serve that on this showing the Tongans were an eminently
religious people. They traced all the good and ill in human affairs to
the direct intervention of the gods, who rewarded or punished mankind
for their deeds in this life, bestowing the reward or inflicting the
punishment in the present world and not deferring either to a distant
and more or less uncertain future in a world beyond the grave. Thus with
the Tongans the fear of the gods was a powerful incentive to lead a
virtuous life; morality was placed under the immediate guardianship of
the deities. It is true that according to their notions morality
consisted largely in the performance of religious ceremonies, but it was
by no means limited to a simple observance of the prescribed rites; for
we have seen that their conception of a virtuous life included
compliance with the dictates of justice, modesty, and friendship, the
fidelity of wives to their husbands, the mutual affection of parents and
children, patience in suffering, and other modes of conduct which we too
should not hesitate to rank among the virtues.

When we consider the nature of the Tongan gods, we perceive that they
are sharply discriminated into two classes, namely, the primitive and
superior gods on the one side and the secondary and inferior gods on the
other side. The primitive and superior gods are those who have always
been gods and whose origin and beginning are unknown; the secondary and
inferior gods are the souls of dead men, who consequently have not
always been gods, because they were human beings before death elevated
them to the rank of deities. The distinction between these two classes
of gods is highly important, not merely for Tongan religion in
particular, but for the history of religion in general. For whatever we
may think of Euhemerism as a universal explanation of the gods, there
can be no doubt that in many lands the ranks of the celestial hierarchy
have been largely recruited by the ghosts of men of flesh and blood. But
there appears to be a general tendency to allow the origin of the human
gods to fall into the background and to confuse them with the true
original deities, who from the beginning have always been deities and
nothing else. The tendency may sometimes be accentuated by a deliberate
desire to cast a veil over the humble birth and modest beginning of
these now worshipful beings; but probably the obliteration of the
distinction between the two classes of divinities