"You white man know everything, and you say your God rules everything. Tell me where I can find him, that I may kill him! he is a bad god—he has killed my favourite wife, and now I must kill him!"
The Negro was foaming at the mouth from impotent rage, and his fearful language, together with the rolling of his eyes and the contortions of his body, impressed the Monk at first with the idea that he was an impersonation of the Evil One. Yet this chief had till then been the most promising of all those natives on whom he had been wasting his time, his patience, and his doctrine. In vain the Missionary tried to reason with the demoniac chief; his words made no impression, and the savage, failing to discover from the Monk the whereabouts of the white man's God, returned to his village, where he burned his own national fetish, and then cut off the heads of half-a-dozen wretches, having first charged them with messages to be delivered to his wife in dead-man's-land!
One evening Padre Anselmo and I, after making ourselves snug on a pile of sacks near the binnacle, were talking about missionary work, when he spoke to me about our Protestant missions, and asked me many questions concerning them.
"You work your missions differently from the way we do ours; you pay your missionaries well, and even allow them, I have been told, to trade at times, and to buy and sell and follow different callings. I have also heard that you send missionaries abroad without any particular regard to their capabilities, for instance as to their knowledge of the language of the country they are sent to. Now all our missionaries are strictly prepared for the country where they are intended to labour, and are not sent out until they have acquired a good knowledge of the language of that country. How do you find your system to work? Have you had much success in the East Indies during the hundred years you have had the opportunity of working in them?"
I imagined I could detect something of a smile playing about the corners of his mouth as he made these remarks, and just as I was about to reply, a scene came to my mind of which I had read or heard an account somewhere, of an English missionary addressing an Arab audience in Tangier through the medium of a Gibraltar Jew, for the missionary was utterly innocent of any language but his own London English, and my innate appreciation of the ridiculous so overcame my sense of what was proper and decorous that I laughed myself nearly into fits.[6] However, having recovered my equanimity, I replied, "I did not know very much about the matter; but I had always heard that, generally speaking, the native Christians were the greatest blackguards in India, the least objectionable being certainly the Goanese Catholics," at which the good old monk seemed highly pleased.
His ideas of missionary work were peculiar and interesting. "We should always," he said, "treat savages and the utterly uneducated, whether at home or abroad, who are scarcely better than savages, like little children, like very little children in intelligence, yet endowed with the passions and vices of grown up men. One should therefore, if possible, never try to teach them things beyond their understanding, but make their practical civilization proceed pari passu with their religious training—instilling morality before preaching doctrine and dogma, both teachings being backed up by unexceptionable example. "These are not my own ideas," added Padre Anselmo, "they are the precepts of the wonderful man who preceded me in the Amazon Mission, the present Pontiff, His Holiness Pope Pius IX., whose equal will never again occupy the chair of St. Peter."
"What! was the Pope ever a missionary?" I asked with astonishment. I knew he had been a soldier, and had been even assured that in his early days he was initiated a Freemason in a Lodge in Sicily; there was nothing very extraordinary in his having been a missionary, but I had never heard of it before, and was therefore taken by surprise.
"Indeed he was," replied Padre Anselmo, "and a very zealous and hard-working missionary, whose memory is reverenced to this day, among many a wild tribe on the banks of the Amazon."
Then we began to talk politics, that is to say I talked, the Monk only listened, till musingly I said, "I wonder who will succeed him in the Chair of St. Peter?"
"Whoever he may be," replied the Monk, "he will have a difficult task coming after such a man."