[Illustration: The True Word expounded to a Potentate of Western Africa.] PART XI. RELIGIOUS RITES AND SUPERSTITIONS. CHAPTER XXVI. The mysterious “still small voice”--Samoan mythology--The man who pushed the Heavens up--The child of the Sun--A Figian version of the “Flood”--The Paradise of the Figian--Lying Ghosts--Singular case of abduction--The disobedient Naiogabui--All fair in love and war--The fate of poor Rokoua--The Samoan hades--Miscellaneous gods of the Samoans--A god for every village--The cup of truth--Mourning the destruction of a god’s image--The most fashionable god in Polynesia--Families marked for human sacrifice--“Tapu” or “tabu”--Its antiquity and wide-spread influence--Muzzled pigs and blindfolded chickens--Ceremony of releasing the porkers--Tremendous feast of baked pig--The tapu in New Zealand--A terrible tinder box--The sacred pole and the missionaries--The chief’s backbone--The Pakeka and the iron pot--One of the best uses of tapu--Its general advantages and disadvantages--Tapu among the Samoans--Witchcraft in New Zealand--Visit of a European to a “retired” witch--The religion of the Dayak--“Tapa,” “Tenahi,” “Iang,” and “Jirong”--Warriors’ ghosts--Religious rites and superstitions of the Sea Dayaks--The great god Singallong Burong--Belief in dreams among the Sea Dayaks--Story of the stone bull--Of the painted dog. Religion, as signifying reverence of God and a belief in future rewards and punishments, may be said to have no existence among people who are absolutely savage. Belief in life hereafter is incompatible with non-belief in the existence of the soul, and difficult indeed would it be to show a thorough barbarian who did not repudiate that grand and awful trust. He is too much afraid of the mysterious thing to confess to being its custodian. Undoubtedly he is quite conscious of a power within him immensely superior to that which gives motion to his arms and legs, and invites him to eat when he is hungry. He “has ears and hears,” and “the still small voice” that speaks all languages and fits its admonitions to the meanest understanding bears the savage no less than the citizen company all the day long, noting all his acts and whispering its approvals and its censures of them; and when the savage reclines at night on his mat of rushes, the still small voice is still vigilant, and reveals for his secret contemplation such vivid pictures of the day’s misdoing, that his hands ache with so fervently clasping his wooden greegree, and he is rocked to sleep and horrid dreams with trembling and quaking fear.