West African studies Part 6

[Ill.u.s.tration: ROUND A KACONGO CAMP FIRE. [_To face page 105._]

Hand nets of many kinds are used. The most frequent form is the round net, weighted all round its outer edge. This is used by one man, and is thrown with great deftness and grace, in shallow waters. I suppose one may hardly call the long wreaths of palm and palm branches, used by the Loango and Kacongo coast native for fis.h.i.+ng the surf with, nets, but they are most effective. When the Calemma (the surf) is not too bad, two or more men will carry this long thick wreath out into it, and then drop it and drag it towards the sh.o.r.e. The fish fly in front of it on to the beach, where they fall victims to the awaiting ladies, with their baskets. Another very quaint set of devices is employed by the Kruboys whenever they go to catch their beloved land and sh.o.r.e crabs. I remember once thinking I had providentially lighted on a beautiful bit of ju-ju; the whole stretch of mud beach had little lights dotted over it on the ground. I investigated. They were crab-traps. "Bottle of Beer," "The Prince of Wales," "Jane Ann," and "Pancake" had become--by means we will not go into here--possessed of bits of candle, and had cut them up and put in front of them pieces of wood in an ingenious way. The crab, a creature whose intelligence is not sufficiently appreciated, fired with a scientific curiosity, went to see what the light was made of, and then could not escape, or perhaps did not try to escape, but stood spell-bound at the beauty of the light; anyhow, they fell victims to their spirit of inquiry. I have also seen drop-traps put for crabs round their holes. In this case the sense of the beauty of light in the crab is not relied on, and once in he is shut in, and cannot go home and communicate the result of his investigations to his family.

Yet, in spite of all these advantages and appliances above cited, I grieve to say the West African, all along the Coast, decends to the unsportsmanlike trick of poisoning. Certain herbs are bruised and thrown into the water, chiefly into lagoons and river-pools. The method is effective, but I should doubt whether it is wholesome. These herbs cause the fish to rise to the surface stupefied, when they are scooped up with a calabash. Other herbs cause the fish to lie at the bottom, also stupefied, and the water in the pool is thrown out, and they are collected.

More as a pastime than a sport I must cla.s.s the shooting of the peculiar hopping mud-fish by the small boys with bows and arrows, but this is the only way you can secure them as they go about star-gazing with their eyes on the tops of their heads, instead of attending to baited hooks, and their hearing (or whatever it is) is so keen that they bury themselves in the mud-banks too rapidly for you to net them. Spearing is another very common method of fis.h.i.+ng. It is carried on at night, a bright light being stuck in the bow of the canoe, while the spearer crouching, screens his eyes from the glare with a plantain leaf, and drops his long-hafted spear into the fish as they come up to look at the light. It is usually the big bream that are caught in this way out in the sea, and the carp up in fresh water.

The manners and customs of many West African fishes are quaint. I have never yet seen that fish the natives often tell me about that is as big as a man, only thicker, and which walks about on its fins at night, in the forest, so I cannot vouch for it; nor for that other fish that hates the crocodile, and follows her up and destroys her eggs, and now and again dedicates itself to its hate, and goes down her throat, and then spreads out its spiny fins and kills her.

The fish I know personally are interesting in quieter ways. As for instance the strange electrical fish, which sometimes have sufficient power to kill a duck and which are much given to congregating in sunken boats, causing much trouble when the boat has to be floated again, because the natives won't go near them, to bail her out.

Then there is that deeply trying creature the Ning Ning fish, who, when you are in some rivers in fresh water and want to have a quiet night's rest, just as you have tucked in your mosquito bar carefully and successfully, comes alongside and serenades you, until you have to get up and throw things at it with a prophetic feeling, amply supported by subsequent experience, that hordes of mosquitos are busily ensconcing themselves inside your mosquito bar. What makes the Ning Ning--it is called after its idiotic song--so maddening is that it never seems to be where you have thrown the things at it. You could swear it was close to the bow of the canoe when you s.h.i.+ed that empty soda-water bottle or that ball of your precious indiarubber at it, but instantly comes "ning, ning, ning" from the stern of the canoe. It is a ventriloquist or goes about in shoals, I do not know which, for the latter and easier explanation seems debarred by their not singing in chorus; the performance is undoubtedly a solo; any one experienced in this fish soon finds out that it is not driven away or destroyed by an artillery of missiles, but merely lies low until its victim has got under his mosquito curtain, and resettled his mosquito palaver,--and then back it comes with its "ning ning."

