Be close to our left side to give aid.
Let all be wrapped in sleep;
Be as a lofty cocoa-nut tree to support us.
The god is then entreated to cause all things to sleep; the owner of the house is entreated to sleep on, likewise the threshold of the house, the insects, beetles, earwigs, and ants that inhabit it, the central post, the several rafters and beams that support it; and after the thatch of the house has been asked to sleep on, the prayer thus concludes:—
The first of its inmates unluckily awaking
Put soundly to sleep again.
If the Divinity so please, man’s spirit must yield.
O Rongo, grant thou complete success.
If, however, we may hope to find anywhere indications of a higher purpose in prayer than the attainment of merely temporary or personal needs, we must seek it (nor is the search entirely vain) in those rites of religion which, from the highest to the lowest levels of culture, are customary upon the entrance of a fresh life on the stage of this world’s trials and sorrows. The popular saying, that the cries of a child at its christening are the cries of the devil going out of it, expresses identically the same belief which still prompts our savage contemporaries to drive evil spirits from a new-born child by rites of mysterious spiritual efficacy; and it is probably to the indigenous prevalence of baptism among many savage tribes that some Catholic missionaries, complacently identifying conversion with immersion, have owed the success of their efforts. It would at least be interesting to know whether baptism was a native African rite at the time that the Capuchin Merolla baptized with his own hands 13,000 negroes, and Padre Jerom da Montefarchio his 100,000 in the space of twenty years.[48] Mungo Park gives an account of a purely heathen festival held about a week after the birth of a child, at which a priest, taking the latter in his arms, would pray, soliciting repeatedly the blessing of God on the child and all the company. And Bosman tells of a priest binding ropes, corals, and other things round the limbs of a new-born child, and exorcising the spirits of sickness and evil.[49]