“We are going to church, you see; and Kanoa, my Hawaiian associate, is blowing a shell to call the people to meeting, as we have no bell. Kanoa’s wife, with one of her children is just behind us. Be sure to look at the king, son of the one who was killed, in his long shirt, and under his umbrella. The queen will come too, for both are very regular in their attendance; and, what is better still, we hope they are Christians.
“You may say, perhaps, that some things in this picture look more like breaking the Sabbath than keeping it; and you are quite right.
“The woman whom you see is a heathen, carrying her husband’s skull as she goes on a visit to some other village. A party of the natives are pressing scraped cocoanuts in an oil-press, to get the oil to buy tobacco with. The dog is one of the many, as heathenish as their masters.”
From Story of the Morning Star,
By Rev. Hiram Bingham.
EVANGELIZING POLYNESIA
Excluding all considerations of intellect—in which both the Missionaries and the Polynesians seem to have been about equally endowed—the abyss between the brethren and the heathen was the abyss that separated John Knox from Aristophanes and the Greek Anthology: the abyss between the animal integrity of classical antiquity and the Hebraic heritage of the agonised conscience. Reason may pass back and forth over this chasm: but no man once touched by the traditions of Christianity can ever again sling his heart back across the abyss. If he attempt the feat—as witness the Intimate Journals of Paul Gauguin—he but adds corruption to crucifixion, and there is no doubt as to the last state of that man.
If the fall from innocence was begun in Eden, it was sealed beyond redemption in Bethlehem. For at the time of the inception of Christianity, the pagan world was going to its doom, and its death agonies were frightful in the extreme. Something had to be done to save humanity,—and something drastic. And humanity—which was at the same time the priest and the victim—found in the cross the justest symbol of its triumph in utter human defeat. More effectively to slander this world, Heaven was set up in libellous contrast; in order to heap debasement upon the flesh, the spirit was opposed to it as an infinitely precious eternal entity, tainted by contact with its mortal habitation. Blessedness lay not in harmony, but in division, and utter confusion was mistaken for total depravity. “For the flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.” But these things classical antiquity did—being given over to a reprobate mind, so St. Paul tells us. The Wesleyan brethren found in Polynesia the same untroubled indulgence in “unrighteousness, fornication and wickedness,” that had so troubled St. Paul. But in Tahiti there were no signs of the intellect that classical antiquity exhibited in the days of its reprobation. And though the Polynesians seemed to have thriven on unrighteousness, the brethren itched to infect them with misgivings, and this in a Holy Name. Melville was profoundly stirred to loathing at these efforts: a loathing heightened by the later contentions introduced into Tahiti by the rival proselyting of French Catholic missionaries. Lost in doubt and shame at such spectacles, in Clarel he thus invokes Christ:
“By what art
Of conjuration might the heart
Of heavenly love, so sweet, so good,