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The Fundamentals gone ashore in a boat, returned bearing this news, “Oahu’s idols are no more.” And it was so. Before the missionaries had landed, the Holy Spirit had moved the pagan king and the priests to destroy all the heathen idols. How God moves upon the hearts of whole communities by the Holy Spirit in answer to the prayer of a devoted man! On Nov. 7, 1837, Titus Coan had been laboring two years at Hilo, Hawaiian Islands. Some ten thousand natives had come in from the surrounding tribes to hear the Gospel. Their little booths lined the shore, and some six thousand were crowded into the crude church building at the hour of even ing service. Suddenly the sea, moved by an unseen hand, began to roar and the volcanic wave fell upon the people, sweeping hundreds out to sea. An awful night that was! But mighty as was the sea, it was not to be compared with the waves of the Spirit that rolled over that people. All the next day, though the sea was giving up its dead one by one, the meeting continued, and the kingdom of darkness gave up its victims by the hundreds. So mighty was this work of the Spirit that on the first Sunday in July, 1838, Mr. Coan, on that afternoon, baptized 1,705 men, women and children, and some 2,400 communicants sat down at the Lord’s table. During the next three years, the Spirit all the while moving upon the people, 7,382 persons were received into the church at Hilo. And during his thirty-five years of work there Mr. Coan baptized with his own hands 11,960 converts. Somehow these “new acts of the apostles” strangely stir our hearts, even when we read about them. The very Spirit seems to breathe through the record, as through the Book of Acts, giving it life. What then must it be to be present in such an atmosphere where such scenes are being enacted! We are not surprised that Bishop Foster says of the first prayer meeting he attended at a mission station that he never saw such manifest presence of God in a mid-week prayer meeting.
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