did. He knew they were Protestants, but he probably hoped by freeing

them to make Romanists of them, and to be able to make good use of a man like Razàka. In this he was disappointed, for Razàka and one of his companions refused to change their religion. At this the Jesuit was wrathful. He first tried to win them over, then he tried threatening them, and at last he sent them as slaves to Réunion. Their case was very pitiable--strangers in a strange land, free men and yet treated as slaves. No doubt they would have fared far better if they would have consented to change their religion and become Roman Catholics; but they set their faces like flint against doing so, and they had to suffer for it. On March 5, 1855, they were put on board ship to be taken to Réunion, which they reached on April 1. The scenes that Razàka witnessed on board the slave-ship and at Nòsibè dare not be described.

At Réunion the Jesuits tried hard to persuade Razàka to marry one of their Catholic girls; but he refused, as he said he had a wife in Madagascar. They said: ‘Very likely she has gone all wrong by this time, or, regarding you as dead, has married some one else.’ He answered that he did not think that probable; but in any case he would wait to see before taking another wife. They wanted to rebaptize him. He told them he had been baptized, but if it was likely to do him any good, he had no objection to being done again. They said his Protestant baptism was of no avail, as it had not been performed by a priest. He asked in whose name they baptized, and they replied, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He said: ‘It was in Their name that I was baptized, and I don’t see that being baptized again in Their name will do me any good’; and so he refused to submit to a second baptism.

When they found that they could make nothing of him, and there was a danger of his even turning some they had from the Roman Catholic faith, their treatment of him changed. As he knew his Bible well, had a good memory, and the gift of exposition, when he and the others were shut up in the dormitory at night, he used to recount to them the stories of the Old Testament, and the parables of the New, repeat and explain the meaning of hundreds of verses in the Gospels and the Epistles, until the faith of the listeners in the teaching of the Jesuits began to be greatly shaken. When this was discovered, the anger of the Jesuits knew no bounds; and, as they had no hope of ever being able to make a convert of him, they determined to get rid of him and his companion. On learning this, Razàka and his friend begged to be sent to Mauritius, to be sold to the Rev. Mr. Le Brun, the Protestant missionary, afterwards pastor there; but they would not do that. ‘No,’ they said, ‘we shall send you back to Madagascar, you ungrateful creatures.’

Accordingly, on March 20, 1856, the two were shipped off to the Island of St. Mary’s, which they reached after a voyage of three days, and from there they got over to the mainland, and started up country for home, where, after having been away nearly two years, they arrived on April 7, much to the surprise and joy of their wives, children, and companions.

On July 31, 1861, Rànavàlona I died, and persecution was at an end. All were then free to worship God as they pleased. In 1863 a building was erected in Fìhàonana, but it was soon found to be far too small for the numbers who came together. After a time small churches were formed, and buildings erected in most of the other large villages. Razàka founded some forty of these small churches in the Fìhàonana district in Vònizòngo. He was often away from home for weeks, and even months, teaching, preaching, and founding churches. All this was a pure labour of love on his part; for he obtained no recognition of his work in any way, except that the people looked up to him as their father in the faith, and the God-appointed apostle and ‘father and mother’ of the district.