A similar affliction is the salt-water drum-fish, with its "b.u.m-b.u.m."

Loanda Harbour abounds with these, and so does Chiloango. In the bright moonlight nights I have looked overside and seen these fish in a wreath round the canoe, with their silly noses against the side, "b.u.m-b.u.mming"

away; whether they admire the canoe, or whether they want it to come on and fight it out, I do not know, because my knowledge of the different kinds of fishes and of their internal affairs is derived from Dr.

Gunther's great work, and that contains no section on ichthyological psychology. The West African natives have, I may say, a great deal of very curious information on the thoughts of fishes, but, much as I liked those good people, I make it a hard and fast rule to hold on to my common-sense and keep my belief for religious purposes when it comes to these deductions from natural phenomena--not that I display this mental att.i.tude externally, for there is always in their worst and wildest fetish notions an underlying element of truth. The fetish of fish is too wide a subject to enter on here, it acts well because it gives a close season to river and lagoon fish; the natives round Lake Ayzingo, for example, saying that if the first fishes that come up into the lake in the great dry season are killed, the rest of the shoal turn back, so on the arrival of this vanguard they are treated most carefully, talked to with "a sweet mouth," and given things. The fishes that form these shoals are _Hemichromis fasciatus_ and _Chromis ogowensis_.

I know no more charming way of spending an afternoon than to leisurely paddle alone to the edge of the Ogowe sand bank in the dry season, and then lie and watch the ways of the water-world below. If you keep quiet, the fishes take no notice of you, and go on with their ordinary avocations, under your eyes, hunting, and feeding, and playing, and fighting, happily and cheerily until one of the dreaded raptorial fishes appears upon the scene, and then there is a general scurry. Dreadful warriors are the little fishes that haunt sand banks (_Alestis Kingsleyae_) and very bold, for when you put your hand down in the water, with some crumbs, they first make two or three attempts to frighten it, by sidling up at it and b.u.t.ting, but on finding there's no fight in the thing, they swagger into the palm of your hand and take what is to be got with an air of conquest; but before the supply is exhausted, there always arises a row among themselves, and the gallant bulls, some two inches long, will spin round and b.u.t.t each other for a second or so, and then spin round again, and flap each other with their tails, their little red-edged fins and gill-covers growing crimson with fury. I never made out how you counted points in these fights, because no one ever seemed a scale the worse after even the most desperate duels.

Most of the West Coast tribes are inveterate fishermen. The Gold Coast native regards fis.h.i.+ng as a low pursuit, more particularly oyster-fis.h.i.+ng, or I should say oyster-gathering, for they are collected chiefly from the lower branches of the mangrove-trees; this occupation is, indeed, regarded as being only fit for women, and among all tribes the villages who turn their entire attention to fis.h.i.+ng are regarded as low down in the social scale. This may arise from fetish reasons, but the idea certainly gains support from the conduct of the individual fisherman. Do not imagine Brother Anglers, that I am hinting that the Gentle Art is bad for the moral nature of people like you and me, but I fear it is bad for the African. You see, the African, like most of us, can resist anything but temptation--he will resist attempts to reform him, attempts to make him tell the truth, attempts to clothe, and keep him tidy, &c., and he will resist these powerfully; but give him real temptation and he succ.u.mbs, without the European preliminary struggle.

He has by nature a kleptic bias, and you see being out at night fis.h.i.+ng, he has chances--temptations, of succ.u.mbing to this--and so you see a man who has left his home at evening with only the intention of spearing fish, in his mind, goes home in the morning pretty often with his missionary's ducks, his neighbours' plantains, and a few odd trifles from the trader's beaches, in his canoe, and the outer world says "Dem fisherman, all time, all same for one, with tief man."[9]

The Accras, who are employed right down the whole West Coast, thanks to the valuable education given them by the Basel Mission as cooks, carpenters, and coopers, cannot resist fis.h.i.+ng, let their other avocations be what they may. A friend of mine the other day had a new Accra cook. The man cooked well, and my friend vaunted himself, and was content for the first week. At the beginning of the second week the cooking was still good, but somehow or other, there was just the suspicion of a smell of fish about the house. The next day the suspicion merged into certainty. The third day the smell was insupportable, and the atmosphere unfit to support human life, but obviously healthy for flies.

