John G. Paton, missionary to the New Hebrides, volume 2 (of 3) : $b An autobiography edited by his brotherPaton, John Gibson
Religion
John G. Paton, missionary to the New Hebrides, volume 2 (of 3) : $b An autobiography edited by his brother
Paton, John Gibson
Missionaries -- Vanuatu -- Biography; Paton, John Gibson, 1824-1907
“Listen, all ye men of Aniwa, and take warning by Waiwai. I am now
old, and ready to drop into the grave alone. My wives kept me back
from Jesus, but now they are all taken, and I am left without one to
care for me or this little child. I tried to deceive the Missi, but I
could not deceive God. When I was left with only one wife, I said that
I would now be baptized and live as a Christian. But God has taken
her also. I pretended to serve the Lord, when I was only serving and
pleasing myself. God has now broken my heart all to pieces. I must
learn no longer to please myself, but to please my Lord. Oh, take
warning by me, all ye men of Aniwa! Lies cannot cheat the great Jehovah
God.”
Poor broken-hearted Waiwai had sorrow upon sorrow to the full. We
had agreed to baptize him and admit him to the Lord’s Table. But a
terrible form of cramp, sometimes met with on the Islands, overtook
him, shrinking up both his legs, and curving his feet up behind him. He
suffered great agony, and could neither walk nor sit without pain. In
spite of all efforts to relieve him, this condition became chronic; and
he died at last from the effects thereof during our absence on furlough.
His married daughter took charge of him and of the little boy; and so
long as I was on Aniwa during his illness, I visited and instructed
and ministered to him in every possible way. He prayed much, and asked
God’s blessing on all his meals; but all that I could say failed to
lead him into the sunshine of the Divine Love. And the poor soul often
revealed the shadow by which his heart was clouded by such cries as
these,—“I lied to Jehovah! It is He that punishes me! I lied to Jesus!”
Readers may perhaps think that this case of the two wives and our
treatment of it was too hard upon Waiwai; and those will be the most
ready to condemn us, who have never been on the spot, and who cannot
see all the facts as they lie under the eyes of the Missionary. How
could we ever have led Natives to see the difference betwixt admitting
a man to the Church who had two wives, and not permitting a member of
the Church to take two wives after his admission? Their moral sense is
blunted enough without our knocking their heads against a conundrum in
ethics! In our Church membership we have to draw the line as sharply
as God’s law will allow betwixt what is Heathen and what is Christian,
instead of minimising the difference.
Again, we found that the Heathen practices were apparently more
destructive to women than to men; so that in one Island, with a
population of only two hundred, I found that there were thirty adult
men over and above the number of women. As a rule, for every man that
has two or more wives, the same number of men have no wives and can
get none; and polygamy is therefore the prolific cause of hatreds and
murders innumerable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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