Rarotonga, “the Paradise of the Pacific,” as it has been called, is an island surrounded by a great coral reef, through which there is a natural opening, wide enough to allow small vessels to pass. On this reef, the great blue waves of the Pacific break in silvery spray to a height of twenty feet. High mountains rise to over four thousand feet above the sea level, with valleys filled with groves of chestnut, cocoanut, and palm trees. No spot on earth is lovelier, yet this island less than a hundred years ago, was the home of cannibals, and the scene of revolting savagery.
Rarotonga was discovered by the pioneer missionary John Williams, in 1822, when exploring in the Pacific. When he and a small party landed, the chief Makea welcomed them, and after a brief sojourn, one of their number, an earnest native Christian named Papeiha, was at his own request left alone a witness for Christ, in the midst of the heathen Rarotongians. This noble youth in whose heart the love of Christ was a constraining force, entered joyfully upon the hazardous mission, to which he believed the Lord had called him, to make known the Gospel among a people who set little value on human life, hitherto given up to cruelty and abominable idolatry. His “missionary outfit” consisted of a change of clothes, a native New Testament, and a bundle of books, which he hoped to find useful in teaching the natives to read. There was little temptation to the natives to rob such a man, or to take his life for the sake of his property. It would have been well, if servants of Christ going forth with His Gospel among the heathen had always gone as empty handed, and left room for God to provide for their necessities, which He surely ever does for those whom He sends on His business. But when a worldly show is made, a retinue of servants and a certain style kept up to impress those benighted people with the “dignity” of the missionary calling, it is, as it ever has been, a snare to the workers, and a hindrance to real work for God and eternity being done.
Only a few years before the heralds of the Gospel entered on Rarotonga, the island was occupied by several tribes that were continually at war one against another. Their chiefs had absolute power, and claimed all the people and property as their own. Human life was of little account, hundreds were massacred yearly for trivial offenses. The chief was regarded as sacred, and carried on men’s shoulders, lest his feet might touch the common earth. When he rested, it was on the bodies of his slaves, and if his shadow happened to fall upon any tribesman, that man was immediately slain.
There stood in the midst of each of the tribes a great altar of sacrifice, to which, in times of war or sickness, two or three of the natives bound together with green thongs, were taken and presented alive to the gods; the priest of the tribe confessing their sins, and asking the gods to remove the calamity. Then the living victims were placed on a large oven of red-hot basaltic stones, heated by firewood placed in a pit underneath, and there consumed as an atonement for the sins of the people. How wonderful that men in heathen darkness, who had never heard the Saviour’s name, or been taught the nature of sin, or the need of atonement, should have been led on by the great enemy of souls—as undoubtedly he does lead the heathen in their demon worship—to invent such an awful caricature of the one great sacrifice of the Son of God, by which sin was atoned for to God’s satisfaction and salvation procured for sinners once for all.
In these times, cannibalism was practiced on the island, and Papeiha had some sad sights to witness during the first few months of his service among the Rarotongians. But the Gospel of God is a message of power; it works its wonders and wins its victories in every part of Satan’s dominion, no less in the abodes of heathen darkness than in the cloisters of nominal Christianity, with a name to live while spiritually dead. Everywhere and always, right along the ages, God’s Gospel is His divinely chosen instrument to turn men to God, to give them life in Christ, and to bring them from under the rule and authority of Satan the prince of darkness, into the kingdom of His dear Son.
Before Papeiha had been there twelve months, there had been some marvelous cases of true conversion to God, and the effect of the preaching of the Word upon the rest who had made no profession of conversion, was to make them renounce idolatry. When John Williams revisited the island three years after Papeiha began his labors, he was amazed to see the change grace had wrought, some of the most ferocious cannibals he had ever met, being now devoted followers of the Lord Jesus Christ.
One of the first converts in Rarotonga was a native named Teava, who immediately he proved the power of the Gospel in his own salvation, had a longing desire to carry the joyful message to his countrymen, which he did. Then his heart went out to the savage tribes beyond, to whom no Gospel messenger had yet gone. Teava himself was the first evangelist to the Samoan islands, among which he went in and out, in his canoe, preparing the way for others to follow, and doing the rough work, for a period of twenty years. He preached the Gospel with much clearness and power; he was a man of prayer and a diligent student of God’s Word, and after a long and even course of godly, devoted life and service for the Lord, Teava, once a benighted heathen, who had killed and cooked and helped to eat his fellowmen, converted through the Gospel’s power to serve the living and true God, passed joyfully away. His last words to his wife, as he lay on his mat, were, “The Messenger has come to fetch me.” And so he passed to holier scenes in the fair paradise of God.