It Is Most Unfair To Describe Africans In This State As "Converted,"
Either In Missionary Reports Or In Attacks On Them.
They are not
converted in the least.
A really converted African is a very
beautiful form of Christian; but those Africans who are the chief
mainstay of missionary reports and who afford such material for the
scoffer thereat, have merely had the restraint of fear removed from
their minds in the mission schools without the greater restraint of
love being put in its place.
The missionary-made man is the curse of the Coast, and you find him
in European clothes and without, all the way down from Sierra Leone
to Loanda. The pagans despise him, the whites hate him, still he
thinks enough of himself to keep him comfortable. His conceit is
marvellous, nothing equals it except perhaps that of the individual
rife among us which the Saturday Review once aptly described as "the
suburban agnostic"; and the "missionary man" is very much like the
suburban agnostic in his religious method. After a period of
mission-school life he returns to his country-fashion, and deals
with the fetish connected with it very much in the same way as the
suburban agnostic deals with his religion, i.e. he removes from it
all the inconvenient portions. "Shouldn't wonder if there might be
something in the idea of the immortality of the soul, and a future
Heaven, you know - but as for Hell, my dear sir, that's rank
superstition, no one believes in it now, and as for Sabbath-keeping
and food-restrictions - what utter rubbish for enlightened people!"
So the backsliding African deals with his country-fashion ideas:
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