Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III RELIGION In
Sartor Resartus, Carlyle makes Teufelsdrockh to say? Wonder is the basis of Worship: the reign of Wonder is perennial, indestructible in man. Carlyle himself would be astonished, if he were alive, at the great lack of wonder in the Fijian mind.
Of admiring emotion, produced by the contemplation of beauty, these people seem incapable. 1 On a certain beautiful moonlight night I made reference to the sublimity of the scene to a native. His laconic reply was:
In what respect is it beautiful ?
If one were to go into raptures over the glories of the unsurpassed Fijian sunset as seen from some of the outlying islets, the Fijians would look with an amused and half- pitying expression upon their faces at such a curious specimen of humanity. The native will indeed admire cleverness and will click his tongue with surprise if he sees anything unusual or abnormal. His curiosity, too, is unbounded. He will notice, for instance, an uncommon species of butterfly if it happens to cross his path. But when all this is said of him, it is still true that theFijian is sadly deficient in the more complex emotion of wonder. 1 Rev. Thos. Williams,
Fiji and the Fijians, Ed. 1884, p. 97. What particular emotion, then, became predominant in the religion of the Fijian people ? To quote the Rev. Thomas Williams again: A principle of fear seems the only motive to religious observances. 1 His beautiful land, set like an emerald in the Pacific, has been and is a land teeming with spirits, with evil powers capable of withholding good and doing harm. But why should the Fijian thus develop along the line of fear ? The answer is to be found in his history and past social life. If we follow Professor Macmillan Brown’s theory of his origin, the Fijian’s departure f…
