“You tell me,” said Kiana, “that there is one great God, who made heaven and earth, an all-wise, all-perfect, all-powerful Being. He has created the Hawaiian, the Spaniard, the Mexican, and all the races of men. I know this to be true. My people worship the wooden images of deities, and think they supply their wants. But those of us who have been taught the true meaning of our sacred songs, know full well that these senseless idols cannot make the taro grow,—they do not send us rain,—neither do they bestow life, nor health. My thought has always been, there is one only Great God dwelling in the heavens.”
“Your thought is indeed right,” replied Olmedo; “but God many years ago, seeing how wicked the world was, sent his only-begotten Son to teach it true religion. He was cruelly crucified by the people to whom he was sent, and he went up to heaven, where he remains to be the judge and Saviour of all men. After his ascension, he sent to his disciples, to comfort them, the Holy Ghost. Now these three persons are one God,—the God whom we Christians worship. All your images are vain idols; cast them aside, and set up in their places the image of the Son, Jesus Christ, and his holy mother, of whom he was born in the flesh, by the will of God, without a human father. Then shall you and your people be saved.”
Had Olmedo been content to have acquiesced in the simple conception of the One God, he would have had little difficulty in persuading Kiana and his people to renounce the direct worship of idols, and to trust in and pray to the Great Father. There was something in their minds that made this idea seem not wholly new to them. This was derived in part from the mystic expressions of their bards, who had dimly felt this sublime truth, and in the testimony of the universal heart of the human race, which ultimately resolves all things into One Great Cause, however much it may overshadow his glory and pervert his attributes, by multiplying the symbols of natural powers, and make to itself “graven images” of earthly passions and foibles. But when Olmedo talked dogmatically of the “Three in One,” he left only a vague impression, that he worshipped either “three male gods and one female, which made four,” or that there were absolutely three equal gods, which in time they called “Kane, Kaneloa, and Maui.”
CHAPTER IX.
“The rounded world is fair to see,
Nine times folded in mystery,
Though baffled seers cannot impart
The secret of its laboring heart,