is impossible, and may meet in solemn committee to put down such dreadful invasion of their rights and privileges; but, after all, they have to submit, and they become, in time, absorbed in the number of those, the overwhelming majority, who accept a good thing from any hand; and their children have on their mantel-pieces statuettes of men on whom they heaped contumely, and whose lives they embittered.

The long labors and the great influence of Nathaniel Turner were owing mainly to his having had a fair start. He was born in the country, amid rural sights and sounds. He got pure fresh air to begin with, and the life of a country lad helped him to a good physical constitution. He knew nothing of "the smoky canopies" of crowded manufacturing towns, but was well acquainted with the Cheshire "incense-breathing morn." His boy life was the best apprenticeship possible for his future work - plenty to do, and not much time or inclination to sit up at night. This is not our own description, for we have heard him speak with earnestness on this point. He attributed his health and his ability to be more than theologically useful to those among whom he afterwards lived - to this cause above all others - that in youth he acquired familiarity with rustic life and occupations. So that he did not emerge from some London or Manchester warehouse, half stifled with fog and gas and tired of handling dry-goods and poring over books of account, suddenly inspired with a desire of seeing the world, and of getting some color in his cheeks. Nor was he sent to an Institution to take in a cargo of theology, to come from thence with book-lore, considerable as to quantity, but not much for useful purposes. He was taught to conduct religious services by conducting them; to preach by preaching, - and first as a substitute for others in his native place, and then as one of the regularly appointed ministers of the Wesleyan Methodist Church. Preaching twice or three times every Sunday, and similarly occupied almost every night, he had a practical training of some seven or eight years, when he was appointed to foreign missionary work in New Zealand, and sailed from England in 1822 for New Zealand in a vessel bound for Van Diemen's Land and New South Wales.

From that time until his death, a period of more than forty years, Nathaniel Turner was always hard at work, delighting in it, and towards the close of his life frequently expressing the wish that he could be a young man once more and begin again. The narrative of missionary labors in New Zealand and Tonga is full of romantic incident, and will well repay perusal, and assist to dispel the notion that missionaries are not or need not be brought into close contact with danger to life and limb, with hardships or privations. From it there can also be learned that enduring work for good can be accomplished by men and women animated by disinterested and Christian principle; and that missionary labor, aimless and Utopian as some may consider it, is fraught with benefits in which the whole world shares.

The social and religious condition of Van Diemen's Land and New South Wales fifty years ago, presents a picture on which one would not willingly dilate. It was necessary to allude to it, and briefly describe it in giving any details of the life of Nathaniel Turner, and this repulsive part of his work the author has performed with taste and judgement. We can hardly realise at the present time the cold-blooded haste with which England in times quite recent hurried away her "damaged population" from her shores, - "anywhere, anywhere, out of the world." To hope to found colonies by shipping off to them the vicious of both sexes, was, verily, a strange and futile hope. Less reasonable than for a farmer to plant rotten potatoes; they might be planted, but that would be all; while evil and wickedness have enormous powers of reproduction, and of descent to lower depths. England has paid dearly for her selfish experiment. Van Diemen's Land has not found her new name of Tasmania suffice to remove her stigma, but remains in a mildewed and stagnant condition, although nature has made her as to climate and land, capable of being a duplicate of England. The whole of the Australian colonies have been retarded and stunted by the abominable system. They have progressed, it is true, but at a miserable snail-like pace when compared to what might have reasonably been expected. But for the self-sacrificing labours of men like Nathaniel Turner their progress would have been slower still. Such men continually travelling over the land, encouraging the despairing, reclaiming the drunken, inculcating industry and frugality, advising the new arrivals, have exerted more influence for good upon the colonization of Australia than all the Acts of the colonial legislatures consolidated. Scattered here and there like salt, they have prevented the Australian colonies from absolutely stinking in the nostrils. Just let us try to imagine the state of things when a Governor of New South Wales could address a minister of religion as follows. It was in 1815.

Governor: - "Who sent you here, in the capacity of a Wesleyan missionary?"

Mr. Leigh: - "The Committee of the Society, at the request of several British emigrants, and, as I understood, with the concurrence of His Majesty's Government."

Governor: - "I regret that you have come here as a missionary, and feel sorry that I cannot give you any encouragement in that capacity."

Mr. Leigh: - "The documents which I now present to your Excellency will show you that I am legally and duly authorised to preach the Gospel in any part of His Majesty's dominions."

Governor: - "You have come to a strange country. These documents are of no value here. It is necessary we should be jealous and cautious; for a few years since we had a religious rebellion, aggravated by the bitter hostility of both Papists and Protestants. If you will take office under Government, I will find you a situation in which you may become rich, and one in which you will be much more comfortable than in going about preaching in such a colony as this."

Mr. Leigh: - "I thank your Excellency for your generous offer, but having come to New South Wales as a Wesleyan Missionary, I cannot act in any other capacity while I remain in the country."

It is but fair to say that when the missionary had stated the object of his mission and the means he intended to employ, the Governor admitted that if these were his objects, they were certainly of the first importance, and added that "if you will endeavour to impress them by the means you have now specified, I cannot but wish you all the success you can reasonably wish or desire."

We have, perhaps, written enough to induce a general and attentive perusal of the volume. We may add that it is the life of the father by one of his sons, the Rev. J. G. Turner, Wesleyan Minister. The circumstance makes it the more pleasing to add that, throughout the volume, there is a marked and pleasant absence of the tendency to run into superlatives and fulsomeness which the circumstances might be thought to render venial. It is modestly and well written, and will, we think, have, as it deserves to have, a place on the book-shelves of all our colonists. Our notice has been the more extended because of Mr. Turner's lengthened residence in Brisbane, and because many of our readers doubtless revere his memory as a private citizen as well as in his capacity as a Christian minister.

"THE PIONEER MISSIONARY: Life of the Reverend NATHANIEL TURNER, Missionary in New Zealand, Tonga, and Australia." By his SON, the Rev. J. G. Turner, of the Australasian Conference. Melbourne. George Robertson.