KANDAVU. 181 



has furnished interesting evidence of the fact in a speech at 

 a missionary meeting in Hobart Town. After observing 

 that any man who can distinguish himself by murdering his 

 fellow-men (the missionary mode of describing war among 

 savages, but among savages only) maybe sure of deification, 

 and that friends are sometimes deified and invoked, he says, 

 ' Tuikilakila, the chief of Somo-Somo, offered Mr. Hunt a 

 preferment of this sort, " If you die first," said he, " I shall 

 make you my god." In fact, there seems to be no certain 

 line of demarcation between departed spirits and gods, nor 

 between gods and living men, for many of the priests and 

 old chiefs are considered as sacred persons, and not a few of 

 them will also claim for themselves the right of divinity. 

 "I am a god," Tuikilakila would sometimes say, and he 

 believed it too. They loere not merely the words of his lips ; 

 he believed he was something above a mere man.' ^ 



Nothing of course is conceivable in this impression 

 when in the common opinion of people the gods have like 

 passions with themselves ; when they love and hate, are 

 proud and revengeful, make war and kill and eat each 

 other, and are in fact savages hke themselves. Philo, as has 

 been already observed, conceived analogous ideas in the Old 

 Testament to be a false colouring to meet the requirements 

 of barbarous and uninstructed men. The mischief has been 

 that such conceptions, the fruit of extreme ignorance, and 

 the rudest possible appreciation of supernatural power, which 



' Seemann, p. 247. 



*N 3 



