This Place Has Been
What The Monasteries Of Europe Are Said To Have Been When Pure.
The Monks Did Not Disdain To Hold The Plow.
They introduced fruit-trees,
flowers, and vegetables, in addition to teaching and emancipating the serfs.
Their monasteries were mission stations, which resembled ours
in being dispensaries for the sick, almshouses for the poor,
and nurseries of learning.
Can we learn nothing from them
in their prosperity as the schools of Europe, and see naught in their history
but the pollution and laziness of their decay? Can our wise men tell us
why the former mission stations (primitive monasteries) were self-supporting,
rich, and flourishing as pioneers of civilization and agriculture,
from which we even now reap benefits, and modern mission stations
are mere pauper establishments, without that permanence or ability
to be self-supporting which they possessed?
Protestant missionaries of every denomination in South Africa
all agree in one point, that no mere profession of Christianity
is sufficient to entitle the converts to the Christian name.
They are all anxious to place the Bible in the hands of the natives,
and, with ability to read that, there can be little doubt as to the future.
We believe Christianity to be divine, and equal to all it has to perform;
then let the good seed be widely sown, and, no matter to what sect
the converts may belong, the harvest will be glorious.
Let nothing that I have said be interpreted as indicative of feelings
inimical to any body of Christians, for I never, as a missionary,
felt myself to be either Presbyterian, Episcopalian, or Independent,
or called upon in any way to love one denomination less than another.
My earnest desire is, that those who really have the best interests
of the heathen at heart should go to them; and assuredly, in Africa at least,
self-denying labors among real heathen will not fail to be appreciated.
Christians have never yet dealt fairly by the heathen and been disappointed.
When Sechele understood that we could no longer remain with him at Kolobeng,
he sent his children to Mr. Moffat, at Kuruman, for instruction
in all the knowledge of the white men. Mr. Moffat very liberally
received at once an accession of five to his family, with their attendants.
Having been detained at Kuruman about a fortnight by the breaking
of a wagon-wheel, I was thus providentially prevented from being present
at the attack of the Boers on the Bakwains, news of which was brought,
about the end of that time, by Masebele, the wife of Sechele.
She had herself been hidden in a cleft of a rock, over which
a number of Boers were firing. Her infant began to cry,
and, terrified lest this should attract the attention of the men,
the muzzles of whose guns appeared at every discharge over her head,
she took off her armlets as playthings to quiet the child.
She brought Mr. Moffat a letter, which tells its own tale.
Nearly literally translated it was as follows:
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