152 POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES. 
his champion on that day, and sent them to 
Tautira, where the temple stood in which the great 
national idol, Oro, was deposited. He gave them 
orders to destroy the temple, altars, and idols 
with every appendage of idolatry they might find. 
In the evening of the day, when the confusion of 
battle had in some degree subsided, Pomare and 
the chiefs invited the Christians to assemble, pro- 
bably in the place in which they had been during 
the morning disturbed—there to render thanks to 
God, for the protection he had, on that eventful 
day, so mercifully afforded. Their feelings on this 
occasion must have been of no common order. 
From the peaceful exercise of sacred worship, they 
had been that morning hurried into all the con- 
fusion and tur.noil of murderous conflict with ene- 
mies, whose numbers, equipment, implacable hatred, 
and superstitious infatuation from the prediction of 
their prophets, had rendered them unusually for- 
midable in appearance, and terrible in combat. 
Defeat and death had, as several of them have 
more than once declared, appeared, during several 
periods of the engagement, almost certain ; and, in 
connexion with the anticipated extirpation of the 
Christian faith in their country, the captivity of 
those who might be allowed to live, the momentous 
realities of eternity, upon which, ere the close of the 
day, it appeared to themselves by no means im- 
probable they would enter; had combined to pro- 
duce a state of agitation, unknown in the ordinary 
course of human affairs, and seldom perhaps ex- 
perienced even in the field of battle. They now 
celebrated the subversion of idolatry, under cir- 
cumstances that, but a few hours before, had 
threatened their own extermination, with the over- 
throw of the religion they had espoused, and on 
