two thousand
persons. There exist two other large stone chapels and three stone
school-houses, each about seventy feet long and thirty-five feet wide.
But what is far more important, there are one thousand six hundred
children and adults under daily instruction, besides five hundred
members in consistent church communion, leaving but one-third of the
population who, though educated and nominal Christians, must be looked
on as yet not earnest in spiritual matters. Of the former, some seven
or more are at the Raratonga training college, and several have gone
forth as evangelists to the heathen many thousand miles away; while
there are more than one hundred native teachers in the schools,
gratuitously employing themselves in instructing the rising generation.
The excess of births over the deaths is very considerable, so that the
population, which at one time was diminishing, is rapidly on the
increase. Davida is dead. He departed just twenty-five years after he
commenced his missionary labours. `Is it right,' he asked, in a humble
tone, `for me to say, in the language of Saint Paul, "I have fought the
good fight, I have finished my course"? These people were wild beasts
when I came among them; but the sword of the Spirit subdued them. 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.

"People in England are, I hear, astonished at the rapid progress made by
Christianity in these islands, and assert that either the accounts are
exaggerated, and that the great mass of the people remain heathens as
before, or that if they have become nominal Christians, it is because
they have been compelled by their chiefs to embrace the new faith. To
this last objection I reply, first: You well know how slight is the
influence exercised by the chiefs over the people, and in no island with
which I am acquainted would a chief be able to compel his followers to
abandon idolatry and embrace Christianity. In the greater number of
instances by far, a considerable proportion of the people have become
Christians before the chief has given up his idols. Pomare was still an
idolater when many of his subjects had been converted. There were
numerous Christians in Samoa before Ma