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derstand you. While discoursing on sin, they will think you mean insulting a Bramin, or killing a cow, or some such thing; and while on holiness, that you mean making offerings to their idols, or going on pilgrimages, and performing some acts of external selfmortification. With such notions as these in regard to sin, and holiness, and repentance, and worship, they can hardly be said to have a conscience, and you have yet to form, or rather to mould, one within them."

But all this to the contrary notwithstanding, and maugre all that may be said on the dark side of native character and piety, we are sure that they have learned a great deal of the Gospel at the Sandwich Islands, and that multitudes among them have felt its power. And we have noted the memorandum, (whether right or wrong,) that the older missionaries grow, and the more thoroughly they become acquainted with native character, and the language, the more they have of charity.

Mr. Alexander, when pastor of the church at Waioli, on the island of Kauai, admitted one hundred and twenty, and he fears that may have been too many. "Not (he says) that the Gospel has been preached in vain-I believe that there are not a few sincere converts; but I have discovered such a disposition in the people to make the attainment of church-membership a paramount aim, that I have felt like adopting the sentiment of the great Apostle to the Gentiles: Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the Gospel."

Other pastors, equally conscientious and engrossed with preaching the Gospel, were admitting at the same

time (the period of the Great Revival) hundreds, and even thousands, in the hope that they were the children of God, and believing that a place in his church was their right.

Mr. Hitchcock, the laborious missionary on Molokai, testifies in regard to that work thus: "A greater number of the fruits of that revival give little or no evidence of conversion, than do the same number of those who were received before. And may not the same be said of great revivals, in general, in every part of the world? I have not the means of determining how much the cases of discipline in this church exceed those of the same size in the United States. Probably the excess may be considerable. In estimating, however, the amount of the work of the Holy Spirit, the truth will not be come at by mere comparisons in numbers.

"It must be remembered that the converts here were taken from the lowest depths of ignorance and moral debasement, and many, yea, all of them, have lived in habits of falsehood and many other overt sins, until such habits have become a second nature to them. All those powerful influences which co-operate with the grace of God in restraining converts from sin in our native land, are wholly wanting here. Let it be supposed, for a moment, that all those who entered the church as fruits of any great revival in New England, have been destitute of parental influence, destitute of conscience, destitute of any true sense of the worth of character, and having lived to the moment of their con

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version in the midst and in the practice of licentious

ness.

"It is easy to perceive that, even allowing them to have been true converts, many more cases of discipline might, and probably would have occurred in those churches, than can be expected to occur now. What we have supposed of the converts in such a New England revival, is fact with converts at the Sandwich Islands. The fact, therefore, that cases of sin and disorderly conduct are more frequent here than there, does, not prove that the work of the Holy Spirit, or that the number of real conversions here, has been less than there; or that the proportion between real and false conversions in the Sandwich Islands revivals, is less than in those occurring in civilized lands.

"Taking into account all the unfavorable circumstances of the members of the church of which I have the care, their great ignorance, the limited range of their ideas, the irresistible influence of the example of their ungodly friends and of society in general, the force of early education and habits of sin, their extreme poverty, idleness, and aversion to thinking, and numerous other adverse influences; the grace of God, in enabling them to walk as consistently with the Gospel as they do, seems to me more evident and conspicuous than it does in churches where there are vastly greater attainments in holiness, but where adverse influences do not exist, and where there are ten thousand precious influences acting in a direct line with that grace."

I have quoted thus at length, because these remarks,

and the whole communication from which they are extracted, contain a better view of Hawaiian churches and revivals than could be given by any man not a missionary. To the same purport is an earnest letter from Mr. Coan, in the same number of the Missionary Herald.*

It has often appeared to me that truth is to be arrived at from comparing the differing views and statements of different men, very much as a ship's longitude is obtained in working lunars. The labor lies in applying rightly the numerous corrections, now on this side and now on that. There are the first, second, and third corrections, with their proportional logarithms. There are the corrections of the sun's and moon's altitudes, for parallax and refraction, and the height of the observer above the sea.

There are the corrections of declinations, and distances as calculated in the Nautical Almanac at the meridian of Greenwich, for the meridian of the ship. And then there is the correction for the seconds of the moon's horizontal parallax, and the correction for equation of time, and other things, all of which are to be exactly applied, and the variation tables carefully consulted, before the navigator can find his real place. And even then it is rarely that he gets it by a lunar nearer than ten or fifteen miles.

So, in gathering truth from the observations and reports of men, you have to take into account the place,

*Vol. xxvii., p. 105.

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and profession, and leanings of the observers. You must compare and correct for the differences of mental parallax and altitudes made by observers from different points of view. You must note, if possible, the aberrations from the fixed meridian of truth, when to be added and when subtracted. The various deflections and increase or diminution made by prejudice are to be ascertained. The dip of the mind's horizon is to be noted, and the different degrees of refraction made by the differences in men's ordinary intellectual atmospheres, whether clear or foggy. There is a correction to be made according as you find the observers to be short or long-sighted, and as they have the eye of an eagle or that of an owl.

And finally, there is an allowance to be made in the representations given, according as they think you will use and steer by their observations or not. And, after all, if you have patience and skill to apply all the corrections, or are so happy as to be able to do it by intuition, even as rare geniuses are said sometimes to solve mathematical problems, yet it is not certain that your result will be absolute truth. And it is seldom that a modest man will peremptorily challenge another's assent to his own particular conclusions.

While the author of this work is far from challenging assent to his reasonings and inferences from things at the Sandwich Islands, either as presented in the present volume, or in "The Island World of the Pacific," he both asks and expects a belief in his facts, which he has certified to be accurate and true, and concerning