The early missionaries who had to combat the influence of the Arioi may have exaggerated its baseness.  In their unsophisticated minds, unprepared by reading or experience for comparisons, most of them sailing directly from English divinity schools or small bucolic pastorates, the devout preachers thought Sabbatarianism of as much consequence as morals, and vastly more important than health or earthly happiness.  They believed in diabolical possession, and were prone to magnify the wickedness of the heathen, as one does hard tasks.  When Christianity had power in Tahiti, the bored natives were sometimes scourged into church, and fines and imprisonment for lack of devotion were imposed by the native courts.  Often self-sacrificing, the missionaries felt it was for the natives’ eternal walfare, and that souls might be saved even by compulsion.  The Arioi society melted under a changed control and Christian precepts.

Livingstone in the wilds of primeval Africa, making few converts, but giving his life to noble effort, meditated often upon the success of the missionaries in the South Seas—­a success perhaps magnified by the society which financed and cheered the restless men whom it sent to Tahiti.  Livingstone in his darker moments, consoling himself with the accounts of these achievements in the missionary annals, doubted his own efficacy against the deep depravity and heathenism of his black flock.  The fact unknown to him was that the missionaries in Polynesia preached and prayed, doctored and taught, ten years before they made a single convert.  It was not until they bagged the king that a pawn was taken by the whites from the adversaries’ stubborn game.  The genius of these strugglers against an apparent impregnable seat of wickedness was patience, “the passion of great hearts.”

But conquering once politically, the missionaries found their task all but too easy to suit militant Christians.  As the converted drunkard and burglar at a slum pentecost pour out their stories of weakness and crime, so these Arioi, glorying in their being washed white as snow, recited to hymning congregations confessions that made the offenses of the Marquis de Sade or Jack the Ripper fade into peccadilloes.

Christian says: 

Their Hevas or dramatic entertainments, pageants and tableaus, of varying degrees of grossness, similar to the more elaborate and polished products of the early Javanese and Peruvian drama ... one cannot help fancying must be all pieces out of the same puzzle ...  I have with some pains discovered the origin of the name “Arioi.”  It throws a lurid light on the character of some of the Asiatic explorers who must have visited this part of the Eastern Pacific prior to the Europeans.  In Maori the word Karioi means debauched, profligate, good-for-nothing.  In Raratonga [an island near Tahiti] the adjective appears as Kariei.  These are probably slightly worn down forms of the Persian Khara-bati, which has