POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES. 
159 
made that the peculiar test of their obedience, Satan 
would have found some other medium through which 
to tempt them to sin. 
A man once asked, What caused the angels in heaven 
to sin, or Satan to become a wicked spirit ? He was 
told that pride was the cause of his fall, but that how 
pride entered heaven was not revealed. Another once 
proposed the following query; You say God is a holy 
and a powerful being, that Satan is the cause of a vast 
increase of moral evil or wickedness in the world, by 
exciting or disposing men to sin. If Satan be only a 
depend entcreature, and the cause of so much evil, which 
is displeasing to God, why does not God kill Satan at 
once, and thereby prevent all the evil of which he is the 
author ? In answer, he was told that the facts of Satan's 
dependence on, or subjection to the Almighty, and his 
yet being permitted to tempt even to evil, were unde¬ 
niable from the declarations of scripture, and the expe¬ 
rience of every one accustomed to observe the opera¬ 
tions of his own mind. Such an observer would often 
find himself exposed to an influence that could be attri¬ 
buted only to Satanic agency 3 but that why he was 
permitted to exert this influence on man, was not made 
known in the Bible. We always stated plainly, that 
it was the contents of that volume which we came to 
teach them^ that the existence of this baneful and often 
fatal influence was too extensively felt to allow of its 
being questioned; that the antidote to the evil it might 
have already inflicted, and the preservative against its 
future effects, were pointed out; and that it was wiser, 
and far more important, to apply to those remedies, 
than to indulge in unprofitable speculations relative to 
its origin. 
