“I know in whom I trust. Even should the lava continue flowing, many days must elapse before the crater is full, and long before it is so we shall be in safety. Pêle has nothing to do with it.”
Having watched the eruption for some time, Kapoiolani and her female attendants returned to their hut, while the rest of the party gathered round their camp fires to spend the remainder of the night.
After breakfast, having plucked more of the berries and again descended the crater, they proceeded down the mountain.
On reaching the camp where the chief body of her attendants had remained, she addressed them, and urged them from henceforth to dismiss all thoughts of the pretended Pêle, and other false deities, from their minds, and to trust alone to Jehovah, the only true God, and His Son Jesus Christ, whom He had sent into the world to die instead of them, and to reconcile them, His outcast children, to Himself. With one voice the people shouted out, “There is no such being as Pêle; Jehovah is the only true God; we will serve Him!”
The news of the pious and heroic Kapoiolani’s visit to the mountain of Pêle was carried through the island; and the people from henceforth acknowledged that they had been foolishly frightened by believing in a being who had no existence, and were everywhere ready to listen to the addresses either of the missionaries or of their own chiefs who had turned from idols.
It is a remarkable circumstance that in the Sandwich Islands the chiefs set the example of overturning their idols, and were generally the first to accept the truth.
After visiting several places on the coast, Kapoiolani and her attendants, accompanied by Tom and the boys, returned to her village.