to report to an unheeding England save the depths of the untilled field of heathenry and depravity, might not have been blamed if they, too, had given up their mission.  The fruits of twelve years of gardening and horticulture were destroyed in a day by ravaging parties.  The fact that their lives were spared and their persons not attacked, except in a rare instance of an individual piece of villainy, is proof of the mild dispositions of the infidels.  The Tahitians worshiped their gods with a superstitious awe not exceeded anywhere, and the outlandish white men proclaimed openly that these gods were dirty lumps of wood and stone and fiber, and to be despised in comparison with the Christian Gods, Father and Son, which they implored them under pain of eternal punishment to adopt.  Imagine the fate of strangers who settled in New England or Spain a hundred and twenty years ago and who announced daily year in and year out that all the ancestors of the people there were in hell, that their God and their angels, saints, priests, and images were demons, or doing the work of demons, and that only by acknowledging their belief in a deity unheard-of before, by having water sprinkled on their heads, and ceasing the customs and thoughts taught as most moral and divine by their own revered priests, could they escape eternal misery as a consequence of a mistake made by a man and a woman named Atamu and Ivi six thousand years earlier!  In Spain at that date the king whose name had been coupled with Christ’s on the cross near my house at Tautira was expelling the Jesuits from his kingdom, and the Holy Office recorded its thirtieth thousand human being burned at the stake in that country in the name of Jesus Christ.

The incredulous Tahitians tolerated the queer white men who wore long, black coats and who had learned their language, and who, except as to religion, spoke gently to them, healed their wounds, patted their children on the head, and taught them how to use iron and wood in unknown fashions.  They saw that these men drank intoxicants in great moderation, lived in amity, and did not advantage themselves in trade or with the native women, as did all the other white men.  And they wondered.

But they were convinced of the truth of their own religion.  Their chiefs and priests replied: 

“If your first man and woman took the lizard’s word and ate fruit from the tabu tree, they should have been punished, and if their children killed the son of your God, they should have been punished; but why worry us about it?  We have not killed you, and our first man and woman respected all tabu trees.”

They disdained the cruel message that their forefathers were in the perpetually burning umu, the oven, as did that Frisian king, Radbod, who with one leg in the baptismal font, bethought him to ask where were his dead progenitors, and was answered by the militant bishop, Wolfran, “In hell, with all unbelievers.”

“Then will I rather feast with them in the halls of Woden than dwell with your little, starveling Christians in heaven” said the pagan, and withdrew his sanctified limb to walk to an unblessed grave in proud pantheism.