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 ove