As That Great Redeemer Of The Guilty
Seeks To Save All He Can, We May Hope That They Find Mercy
Through His blood,
though little able to appreciate the sacrifice He made.
The indirect and scarcely appreciable blessings of Christian
Missionaries
going about doing good are thus probably not so despicable
as some might imagine; there is no necessity for beginning to tell
even the most degraded of these people of the existence of a God
or of a future state, the facts being universally admitted.
Every thing that can not be accounted for by common causes
is ascribed to the Deity, as creation, sudden death, etc.
"How curiously God made these things!" is a common expression;
as is also, "He was not killed by disease, he was killed by God."
And, when speaking of the departed - though there is naught
in the physical appearance of the dead to justify the expression -
they say, "He has gone to the gods," the phrase being identical with
"abiit ad plures".
On questioning intelligent men among the Bakwains as to their
former knowledge of good and evil, of God and the future state,
they have scouted the idea of any of them ever having been
without a tolerably clear conception on all these subjects.
Respecting their sense of right and wrong, they profess that
nothing we indicate as sin ever appeared to them as otherwise,
except the statement that it was wrong to have more wives than one;
and they declare that they spoke in the same way of the direct influence
exercised by God in giving rain in answer to prayers of the rain-makers,
and in granting deliverances in times of danger, as they do now,
before they ever heard of white men.
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