Here, then, is a state of mental degradation that to us looks almost like insanity. I have only touched upon the salient points of their belief. One can never convey to others any adequate impression of the stifling mental atmosphere of an African community, with its stagnation and torpor, depressing even the mind of the missionary and in some instances fairly threatening his faith. My experience of that atmosphere has been such that I have the deepest sympathy and compassion for traders and government officials living often solitary in such communities; whose beliefs and morals are often not the result of personal convictions, but merely a reflection of the beliefs, traditions and moral restraints of the social community in which they have lived. Upon the beliefs of such men there is a power of gravitation in the mentality of an African community that acts like the Magnetic Mountain of the Arabian fable, which, as ships approached it from the sea, drew out of them every nail, bolt and rivet, and left them a wreck of floating timbers, to be flung at random upon the lonely shore or buried in its sand.
At the first approach the mind of the African seems utterly inaccessible. His mental powers are paralyzed; he has forgotten how to think. If his mental redemption is possible where must it begin?
One day long ago, when a fellow missionary and myself were together in the Bulu interior, a native young man, in response to our inquiry, expressed the African belief that the rainbow is a snake. It has the power—which many men also have—of making itself invisible. The missionary, reflecting that superstition is simply ignorance of nature and nature’s laws, resolved to undertake immediately the boy’s education. The sun was shining brightly, and the missionary, having sent the native to fetch a bucket of water, told him that he himself would then and there make a rainbow. He asked me to stand on the porch and throw the bucketful of water in a certain direction, while he took his stand on the ground with the boy by his side. Now it happens that in matters of science I have an inveterate inclination to be content with theory. I never attempted a practical experiment in my life that did not miscarry. Besides, everybody knows that a bucket is an exceedingly awkward instrument with which to take accurate aim. The water came down on the upturned faces of the two eager scientists. The black man has an abiding antipathy to the fourth element; and this native evidently regarded the performance as a punishment for his unbelief in regard to the substance of the rainbow. He ducked his head and shouted: “I believe; I believe; master, please don’t do it again.”
Later in the day he might have been heard telling his friends not to let the white man hear them say that the rainbow is a snake—if they did not want a bucket of water thrown on them. So we made a conversion after the Mohammedan fashion. But that native must have wondered what might be the essential difference between the reign of law and the law of rain.
A million such experiments, even if perfectly successful, would not be worth while except as amusement; for the native mind is wrong not merely in particulars, but fundamentally. The idea of God must be injected into nature, as a basis for law, before a scientific attitude is possible. Only the idea of God can expel the multitude of spirits whose activities make of nature a haphazard warfare of conflicting forces. And how shall we convey this idea to the degraded mind of the African?
Of course we should change his idea of nature if we could persuade him of God’s unity, and that nature, therefore, is the product of a single mind; His spirituality, and that He is therefore present everywhere, in nature and the hearts of men; His holiness, and that God and nature are therefore on the side of righteousness; His love, and that God and nature are therefore benevolent and sympathetic with man. But to talk to the African about God’s attributes is to speak in an unknown tongue. And besides, God’s personality is something more than the sum of His attributes, which no more make God, as some one has said, than arms and legs and head and trunk make my father. But we can present to the African mind the personal Christ—God incarnate—and the African heart responding can love Him; and loving Him he can know Him; for love is more knowing than reason. The African is, above all, still capable of strong personal affection; and looking into the face of Jesus he sees God—the One God of conscience—and learns to call Him Father, a word which even to the African mind implies love and care. He knows nothing of attributes, but like a child he can discern his Father’s will.
God’s fatherhood includes His care. And this relates God to nature, through which that care is largely exercised. His first lessons on nature the African learns not from science, but directly from Jesus. Jesus multiplies the loaves, and the value of the miracle for the African, and for us, is not the wonder of it, but the lesson that it is God who gives us our daily bread. Jesus stills the storm on Galilee and thus teaches that the Father is present in all storms and always rules the sea and the wind, which are not under the control of demons. Jesus heals the leper, and we learn His power over all disease, and that a loving will afflicts and heals. He raises Lazarus from the dead, and reveals that death is never in the hands of a malignant foe, but under the control of a sympathetic Power. The thought of the African is completely reversed by this knowledge of God. Nature is not the result of myriad spirits hostile to himself, but the product of one single mind, and its laws, the expression of a constant and loving Will. It is as if the forked lightning at which he trembles in the darkness should flash upon the storm-cloud the word Father; and fear becomes faith. In Jesus the One God of conscience, the Father, becomes supreme over nature.
A certain native named Toko, of the Mpongwe coast tribe, who had been for some years a Christian, went back into the interior among the Fang, preaching the Gospel. The Fang were notorious robbers, who at every opportunity plundered the cargo of traders as it passed in boats up and down the river. While Toko was preaching one day, some one interrupting him said: “I don’t believe that God is good, as you say. For why did He make this river so crooked that in order to reach the coast we have to travel nearly twice the straight distance?”
“My friend,” replied Toko, “God knew that you wicked Fang were going to live along this river and that you would plunder passing boats; and He made the river crooked so that you can’t see the boat coming until it is so near that you have not time to get out to it before it is past.”
The wit aside, and however defective the teleology, observe the underlying attitude towards nature, and the fundamental change it implies. God is in nature, which is therefore under law, is sympathetic towards man, and working on the side of righteousness—a view that excludes and dooms fetishism and witchcraft. This simple man, and his fellow Christians with him, had the right basis for a scientific knowledge of nature.