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to him his kingdom by the good Admiral Thomas. Those festivities were rather inconsiderately prolonged through three days, and cost the government much money, besides leading to more waste and dissipation on the part of individuals, and giving too free rein to the sensual mind of a people just getting up from the long debauch of heathenism.

The pastors at Honolulu found a strong current of worldliness and sensuality setting there some time after the feast; and there was a revival of a species of heathenism, for which some church members even had to be disciplined. The common people, after the example of their rulers, feasted themselves in squads.

They would get together, pray, then eat and drink, sing meles, (old native songs,) and indulge in other excesses; and there was a strong hankering after old heathenish pleasures, which they would like to baptize with a Christian name; like some of the love-feasts of the Corinthian and other converts, where one was hungry and another drunken; at which they counted it pleasure to riot in the day-time; feeding themselves without fear, sporting themselves with their own de ceivings, having eyes full of adultery, and that cannot cease from sin.

Without the Gospel, men everywhere, be they savage or civilized, are constantly tending downward. And when this tendency seems arrested, and some steps have been taken upward, there is still a gravitation in the sensual mind towards evil, which has to be watched against and counteracted, if we would keep an indi

vidual or a people progressing. Human nature, it is remarked by Taylor, in his "Ancient. Christianity," however much it may have been raised above its ordinary level in particular instances, has always quickly subsided, and been substantially the same in every age and country.

Ancient and modern heathenism are of much the same type. The one in the Apostles' day had little to boast over the other in this. It took longer to purge out the old leaven from some of the primitive churches; and many of the converts then (it is manifest from Paul's own epistles) were not at all more stable-we doubt if as much so-or spiritually-minded, than some of the converts in these days at the Sandwich Islands.

A favorite ride and walk of twelve miles north from Honolulu, brings the traveller on Oahu to Kaneohe, one of the three out-stations on this island, of which the population, by the late census, is twenty-one thousand three hundred and sixty-three. You turn out of town on an excellent road near the large adobe and grass meeting-house of the Rev. Lowell Smith, belonging to the second church of Honolulu. The scenery of the Nuuanu Valley, with all its cultivated kalo-beds, cascades, cottages, and romantic mountain sides, is highly beautiful and unique.

Stewart's Journal of a Residence at the Sandwich Islands has made it familiar to many readers. And there is no one who has ridden through it up to the "Pali," but can testify that his glowing description has no more than done it justice.

THE KING'S VILLA IN THE VALLEY.

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About five miles up the valley, we stopped at a large unfinished house belonging to the king, in a grove of ancient koa-trees, where the chief boys and girls were rusticating a while with the family of their missionary teachers. They make an exceedingly well-behaved and happy company. All of them, to the number of sixteen, talk English with considerable fluency; and their entire aspect and bearing reflect much credit upon the fidelity and tact of their amiable guardians. The king is fond of riding up there, and takes great pleasure in the school, often expressing his sense of its utility, and wishing there had been such a school for him when a lad.

Rev. Mr. Parker, of Kaneohe, a patient missionary there for sixteen years, up to 1850, was greatly tried when I knew him, with the stupidity, the sensual tendency, and the disposition to deceive among his people; and he was consequently very slow in admitting to the church. He was of opinion then that the stone Meeting-house which he had built by dint of hard labor, some help from other native churches, and the savings of his own family, would in two Sabbaths be crowded to more than its capacity, if he should have a meeting of those out of the church, propound a few of them for admission, and call another meeting of inquirers.

They would think the kumu is now opening the puka (door) of the church, if not of heaven, and would run from every quarter to get in. There was a revival movement in his district in the year 1844, but out of a company of three hundred inquirers he admitted but

five, because he feared their hypocrisy, and thought he could have more hold of them out of the church, but as instructed candidates for it, than when in.

Since that period there has been another religious awakening in his district, from which more fruit was cautiously gathered into the church; and the Minutes of 1848 show that there have been received in all into the Kaneohe church, by profession and certificate, from the time of its formation, three hundred members.

With all deference to the principles and conscientious fears of the pastor there, and of a few others who think like him, I cannot help expressing the opinion that a very close and rigid policy, as the rule of admission to Hawaiian churches, is a mistaken one. To say nothing of the propriety of using all suitable means to keep up a congregation, in order that a missionary may not preach to bare walls, we argue that if a man preach the true Gospel of Christ, and pray sincerely for a blessing, and there appear at times good evidence of the presence of the Holy Spirit, it is but reasonable to believe, in the absence of strong evidence to the contrary, that this same Divine Agent completes the work of regeneration in many souls that seem earnestly feeling, it may be, groping through thick darkness after God.

And when, as at all missionary stations, through ignorance and imperfections, both in him who judges, and in those whose conversion is to be judged of, the evidence of certainty cannot be had, we do not think that the fear of receiving some hypocrites should keep

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a minister from admitting to the church a goodly number of those who seem to have been wrought upon by the Holy Spirit, who profess repentance and faith, who pray and abandon outward sins, and who desire to be taken into the fellowship of saints.

Isaac Taylor very properly remarks in the History of Fanaticism, that "the duty of those, whether they be the few or the many, to whose hands are intrusted ecclesiastical powers, is not that of a Rhadamanthus. Responsibility does not stretch beyond natural powers, and it is quite certain that men have no power to search each other's bosoms; nor should they think themselves charged with any such endeavor. The pretender and the hypocrite belong always to Divine jurisdiction; the Church will be asked to give no account of them, so long as they successfully conceal the fatal fact of their insincerity. Let but a community be more or less extended in its sphere, be pure in manners-PURE, not sanctimonious; let the Scriptures be universally and devoutly read by its private members, and honestly expounded by its teachers; and in this case it will be very little annoyed by the intrusion of heretical or licentious candidates."

If they are not so embraced and taken care of in the Church, they are liable, weak and unsteady as the undisciplined mind is, to wander and stumble as sheep without a shepherd, to fall at length into darkness and sin, to lose patience and hope, and cease praying together, and to fall, perhaps, into the clutches of the Man of Sin.