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It was not I, it was God who did it. Davida and Papehia, and many other dark-skinned sons of these fair isles of the Pacific, themselves born in darkest heathenism, have gained their crowns of glory in the heavens, never to fade away, which the highly educated inhabitants of civilised Europe may have cause to envy.
Here the missionary Papehia landed alone, trusting in Jehovah, among its then savage inhabitants. It was here the great missionary Williams spent many months, and built single-handed the schooner the Messenger of Peace mentioned before in which he crossed over so many thousand miles of the Pacific Ocean, to carry the glad tidings of great joy to many of the numerous islands scattered over it.
You know how John Williams, after founding the church in Huahine, moved to Raiatea, in the Hervey group, and thence sailing forth, discovered the then savage Raratonga, where the devoted Papehia landed to commence the work which he was afterwards enabled to perfect.
The priests were the most inveterate opponents of Christianity, yet the first person who destroyed his idols was a priest. Several others followed his example. Soon another native teacher from Tahiti joined Papehia to aid in the work which so rapidly progressed. The first chief converted was Tinomana.
Some went forth to the Paumotu Group, or Low Archipelago, to the east; others to the Austral Isles, to the south; and others, among whom was Papehia, accompanied Mr Williams on a voyage to the Hervey group. His first visit was to Aitutaki, where some native teachers were left, by whose means the natives became Christians.
At each village, or even where there was a chapel alone, a school-house was erected, where the elements of reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography, were taught to adults as well as to children, and only eight years after the landing of Papehia, two thousand children and one thousand six hundred adults were under instruction.
Had it not been, indeed, for the exertions of Tapaeru, the niece of the chief, who had been carried away, the native teachers who went on shore would have been murdered. They returned on board; but Papehia, one of their number, as the ship was about to sail away, volunteered to return.
After a lengthened conversation with Papehia, in spite of the expostulations of priests and people, saying, `My heart has taken hold of the word of Jehovah, he ordered a servant to set fire to his idol and his temple. The Christians now united, with Tinomana at their head, to live together in one community, numbering four or five thousand.
Two years afterwards, however, he returned with two zealous Tahitians, Davida and Tiere, who swimming on shore through the surf, as did Papehia at Raratonga, with their books and clothes in a cloth on their heads, landed among the fierce natives. God had so ordered it that their reception was very different from what they had expected.
In each village there are schools and churches and native pastors. Children also are brought from other islands to the chief school, under the English missionary, to receive instruction. Thus from this once savage country the true light now shines forth over a wide circle of the Pacific that light brought to those shores by the once heathen Papehia!
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