Further, these very facts—that they did worship, that they believed in spirits of ancestors and heroes, and that they cherished many legends regarding those whom they had never seen, and handed these down to their children—and the fact that they had ideas about the invisible world and its inhabitants, made it not so hard as some might suppose to convey to their minds, once their language and modes of thought were understood, some clear idea of Jehovah God as the great uncreated Spirit Father, who Himself created and sustains all that is. But it could not be done off-hand, or by a few airy lessons. The whole heart and soul and life had to be put into the enterprise. The idea that man disobeyed God, and was a fallen and sinful creature,—the idea that God, as a Father, so loved man that He sent His only Son Jesus to this earth to seek and to save him,—the idea that this Jesus so lived and died and rose from the dead as to take away man’s sin, and make it possible for men to return to God, and to be made into the very likeness of His Son Jesus,—and the idea that this Jesus will at death receive to the mansions of Glory every creature under heaven that loves and tries to follow Him,—these ideas had to be woven into their spiritual consciousness, had to become the very warp and woof of their religion. But it could be done—that we believed because they were men, not beasts; it had been done—that we saw in the converts on Aneityum; and our hearts rose to the task with a quenchless hope! The Tannese called Heaven by the name Aneai; and we afterwards discovered that this was the name of the highest and most beautifully situated village on the island. Their best bit of Earth was to them the symbol and type of Heaven; their Canaan, too, was a kind of prophecy of another country, even a heavenly Canaan. The fact that they had an Aneai, a promised land, opened their minds naturally to our idea of the promised land of the future, the Aneai of the Gospel hope and faith. The universal craving to know the greater and more powerful gods, and to have them on their side, led them, whenever we could speak their language, to listen eagerly to all our stories about the Jehovah God and His Son Jesus, and all the mighty works recorded in the Bible. But when we began to teach them that, in order to serve this Almighty and living Jehovah God, they must cast aside all their idols and leave off every heathen custom and vice, they rose in anger and cruelty against us, they persecuted every one that was friendly to the Mission, and passed us through the dreadful experiences to be hereafter recorded. It was the old battle of History; light had attacked darkness in its very stronghold, and it almost seemed for a season that the light would be finally eclipsed, and that God’s Day would never dawn on Tanna!