428 POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES. 
the native immediately inquired further, how 
Adam’s crime could affect his posterity, after the 
guilt contracted by it had been removed even from 
the perpetrators of that crime? The origin of 
moral evil was sometimes introduced. It has been 
asked, at meetings where I have been present, 
Would Satan have tempted Eve, or would man 
have fallen, if God had not forbidden our first 
parents to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge ? 
To which it was answered, That if God had not 
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 dependent crea- 
ture, and the cause of so much evil, which is dis- 
pleasing 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 
men to evil, were undeniable from the declarations 
of scripture, and the experience of every one accus- 
tomed to observe the operations of his own mind. 
Such an observer would often find himself exposed 
to an influence that could be attributed only to 
satanic agency; 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 
