"Since I have been King,' said Kaméhaméha to Kotzebue, 'no European has had cause to complain of having suffered injustice here. I have made my islands an asylum for all nations, and honestly supplied with provisions every ship that desired them.' The King conversed, says the same traveller, with a vivacity, surprising at his age; asked us various questions, and made observations which his interpreter was not always able to translate; the words which he used being peculiar to the language of Owhyhee, and so witty that his ministers often laughed aloud.

One cannot but feel a deep regret that, to a mind so original and energetic as Kaméhaméha's, the Christian religion had not been presented under more favourable circumstances. The first impressions of it he received from Vancouver seem never to have been quite effaced, but his after-acquaintance with its nominal professors was not likely to give him either a true or an exalted conception of the power or the purity of the faith in Christ. The changes which had occurred at Tahiti,' writes Jarves, by the final triumph of the Christian religion, aroused his attention, and he made many enquiries in regard to the causes and results. He desired to be instructed in the doctrines, and to learn the nature of the Supreme Being the foreigners worshipped. It was his misfortune not to have come in contact with men who could have rightly influenced his religious aspirations. The whites around him were little calculated to explain the sublime truths, or to tell him of the heavenly tidings of the Gospel.'

'These are our gods, whom I worship,' said Kaméhaméha to Kotzebue, whilst showing him one of the morais or temples. Whether I do right or wrong I

AN EULOGY AND A REGRET.

179

do not know; but I follow my faith, which cannot be wicked, as it commands me never to do wrong.

In one of the most beautiful of Dean Alford's sonnets, the poet, walking among the fallen pillars of 'Desert Academe,' sees approach him an Athenian

'A very sad old man,-his eyes were red
With over-weeping;'-

and the cause of his inconsolable grief was that beautiful Athens, in all her loveliness, was, in respect of the boon of Christianity under which it is our own privilege to dwell, only in the prime.' Her existence, in regard to the highest revelation, was premature. May we not appropriate to Kaméhaméha, who died one year before the arrival of the first missionaries from America, the mournful sentence of the visionary Athenian, who

'cried and said,

THE LIGHT HATH RISEN-BUT SHINETH NOT ON ME!'

CHAPTER XII.

HISTORICAL SKETCH-ACCESSION OF LIHOLIHO-THE
ABOLITION OF IDOLATRY.

WE

E are about to relate in this chapter one of the strangest events that ever happened in the history of a nation; a fact standing by itself-unparalleled. It is that of a people rising up, and at a blow destroying the religious system in which they and their ancestors had lived, sweeping away their idols, casting them to the moles and to the bats; and, what is more strange than all, some of the priests concurring in and assisting at the demolition. This spontaneous movement was no triumph of Christianity,-for Christianity had not yet claimed or even approached the Hawaiian Islands. It was no reformation of a religious system, for it was its total overthrow and abolition. The mountains were being made low, but as yet no voice was heard crying in the wilderness, 'prepare ye the way of the Lord.' The thin and torn but accustomed garment of paganism was to be thrown violently away; and those who had worn it were to remain for a time, not clothed upon,' but left naked and shivering in absolute atheism.

We must recall briefly the efficient causes which led to this event. Liholiho, the son of Kaméhaméha, succeeded to the kingdom on his father's death, being at the time twenty-two years of age. As has been stated, he had

A NATION OF SCEPTICS.

181

already, in 1809, been invested with royal honours, in order to secure a quiet and uninterrupted succession to the crown. In character he was very unlike his father. His disposition was frank and humane, indolent and pleasure-loving. The very force of one man's character not unfrequently dwarfs that of others who long have dwelt under its shelter. In his father's lifetime there was no call, no room for original energy or action; and there would be no competition of wills where the result of a struggle was certain beforehand. The prince possessed dignified and agreeable manners, an enquiring mind and a retentive memory; but he lived a dissipated existence, and was intemperate in the use of stimulants. As long as his father lived, little or no change was perceptible in the idolatrous system of the nation. Unquestionably there had been a growing scepticism in the people's mind about the gods they bowed to, and a growing knowledge of and impatience under the yoke of oppressive services, tabus, &c., jointly fastened on their necks by the tyranny of kingship, chiefdom, and sacerdotalism, uniting in the common object of their own aggrandizement. A leaven was working in the mass. The sparks of light left by Vancouver were not entirely trodden out. These were directly for good. Intercourse with foreigners was a more mixed influence, and a more indirect path towards better things. Sensual, scornful, and devoted to avarice as was the life of many of the white visitors, it was denied even to these, whatever might be in their heart, to be quite as the heathen were. There was the vital phenomenon of double consciousness; and in the fever of excess they sometimes uttered the words of an early piety, and reproduced long-forgotten fruits of childhood's teaching. The foreigners set bad examples of Christianity: but

the universal 'Nay,' according to Mr. Carlyle, has to precede the universal 'Yea;' and their open disbelief and ridicule of the idolatrous system existing, made the Hawaiians sceptical at least; though, as was natural, fear in many cases mingled with their disbelief. They were now eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and their eyes were open: they saw that all things around them were false, and that they themselves were naked; but the other plant, of heavenly growth, the tree of life, had not been given to them as yet.

The rumour, too, had come to them, that in Tahiti and in groups farther to the south the idols had been destroyed without ill effects to the people. There Christian missionaries had commenced their work, the rivalry of pagan images would not be tolerated, and they would necessarily, as Christian principles prevailed, be suppressed. Unquestionably there were those among the Hawaiians whose interest it was to continue the system of idolatry; Uzzahs, who stretched out both hands to uphold a tottering ark, and who struggled hard in every way to support it; uttering short-sighted prophecies,of which the only afflatus was their own wrath and their own wishes.

The material idols themselves existed in immense numbers in the islands. They consisted of two or three kinds; the greater number were grotesque figures carved in wood, frightful caricatures of humanity having a conventional imitation of nature which might have satisfied our most fastidious art-critics of the present day; the features often passing off into ornament, not the least realistic, and the hair descending, like two saws, to the feet. Some of the idols, including the plinth in which they stood or sat, were sixteen feet high. Besides these gigantic figures there were others of