Even after years of faithful church-going many of my friends still struggled with their doubts, and when these were propounded to me I was fain to wrinkle my own brow and ponder deeply.

The burning question as to the color of Adam and Eve had long been settled.  Adam and Eve were brown, like themselves.  But if, as the priests said was most probable, Adam and Eve had received pardon and were in heaven, why had their guilt stained all mankind?

Also, would Satan have been able to tempt Eve if God had not made the tree of knowledge tapu?  Was not knowledge a good thing?  What motive had led the Maker and Knower of all things to do this deed?

What made the angels fall?  Pride, said the priests.  Then how did it get into heaven? demanded the perplexed.

The resurrection of the body at the last judgment horrified them.  This fact, said the husband of Kake, had led to the abandonment of the old manner of burying corpses in a sitting posture, with the face between the knees and the hands under the thighs, the whole bound round with cords.  Obviously, a man buried in such a position would rise deformed.  Their dead in the cemetery on the heights slept now in long coffins of wood, their limbs at ease.  But other and less premeditated interments still befell the unwary islander.

What would God do in cases where sharks had eaten a Marquesan?  And what, when the same shark had been killed and eaten by other Marquesans?  And in the case of the early Christian forefathers, who were eaten by men of other tribes, and afterward the cannibals eaten in retaliation, and then the last feaster eaten by sharks? Aue! There was a headache query!

At this point in the discussion an aged stranger from the valley of Taaoa, a withered man whose whole naked chest was covered with intricate tattooing, laid down his pipe and artlessly revealed his idea of the communion service.  It was, he thought, a religious cannibalism, no more.  And he was puzzled that his people should be told that it was wrong to feed on the flesh of a fellow human creature when they were urged to “eat the body and drink the blood” of Ietu Kirito himself.

It was long afterward, in that far-away America so incomprehensible to my simple savage friends, that I read beneath the light of an electric lamp a paragraph in “Folkways,” by William Graham Summer, of Yale: 

“Language used in communion about eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ refers to nothing in our mores and appeals to nothing in our experience.  It comes down from very remote ages; very probably from cannibalism.”

The printed page vanished, and before my eyes rose a vision of my paepae among the breadfruit- and cocoanut-trees, the ring of squatting dusky figures in flickering sunlit leaf-shade, Kake in her red tunic with the babe at her breast, Exploding Eggs standing by with a half-eaten cocoanut, and the many dark eyes in their circles of ink fixed upon the shriveled face of the reformed cannibal whose head ached with the mysteries of the white man’s religion.