The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1929, Page 20

Transcription machine transcription, uncorrected

⤓ Download .txt · copy text

20

THE LUTHERAN PIONEER.

favors from the gods for their hard rulers. The
missionaries have clothed them, educated -them,
broken up the tyrannous authority of their chiefs,
and given them freedom and the right to enjoy
whatever their hands and brains produce, with
equal laws for all and punishment for all alike who
transgress them. The contrast is so strong, the
benefits conferred upon this people by the mission-
aries are so prominent, so palpable, and so unques-
tionable, that the frankest compliment I can pay
them, and the best, is simply to point to the con-
dition of the Sandwich Islanders of Captain Cook’s
time and their condition to-day. Their work speaks
for itself.” f
Titus Coan.

When Titus Coan came as a missionary to
Hawaii, he was assigned to labor in and around
Hilo, on the eastern coast of the island. His parish
was about a hundred miles long and had a popula-
tion of fifteen thousand people. Coan was a man of
great zeal and spiritual power. His preaching
deeply impressed many from the very first. The
size of his field made it impossible for him to make
more than four or five trips a year. Often he
preached three and four times a day, and once he
preached three times before he had an opportunity
to eat his breakfast. Since he could not go to the
people as often as they wished him to come, they
went where he was, to Hilo. It is said that at times
the population of Hilo was swelled to ten times its
ordinary size. Audiences of from two thousand to
six thousand were every-day occurrences.

Titus Coan preached with great simplicity and
made no attempt to excite his hearers. But the
effect of his preaching was marvelous. He himself
could only say, “It is wonderful!” Quarrels were
laid by, thieves brought back property they had
stolen, drunkards reformed, the unclean became
pure in their lives, and murderers confessed their
crimes. The chief priest of Pele came with his
sister into the meetings and openly confessed with
bitter tears the crimes he was guilty of. He pub-
licly renounced his idolatry and confessed his faith
in Jesus Christ. He and his sister had spent almost
seventy years in sin, but they remained faithful to
their new-found Savior till death. :

Titus Coan was very careful in properly pre-
paring the new converts for reception into the
_ Church and most conscientiously examined all be-
' fore admitting them to Baptism. With the help
_ of his assistants he received into the Church in five
" years no less than 7,500 persons, three-fourths of
the adult population of the parish. When he left

Hawaii in 1870, after a service of thirty-five years,
he had received almost 12,000 into the Church.

An eye-witness thus describes a gathering at
Hilo for a Communion service: “The old, the de-
crepit, the lame, the blind, the maimed, the with-
ered, the paralytic, and those afflicted with divers
diseases and torments; those with eyes, noses, lips,
and limbs consumed with the fire of their own or
their parents’ former lusts, with features distorted
and figures the most depraved and loathsome, —
all these came hobbling upon their staves and led
or borne by their friends; and among the throng
the hoary priests of idolatry, with hands but re-
cently washed from the blood of human victims, to-
gether with the thief, the adulterer, the Sodomite,
the sorcerer, the robber, the murderer; and the
mother — no, the monster —whose hands reeked
with the blood of her own children! ‘These all met
before the cross of Christ with their enmity slain,
and themselves ‘washed and sanctified and justified
in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit
of our God.’ ”

And these people held fast to their faith. But
few of them fell away, and very few became ame-
nable to church discipline. A few years before Titus
Coan left Hawaii, the mother church was divided
into seven parishes with fourteen churches, and the
means to do this came principally from the people
themselves.

When the American Board withdrew from the
field, self-supporting congregations were found
everywhere on the islands, and two-thirds of the
pastors were natives. To use the words of the old
native missionary Kauwealoha: “Not with powder
and ball, and swords and cannon, but with the
living Word of God and His Spirit were the islands
conquered for Christ.”

Hawaiian Foreign Missions.

The Hawaiian Church, early in its history,
showed that its desire was to carry the Gospel of
Jesus to other nations. Having received, they
longed to give; having experienced the sweetness
of Jesus’ love, their desire was that others might
share their happiness. As early as 1853 they estab-
lished a mission in Micronesia, that group of small
coral islands two thousand miles west of Hawaii.
In the following year they began work on the Mar-
quesas Islands also. The most distinguished of
these foreign Hawaiian missionaries were JKau-
wealoha, mentioned before, and Kekela. Both of
these men spent about fifty years in the Marquesas
Islands. Kekela was able to save the life of an