226 POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES. 
to his determination, he was banished from his father’s 
house, and forced to leave his home. Not satisfied 
with this, that rage and malignant hatred of Christianity, 
which is gendered by ignorance and idolatry, and 
cherished by satanic infatuation, pursued him still. A 
heathen ceremony was at hand, for which a human 
victim was required, and this young man was selected 
by his persecutors, because he professed to be a wor¬ 
shipper of the true God. A more acceptable sacrifice 
they thought they could not offer, as the revenge they 
should thereby wreak upon him, they conceived would 
not only gratify their own insatiate malice, but be so 
acceptable to the gods whom he had rejected, as cer¬ 
tainly to render them propitious. On the evening of 
the day preceding that on which the ceremony was to 
take place, the young man, as his custom was, had 
retired to the brow of a hill that overlooked the valley 
where he dwelt; and there, seated beneath the em¬ 
bowering shade of an elegantly growing clump of trees, 
was absorbed in meditation, previous to offering up his 
evening supplications to his God. While thus engaged, 
his seclusion was invaded, and his solitude disturbed, 
by the appearance of a band similar, in some respects, 
to that which broke in upon the Saviour’s retirement in 
Gethsemane. A number of the servants of the priests 
and chiefs approaghed the young man, and told him that 
the king had arrived, and, wishing to see him, had sent 
them to invite him down. He knew of the approaching 
ceremony,—^that a human sacrifice was then to be offered, 
—and he no sooner saw them advancing to his retreat, 
than a sudden thought, like a flash of lightning, darted 
through his mind, intimating that he was to be the 
victim. He received it as a premonition of his doom; 
