When the Scriptures came to be translated, considerable objections presented themselves. Many even of the Christian Greenlanders thought that it would not be advisable for their unbelieving countrymen to be told, for example, of ‘Jacob’s slyness and treachery towards his father and brother, of the patriarchs’ polygamy, and especially of Simeon’s and Levi’s matchless wickedness.’ ‘The story of Lot,’ too, they thought unfortunate. ‘A selection of what was most important would be best for this people.’[171]
The sacrament of the altar, of course, seemed in their eyes the most arrant witchcraft, and baptism likewise. One time, says Niels Egede, when they had seen some Europeans going through this ceremony, ‘an angekok asked me why I was always denouncing those who practised witchcraft, when here was one of our own priests performing sorceries over us?’ To which Egede found no better answer than that it was ‘in accordance with Christ’s command;’ he did not think ‘the dog had any right to know more.’ Once, when the missionaries told a man ‘that he should especially thank God who had given him many children,’ he became very angry and answered, ‘It is a great lie to say that God has given me children, for I made them myself. “Is it not so?” he said, turning to his wife.’
Their criticism of the doctrine and practice of the missionaries was sometimes so mordant that the intelligent and honest merchant Dalager has to admit that ‘even the stupidest natives from far beyond the colony have often confronted me with such objections on these points as have made me groan, while the perspiration stood on my brow.’
Divine service seems at first to have bored them very much; they preferred to hear about Europe, and would ask many naïve questions: ‘Whether the King was very big? Was he strong? Was he a great angekok? And had he caught many whales?’ Paul Egede records that when they thought his father’s sermons too long ‘they went up to him and asked him if he was not soon going to stop. Then he had to measure off upon his arm how much of his discourse was left, whereupon they went back to their places and sat moving their hands down their arms every moment. When the preacher paused at the end of a paragraph, they made haste to move the hand right out to the finger-tips; but when he began again they cried “Ama” (that is, “Still more”) and moved the hand back again half way up the arm. The singing was in my department, and when I began a new psalm, or sang for too long, they would often hold a wet seal-skin mitten over my mouth.’
The missionaries’ treatment of the natives was not always of the gentlest. I may cite a couple of examples chosen at random from their own statements: ‘I gave him to understand,’ says Niels Egede, ‘that if he would not let himself be persuaded by fair means, but despised the Word of God, he should receive the same treatment from me as other angekoks and liars had received (namely a thrashing).’ ‘When I had tried all I could by means of persuasion and exhortation, without avail, I had recourse to my usual method, flogged him soundly and turned him out of the house.’[172] A girl was beaten by her priest, ‘because she could not believe that God was so cruel as he represented Him to be; he had said that all her forefathers were with Tornarssuk, and were to be tortured to all eternity, because they did not know God.’ She tried to defend them by suggesting that they knew no better, whereupon he lost his temper; and when at last she said ‘that it was horrible for her to learn that God was so terribly angry with those who sinned that he could never forgive them, as even wicked men will sometimes do,’ he gave her a beating.[173] It cannot but jar upon us to hear of such conduct on the part of our countrymen and Christian missionaries towards so peaceable a people; and it would scarcely make a better impression upon the natives themselves. We can only admire the good humour which prevented them from driving the missionaries out of their houses. In excuse for the missionaries, we must remember that they were born in Europe, and in a much ruder age than our own.
The conversion of the natives at first went but slowly and with difficulty; but they gradually discovered that the missionaries were in reality great angekoks, and that their ceremonies, such as baptism, their doctrines and formulas, the Christian books, and so forth, were magical appliances, potent for curing disease, protecting against want, and ensuring good fishery and other advantages; not to mention that conversion and a little appearance of contrition often bore immediate fruits in the shape of small rewards from the eager missionaries. Accordingly they said of them: ‘They are good people, they gave us food when we believed and looked sorrowful.’ A father whose son was dangerously ill, after having had recourse to various angekoks, took counsel with an old and experienced one ‘as to whether he should not seek help from the priest at the Colony;’ whereupon the old man calmly answered: ‘You may do as you please; for I am of opinion that the Word of God and the words of skilful angekoks are equally powerful.’ This gradually became the general opinion; and as it fortunately chanced in several cases that the Word of God seemed more effectual than that of the angekoks, it was natural that some should let themselves be baptised. The example once given, there were plenty to follow it, especially when distinguished hunters led the way.
But if the Greenlanders nominally went over to Christianity, they held, and still hold in a greater or less degree, to their old faith as well. It was at first very difficult to convince them of the falsity of the grotesque inventions of their angekoks. When they were reproached with their credulity they answered simply ‘that they were not in the habit of lying and therefore believed all that people said to them.’
That they were not absolutely simple-minded, however, in their acceptance of all that the Europeans told them, seems clear from this, amongst other things, that when some Greenlanders could not get Niels Egede to swallow their assertion that ‘they had killed a bear on Disco which was so big that it had ice on its back that never melted,’ they said: ‘We have believed what you tell us, but you will not believe what we tell you.’
To show what a little way below the surface Christianity has gone, and how some of them, at any rate, still understand baptism, I may mention that some years ago in North Greenland a catechist (a man who has received a theological education, and supplies the place of the clergyman in his absence) baptised not only his parishioners, but also his puppies in the name of the Father, the Son, &c. His wife was childless, and he took this means, as he thought, of setting matters right; and, sure enough, next year she bore a child.