The late Dr. Mullens met with Razàka when in Madagascar in 1873, and, in his _Twelve Months in Madagascar_, he says: ‘Of Razàka, the pastor of the church at Fìhàonana, Mr. M. spoke much. It was a great pleasure to Mr. Pillans and myself to see this good man: to talk with him of the hard days of trial; and to hear from his own lips the story of the sufferings he had endured. He told us of the meetings which the fugitive Christians held for worship and mutual help. They used to come long distances to such meetings; tracts were lent from one to the other, as a tract could often be carried and hidden away, when a Bible or a Testament could not. Parts of the New Testament were lent about, even to single leaves; and leaves of the hymn-book and the _Pilgrim’s Progress_. He said they used often to long for a rainy night, in order that they might be able to sing. He showed us the underground passage, beneath the floor of his huts (from the one rice-pit to another, and from that out to the hollow ditch), by which, when the soldiers came to search, the inmates and visitors could escape. He accompanied us to a pile of immense boulders (in the circle formed by them the persecuted Christians met for worship on the Sabbath mornings, during lulls in the persecution), and showed us the “Cave” beneath the big boulder, into which they used to creep to have a prayer-meeting, and in the dark corner of which the Bible was hid for so long. He brought vividly before us the sufferings and persecutions which his heroic brethren and himself had endured; and in him we realized something of the power of that faith by which all had been sustained. Few finer bodies of Christians have been won for Christ by modern missions than those faithful men and women in Vònizòngo.’

At my request, Razàka wrote an account of his _Life and Times_, but he stipulated that it was not to be published during his lifetime, in case it might get him into trouble with the government. It was published by instalments, first in _Good Words_, and then as a small booklet, hundreds of which have been given away as school prizes.

I had the satisfaction of seeing my dear old friend four days before his death. I was in the neighbourhood of Fìhàonana, on my autumnal tour through my district, and went over on the Sabbath morning to visit him and our other friends at our old station, and to preach for them. I found him prostrated with malarial fever, but had no idea he was so near home--so near hearing the welcome, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant!’ I was never more struck with the calm Christian resignation of the man than I was on that occasion. There he lay, sweltering in the fever--but not a murmur passed his lips. His honest face beamed amid his sufferings, as if light from the ‘better land’ was already falling on it. He expressed his sorrow at being found prostrated with fever, when his friend had come so far to see him, as also his deep disappointment at not being able to go to church to hear me preach. He passed quietly away the following Thursday, July 30.

‘On the Saturday previous, he told us,’ said one of his fellow pastors, ‘that he would like to preach next day’ (although it was not his turn to do so, the first Sabbath of August--the Communion Sabbath--being his turn). His fellow pastors agreed to his wish; but he was never able to carry out his intention; for the following day found him suffering from fever and pneumonia, and of this he died. The day before his death he said: ‘We do not know at all what shall be the day of our death.’ About the middle of the day on which he died he said; ‘Prayer is the breath of the believer,’ and also: ‘Jehovah will answer prayer.’ He asked them to read Isaiah lxi to him, ‘The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, &c.’ He asked for his fellow pastors to be called, and they came and prayed with him. His wife and they asked how he felt, when he replied: ‘There is only a very little (life, or way to go) left.’ Just before he died he said to his daughter-in-law: ‘Don’t look at me any more!’ perhaps he thought she would be frightened if she saw him expire; and so about three o’clock in the afternoon of Thursday, July 31, 1885, he passed to his rest and his reward.

The death of Razàka was a very great loss to the mother-church at Fìhàonana, and to all the churches of the district, a far greater loss than the loss of their missionary: for he was ‘father and mother’ to them all; and they were all very deeply distressed at his death. They realized that a prince and a great man had fallen in the Church of God; and although they did not sorrow ‘as others who have no hope,’ for they knew that Razàka had only gone on a little ahead to join the general assembly and church of the first-born, who are written in heaven, and the spirits of just men made perfect. But, feeling that in him they had lost a father and a friend, their distress was very deep, the deeper that there was no one like him left to help and guide them.

A vast multitude assembled at his funeral, and the signs of grief were the greatest and deepest ever seen in Vònizòngo. His grave is on the hill-side, to the east of Fìhàonana, quite near to the ‘Cave’ in which he and the Bible were so long hidden.

Shortly after Razàka died another Vònizòngo veteran passed away, in the person of Andrìantsehèno, the pastor of Ankàzobè. He died on Sabbath, Oct. 25; and just before he expired, he said: ‘Say good-bye to Mr. Matthews and Mr. Cousins, the elder, for me--for I am going!’ and shortly afterwards he ceased to breathe.