The cook was summoned, and asked by Her Britannic Majesty's representative "Where that smell came from?" He said he "could not smell it, and he did not know." Fourth day, thorough investigation of the premises revealed the fact that in the back-yard there was a large clothes-horse which had been sent out by my friend's wife to air his clothes; this was literally converted into a screen by strings of fish in the process of drying, _i.e._, decomposing in the sun.

The affair was eliminated from the domestic circle and cast into the Ocean by seasoned natives; and awful torture in this world and the next promised to the cook if he should ever again embark in the fish trade.

The smell gradually faded from the house, but the poor cook, bereaved of his beloved pursuit, burst out all over in boils, and took to religious mania and drink, and so had to be sent back to Accra, where I hope he lives happily, surrounded by his beloved objects.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] Specimens of rock identified by the Geological Survey, London, as cretaceous, and said by other geologists up here to be possibly Jura.s.sic.

[7] _Clarias laviaps._

[8] Translation: "Leave it alone! Leave it alone! Throw it into the water at once! What did you catch it for?"

[9] Translation: "All fishermen are thieves."

CHAPTER V.

FETISH.

Wherein the student of Fetish determines to make things quite clear this time, with results that any sage knowing the subject and the student would have safely prophesied; to which is added some remarks concerning the position of ancestor wors.h.i.+p in West Africa.

The final object of all human desire is a knowledge of the nature of G.o.d. The human methods, or religions, employed to gain this object are divisible into three main cla.s.ses, inspired--

_Firstly_, the submission to and acceptance of a direct divine message.

_Secondly_, the attempt by human intellectual power to separate the conception of G.o.d from material phenomena, and regard Him as a thing apart and unconditioned.

_Thirdly_, the attempt to understand Him as manifest in natural phenomena.

I personally am constrained to follow this last and humblest method, and accept as its exposition Spinoza's statement of it, "Since without G.o.d nothing can exist or be conceived, it is evident that all natural phenomena involve and express the conception of G.o.d, as far as their essence and perfection extends. So we have a greater and more perfect knowledge of G.o.d in proportion to our knowledge of natural phenomena.

Conversely (since the knowledge of an effect through a cause is the same thing as the knowledge of a particular property of a cause), the greater our knowledge of natural phenomena the more perfect is our knowledge of the essence of G.o.d which is the cause of all things."[10] But I have a deep respect for all other forms of religion and for all men who truly believe, for in them clearly there is this one great desire of the knowledge of the nature of G.o.d, and "_Ein guter Mensch in seinem dunkeln Drange Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewuszt._" Nevertheless the most tolerant human mind is subject to a feeling of irritation over the methods whereby a fellow-creature strives to attain his end, particularly if those methods are a sort of heresy to his own, and therefore it is a most unpleasant thing for any religious-minded person to speak of a religion unless he either profoundly believes or disbelieves in it. For, if he does the one, he has the pleasure of praise; if he does the other, he has the pleasure of war, but the thing in between these is a thing that gives neither pleasure; it is like quarrelling with one's own beloved relations. Thus it is with Fetish and me. I cannot say I either disbelieve or believe in it, for, on the one hand, I clearly see it is a religion of the third cla.s.s; but, on the other, I know that Fetish is a religion that is regarded by my fellow white men as the embodiment of all that is lowest and vilest in man--not altogether without cause. Before speaking further on it, however, I must say what I mean by Fetish, for "the word of late has got ill sorted."

