The Oahu College at the Sandwich Islands | Page 3

with the divine blessing is able to mould the literary and religious institutions of the Hawaiian nation. Religion, just now, has a strong hold on those Islands. The present is, therefore, a favorable time to institute a College, and put it into a working condition.
The necessity for an institution, such as it is proposed to make of the Oahu College, is one of the most obvious and interesting facts now presented to our view in that part of the world.
1. The College is essential to the development and continued existence of the Hawaiian nation. It is so because the missionary portion is really the palladium of the nation, and because a College is essential to that part of the community. The religious foreign community cannot otherwise long continue to perform its functions. It must have the means of liberally educating its children on the ground. Without a College, its moral, social and civil influence will tend constantly to decay. This most precious Christian influence, now rooted on the Islands, now no longer exotic, needs only the proper culture to perpetuate itself. The cheapest thing we can do for the Islands and for that part of the world, is to furnish this culture. It is better to educate our ministry there, than to send it thither from these remote shores. Indeed we are shut up to this, as our main policy. The providential indications are perfectly clear. Through the grace of God and the gospel of his Son, all the means, excepting such as are pecuniary, for perpetuating Christianity at the Islands, are already there. Mr. Armstrong, the Minister of Instruction at the Islands, writing to one of the Secretaries of the American Board under date of January 2, 1856, bears this remarkable testimony:--
"During the year 1855, just closed," he says, "I visited all the Islands, and every missionary station, in the course of my official duty, and had good opportunities for seeing how the brethren conduct the affairs of their respective stations, and the success that has crowned their labors. I found them all at their posts, hard at work, watching for souls, and promoting the welfare of their people in various ways. As a class, they are very laborious and self-denying, and the advancement of their people in knowledge, industry, civilization and religion, is the best evidence of their success. I have lived for weeks on weeks among the natives, lodging with them in their huts, partaking of their homely fare and sleeping on their mats; and the more I see of them, the more I bless God for what he has done for them. I do not believe there is a community on earth, of the same number, more entirely pervaded by the blessed gospel. In the remotest corners of the land, I find a Bible and Hymn-book in nearly every house, if there was nothing else."
We may say of the faithful men, who, ceasing to be missionaries in the technical sense, are now laboring as pastors of churches, superintendents of education, or professors in the native College, or as physicians, teachers, editors, or Christian merchants:--"Except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved." Had the great body of these men left the Islands in the year 1848, the native government could not long have survived the catastrophe; and now, and for years to come, they will be, under God, the most effectual safeguard the Hawaiian Government and people can possibly have. Remaining there, with their numerous and healthy families of children, and furnished with facilities for educating those children, the government, the nation, the Islands will continue, with the ordinary blessing of Heaven, to be Christian, evangelical, a glorious monument of the triumphs of the gospel, a light enlightening the benighted groups lying far to the westward, and a cause for admiring gratitude to the whole Christian world!
Surely results like these are worth a great outlay for their preservation; but this cannot be effectually done without the speedy institution of a College at the Islands, where a portion of the children of foreign parents, and some of the more promising of the native youth, may receive that liberal education which is deemed so important in this country.
2. There is another and highly interesting view of the subject. This Christian community at the Sandwich Islands,--mixed in blood, but one in Christ,--should be regarded as a centre of light and influence for the large number of inhabited but benighted Islands scattered over the far and vast WEST of the Pacific Ocean. This missionary enterprise in the insular world beyond, besides its intrinsic importance, is among the necessary means, by its reacting influence, of raising the Hawaiian churches to the point of self-support and self-control; and its value, in this view, is already delightfully evident. The pecuniary means for