Milk Or Meat,
Obtained In However Small Quantities, Removed Entirely
The Excessive Longing And Dreaming About Roasted Ribs Of Fat
Oxen,
and bowls of cool thick milk gurgling forth from the big-bellied calabashes;
and I could then understand the
Thankfulness to Mrs. L.
often expressed by poor Bakwain women, in the interesting condition,
for a very little of either.
In addition to other adverse influences, the general uncertainty,
though not absolute want of food, and the necessity of frequent absence
for the purpose of either hunting game or collecting roots and fruits,
proved a serious barrier to the progress of the people in knowledge.
Our own education in England is carried on at the comfortable
breakfast and dinner table, and by the cosy fire, as well as in
the church and school. Few English people with stomachs painfully empty
would be decorous at church any more than they are when these organs
are overcharged. Ragged schools would have been a failure
had not the teachers wisely provided food for the body as well as
food for the mind; and not only must we show a friendly interest
in the bodily comfort of the objects of our sympathy as a Christian duty,
but we can no more hope for healthy feelings among the poor,
either at home or abroad, without feeding them into them,
than we can hope to see an ordinary working-bee reared into a queen-mother
by the ordinary food of the hive.
Sending the Gospel to the heathen must, if this view be correct,
include much more than is implied in the usual picture of a missionary,
namely, a man going about with a Bible under his arm.
The promotion of commerce ought to be specially attended to,
as this, more speedily than any thing else, demolishes that sense of isolation
which heathenism engenders, and makes the tribes feel themselves
mutually dependent on, and mutually beneficial to each other.
With a view to this, the missionaries at Kuruman got permission
from the government for a trader to reside at the station,
and a considerable trade has been the result; the trader himself
has become rich enough to retire with a competence.
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