I mean by Fetish the religion of the natives of the Western Coast of Africa, where they have not been influenced either by Christianity or Mohammedanism. I sincerely wish there were another name than Fetish which we could use for it, but the natives have different names for their own religion in different districts, and I do not know what other general name I could suggest, for I am sure that the other name sometimes used in place of Fetish, namely Juju, is, for all the fine wild sound of it, only a modification of the French word for toy or doll, _joujou_. The French claim to have visited West Africa in the fourteenth century, prior to the Portuguese, and whether this claim can be sustained on historic evidence or no, it is certain that the French have been on the Coast in considerable numbers since the fifteenth century, and no doubt have long called the little objects they saw the natives valuing so strangely _joujou_, just as I have heard many a Frenchman do down there in my time. Therefore, believing Juju to mean doll or toy, I do not think it is so true a word as Fetish; and, after all, West Africa has a prior right to the use of this word Fetish, for it has grown up out of the word _Feitico_ used by the Portuguese navigators who rediscovered West Africa with all its wealth and worries for modern Europe. These worthy voyagers, noticing the veneration paid by Africans to certain objects, trees, fish, idols, and so on, very fairly compared these objects with the amulets, talismans, charms, and little images of saints they themselves used, and called those things similarly used by the Africans _Feitico_, a word derived from the Latin _fact.i.tius_, in the sense magically artful. Modern French and English writers have adopted this word from the Portuguese; but it is a modern word in its present use. It is not in Johnson, and the term _Fetichisme_ was introduced by De Brosses in his remarkable book, _Du Culte des Dieux fetiches_, 1760; but doubtless, as Professor Tylor points out, it has obtained a great currency from Comte's use of it to denote a general theory of primitive religion. Professor Tylor, most unfortunately for us who are interested in West African religion, confines the use of the word to one department of his theory of animism only--namely to the doctrine of spirits embodied in, or attached to, or conveying influence through certain material objects.[11]

I do not in the least deny Professor Tylor's right to use the word Fetish[12] in that restricted sense in his general study of comparative religion. I merely wish to mention that you cannot use it in this restricted sense, but want the whole of his grand theory of animism wherewith to describe the religion of the West Africans. For although there is in that religion a heavy percentage of embodied spirits, there is also a heavier percentage of unembodied spirits--spirits that have no embodiment in matter and spirits that only occasionally embody themselves in matter.

Take, for example, the G.o.ds of the Ewe and Ts.h.i.+.[13] There is amongst them Tando, the native high G.o.d of Ashantee. He appears to his priesthood as a giant, tawny skinned, lank haired, and wearing the Ashantee robe. But when visiting the laity, on whom he is exceedingly hard, he comes in pestilence and tempest, or, for more individual village visitations, as a small and miserable boy, desolate and crying for help and kindness, which, when given to him, Tando repays by killing off his benefactors and their fellow-villagers with a certain disease.

This trick, I may remark, is not confined to Tando, for several other West African G.o.ds use it when sacrifices to them are in arrears; and I am certain it is more at the back of outcast children being neglected than is either sheer indifference to suffering or cruelty. Because, fearing the disease, your native will be far more likely to remember he is in debt to the G.o.d and go and pay an instalment, than to take in that child whom he thinks is the G.o.d who has come to punish.

But you have only to look through Ellis's important works, the "Ts.h.i.+-speaking, Ewe-speaking, and Yoruba-speaking peoples of the West Coast of Africa," to find many instances of the G.o.ds of Fetish who do not require a material object to manifest themselves in. And I, while in West Africa, have often been struck by incidents that have made this point clear to me. When I have been out with native companions after nightfall, they pretty nearly always saw an apparition of some sort, frequently apparitions of different sorts, in our path ahead. Then came a pause, and after they had seen the apparition vanish, on we went--not cheerily, however, until we were well past the place where it had been seen. This place they closely examined, and decided whether it was an Abambo, or Manu, or whatever name these spirit cla.s.ses had in their local language, or whether it was something worse that had been there, such as a Sasabonsum or Ombuiri.

They knew which it was from the physical condition of the spot. Either there was nothing there but ordinary path stuff; or there was white ash, or there was a log or rock, or tree branch, and the reason for the different emotion with which they regarded this latter was very simple, for it had been an inferior cla.s.s spirit, one that their charms and howled incantations could guard them against. When there was ash, it had been a witch destroyed by the medicine they had thrown at it, or a medium cla.s.s spirit they could get protection from "in town." But if "he left no ash" the rest of our march was a gloomy one; it was a bad business, and unless the Fetish authorities in town chose to explain that it was merely a demand for so much white calico, or a goat, &c., some one of our party would certainly get ill.

Well do I remember our greatest terror when out at night on a forest path. I believe him to have been a Sasabonsum, but he was very widely distributed--that is to say we dreaded him on the forest paths round Mungo Mah Lobeh; we confidently expected to meet him round Calabar; and, to my disgust, for he was a hindrance, when I thought I had got away from his distribution zone, down in the Ogowe region, coming home one night with a Fan hunter from Fula to Kangwe, I saw some one coming down the path towards us, and my friend threw himself into the dense bush beside the path so as to give the figure a wide berth. It was the old symptom. You see what we object to in this spirit is that one side of him is rotting and putrifying, the other sound and healthy, and it all depends on which side of him you touch whether you see the dawn again or no. Such being the case, and African bush paths being narrow, this spirit helps to make evening walks unpopular, for there are places in every bush path where, if you meet him, you must brush against him--places where the wet season's rains have made the path a narrow ditch, with clay incurved walls above your head--places where the path turns sharply round a corner--places where it runs between rock walls.

