“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.
Besides all this, to look at things in a purely practical light, as the so-called “practical men” are our scornful censors in these affairs, it is really no hardship for one woman, or any number of women, to be given up when the man becomes a Christian and elects to have one wife only; for every one so discarded is at once eagerly contended for by the men who had no hope of ever being married, and her chances of comfort and happiness are infinitely improved. We had one Chief who gave up eleven wives on his being baptized. They were without a single exception happily settled in other homes. And he became an earnest and devoted Christian.