But it must not be supposed that this earnest searcher after truth became ascetic or morose. Despite his mistakes, and the somewhat severe discipline which he was thereby led to impose on himself and the community, the effect on him and his large family of the Scriptures—pure, unadulterated, and without note or comment—was to create love to God, to intensify their love for each other, to render them anxious to imitate the example and walk in the footsteps of Jesus, and to cause them to rejoice at all times. It was quite evident, ere long, that the whole community had drunk deeply into the spirit of such passages in the Word as these:— “Delight thyself in the Lord,”—“By love serve one another,”—“Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, rejoice,”—“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, as unto the Lord and not unto men,”—“Ask and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you,”—“Let each esteem other better than himself.”—“Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so to them.”—“Love is the fulfilling of the law,”—“Let not the sun go down upon your wrath.”
The last text was a favourite one with Adams, who occasionally found that even among the tractable and kindly troop he had to deal with, sin was by no means extinct.
Do not suppose, good reader, that we are now attempting to depict a species of exceptional innocence which never existed, an Arcadia which never really had a local habitation. On the contrary, we are taking pains to analyse the cause of a state of human goodness and felicity, springing up in the midst of exceptionally unpromising circumstances, which has no parallel, we think, in the history of mankind; which not only did exist, but which, with modifications, does still exist, and has been borne witness to through more than half a century by men of varied and unquestionable authority, including merchant-skippers, discoverers, travellers, captains and admirals in the Royal Navy. The point that we wish to press is, not that the enviable condition of things we have described is essentially true, but that this condition has been brought about by the unaided Word of God; that Word which so many now-a-days would fain underrate, but which for those who are taught by the Holy Spirit is still the power of God unto salvation.
The hilarity of the Pitcairners increased rather than diminished as their love for the Bible deepened. Fun and solemnity are not necessarily, and never need be, antagonistic. Hand in hand these two have walked the earth together since Adam and Eve bid each other good-morning in the peaceful groves of Paradise. They are subject, no doubt, to the universal laws which make it impossible for two things to fill the same place at the same time, and they sometimes do get, as it were, out of step, and jostle each other slightly, which calls forth a gentle shake of the head from the one and a deprecatory smile from the other; but they seldom disagree, and never fight.
Thus it came to pass that though John Adams, as time went on, read more than ever of the Bible to his audiences, and dilated much on the parables, he did not dismiss Robinson Crusoe, or expel Gulliver, or put a stop to blind-man’s-buff. On the contrary, waxing courageous under the influence of success, he cast off his moorings from the skeletons of the stories to which he had at first timidly attached himself, and crowding all sail alow and aloft, swept out into the unexplored seas of pure, unadulterated, and outrageous fiction of his own invention.
“Them’s the stories for me,” Daniel McCoy was wont to say, when commenting on this subject. “Truth is all very well in its way, you know, but it’s a great bother when you’ve got to stick to it; of course I mean when story-tellin’.”
Neither John Adams nor his pupils knew at that time, though doubtless their descendants have learned long ere now, that after all truth is in very deed stranger than fiction.
As time passed changes more or less momentous occurred in the lonely island. True, none of those convulsions which rack and overturn the larger communities of men on earth visited that favoured spot; but forces of Nature were being slowly yet surely developed, which began to tell with considerable effect on the people of Pitcairn.
They were not, however, much troubled by the ills that flesh is heir to. Leading, as they did, natural and healthy lives, eating simple and to a large extent vegetable fare, and knowing nothing of the abominations of tobacco or strong drink, their maladies were few and seldom fatal.
John Adams himself had the constitution of a horse. Nevertheless, he was troubled now and then with a bad tooth, and once had a regular attack of raging toothache. As none of the people had ever even heard of this malady, they were much alarmed and not a little solemnised by its effects on their chief.