Such being the case, the risk of rubbing against his rotting side is held to be so great that it is best avoided by staying at home in the village with your wives and families, and playing the tom-tom or the orchid-fibre-stringed harp, or, if you are a bachelor, sitting in the village club-house listening to the old ones talking like retired Colonels. Yet however this may be, I should hesitate to call this half-rotten individual "a material object." Sometimes we had merry laughs after these meetings, for he was only So-and-so from the village--it was not him. Sometimes we had cold chills down the back, for we lost sight of him; under our eyes he went and he left no ash.

Take again Mbuiri of the Mpongwe, who comes in the form usually of a man; or Nkala, who comes as a crab; or the great Nzambi of the Fjort--they leave no ash--and so on. This subject of apparition-forms is a very interesting one, and requires more investigation. For such G.o.ds as Nzambi Mpungu do not appear to human beings on earth at all, except in tempest and pestilence. The great G.o.ds next in order leave no ash.

The witch, if he or she be destroyed, does leave ash, and the ordinary middle and lower cla.s.s spirits leave the thing they have been in, so unaltered by their use of it that no one but a witch doctor can tell whether or no it has been possessed by a spirit.

You see therefore Fetish is in a way complex and cannot be got into "wors.h.i.+p of a material object." There is no wors.h.i.+p in West Africa of a material not so possessed, for material objects are regarded as in themselves so low down in the scale of things that nothing of the human grade would dream of wors.h.i.+pping them. Moreover, apart from these apparitions, I do not think you can accurately use the word Fetish in its restricted sense to include the visions seen by witch-doctors, or incantations made of words possessing power in themselves, and yet these things are part and parcel of Fetish. In fact, not being a comparative ethnologist, but a student of West African religion, I wish to goodness those comparative ethnologists would get another word of their own, instead of using our own old West Coast one.

It is, however, far easier to state what Fetish is not, than to state what it is. Although a Darwinian to the core, I doubt if evolution in a neat and tidy perpendicular line, with Fetish at the bottom and Christianity at the top, represents the true state of things. It seems to me--I have no authority to fortify my position with, so it is only me--that things are otherwise in this matter. That there are lines of development in religious ideas, and that no form of religious idea is a thing restricted to one race, I will grant; but if you will make a scientific use of your imagination, most carefully on the lines laid down for that exercise by Professor Tyndall, I think you would see that the higher form of the Fetish idea is Brahmanism; and that the highest possible form it could attain to is shown by two pa.s.sages in the works of absolutely white people to have already been reached,--first in that pa.s.sage from a poem by an author, whose name I have never known, though I have known the lines these five-and-twenty years--

"G.o.d of the granite and the rose, Soul of the lily and the bee, The mighty tide of being flows In countless channels, Lord, from Thee.

It springs to life in gra.s.s and flowers, Through every range of Being runs, And from Creation's mighty towers, Its glory flames in stars and suns"--

and secondly in this statement by Spinoza--"By the help of G.o.d, I mean the fixed and unchangeable order of nature, or chain of natural events, for I have said before and shown elsewhere that the universal laws of nature, according to which all things exist and are determined, are only another name for the eternal decrees of G.o.d, which always involves eternal truth and necessity, so that to say everything happens according to natural laws, and to say everything is ordained by the decree and ordinance of G.o.d, is to say the same thing. Now, since the power in nature is identical with the power of G.o.d, by which alone all things happen and are determined, it follows that whatsoever man as a part of nature provides himself with to aid and preserve his existence, or whatsoever nature affords him without his help, is given him solely by the Divine power acting either through human nature or through external circ.u.mstances. So whatever human nature can furnish itself with by its own efforts to preserve its existence may be fitly termed the inward aid of G.o.d, whereas whatever else accrues to man's profit from outward causes may be called the external aid of G.o.d."[14]

Now both these utterances are magnificent Fetish, and because I accept them as true, I have said I neither believe nor disbelieve in Fetish. I could quote many more pa.s.sages from acknowledged philosophers, particularly from Goethe. If you want, for example, to understand the position of man in Nature according to Fetish, there is, as far as I know, no clearer statement of it made than is made by Goethe in his superb _Prometheus_. By all means read it, for you cannot know how things really stand until you do.

This was brought home to me very keenly when I was first out in West Africa. I had made friends with a distinguished witch doctor, or, more correctly speaking, he had made friends with me. I was then living in a deserted house the main charm of which was that it was the house that Mr. H. M. Stanley had lived in while he was waiting for a boat home after his first crossing Africa. This charm had not kept the house tidy, and it was a beetlesome place by day, while after nightfall, if you wanted to see some of the best insect society in Africa, and have regular Walpurgis all round, you had only got to light a lamp; but these things were advantageous to an insect collector like myself, therefore I lodge no complaint against the firm of traders to whom that house belongs. Well, my friend the witch doctor used to call on me, and I apologetically confess I first thought his interest in me arose from material objects. I wronged that man in thought, as I have many others, for one night, about 11 p.m., I heard a pawing at the shutters--my African friends don't knock. I got up and opened the door, and there he was. I made some observations, which I regret now, about tobacco at that time of night, and he said, "No. You be big man, suppose pusson sick?" I acknowledged the soft impeachment. "Pusson sick too much; pusson live for die. You fit for come?" "Fit," said I. "Suppose you come, you no fit to talk?" said he. "No fit," said I, with a shrewd notion it was one of my Portuguese friends who was ill and who did not want a blazing blister on, a thing that was inevitable if you called in the local regular white medical man, so, picking up a medicine-case, I went out into the darkness with my darker friend. After getting outside the closed ground he led the way towards the forest, and I thought it was some one sick at the Roman Catholic mission. On we went down the path that might go there; but when we got to where you turn off for it, he took no heed, but kept on, and then away up over a low hill and down into deeper forest still, I steering by his white cloth. But Africa is an alarming place to walk about in at night, both for a witch doctor who believes in all his local forest devils, and a lady who believes in all the local material ones, so we both got a good deal chipped and frayed and frightened one way and another; but nothing worse happened than our walking up against a python, which had thoughtfully festooned himself across the path, out of the way of ground ants, to sleep off a heavy meal. My eminent friend, in the inky darkness and his hurry to reach his patient, failed to see this, and went fair up against it. I, being close behind, did ditto. Then my leader ducked under the excited festoon and went down the path at headlong speed, with me after him, alike terrified at losing sight of his guiding cloth and at the python, whom we heard going away into the bush with that peculiar-sounding crackle a big snake gives when he is badly hurried.

Finally we reached a small bush village, and on the ground before one of the huts was the patient extended, surrounded by unavailing, wailing women. He was suffering from a disease common in West Africa, but amenable to treatment by European drugs, which I gave to the medical man, who gave them to his patient with proper incantations and a few little things of his own that apparently did not hinder their action. As soon as the patient had got relief, my friend saw me home, and when we got in, I said, Why did you do this, that and the other, as is usual with me, and he sat down, looked far away, and talked for an hour, softly, wordily and gently; and the gist of what that man talked was Goethe's _Prometheus_. I recognised it after half an hour, and when he had done, said, "You got that stuff from a white man." "No, sir," he said, "that no be white man fash, that be country fash, white man no fit to savee our fash." "Aren't they, my friend?" I said; and we parted for the night, I the wiser for it, he the richer.

Now, I pray you, do not think I am saying that there is a "wisdom religion" in Fetish, or anything like that, or that Fetish priests are Spinozas and Goethes--far from it. All that it seems to me to be is a perfectly natural view of Nature, and one that, if you take it up with no higher form of mind in you than a shrewd, logical one alone, will, if you carry it out, lead you necessarily to paint a white chalk rim round one eye, eat your captive, use Woka incantations for diseases, and dance and howl all night repeatedly, to the awe of your fellow-believers, and the scandal of Mohammedan gentlemen who have a revealed religion.

Moreover, the mind-form which gets hold of this truth that is in all things, makes a great difference in the form in which the religion works out. For instance, to a superficial observer, it would hardly seem possible that a Persian and a Mahdist were followers of the same religion, or that a Spaniard and an English Broad Churchman were so.

And yet it seems to me that it is only this cla.s.s of difference that exists between the African, the Brahmanist, and the s.h.i.+ntoist.