This is incomparably more true in Africa than it ever has been or ever can be in the Southern states. The worst of the remote possibilities which Mr. Murphy describes are fully realized in Africa. The velocity of the process is accelerated by the depressing effect of the climate.
The missionary too is more or less sensible of this influence upon himself; but he is guarded by the fact that his very purpose in Africa is to introduce and teach his own standards to the natives and he is constantly occupied in pointing out the superiority of his own and the inferiority of theirs. Moreover any definite accommodation to native standards would mean disgrace and failure; to other white men it means neither. Indeed the white man, other than the missionary, who proposes to maintain the home standards in Africa will sometimes find himself ostracized by his fellows.
The use of rum by the natives the missionary is bound to denounce and within the membership of the church it is absolutely forbidden. But in doing this the missionary by implication reflects very seriously upon many white men. For the excessive drinking of the majority of white men in Africa, with its appalling consequences, is so well known that there is no need to exploit it. And when the native connected with the mission church refuses either to drink rum or to sell it, thereby professing moral superiority to those white men, the latter are exasperated. And shall the missionary not teach the native the strict observance of the seventh commandment because the white man so flagrantly violates it? The discord arising from this source is greatly aggravated by the fact that so many girls educated in mission schools are enticed by the extraordinary temptations of the white men to a life that the missionary, if he be true to his Christian standards, must condemn; for the girls of the mission are the most intelligent and attractive.
These various reasons are ample explanation of the hostility to missions and the consequent criticisms that are heard all along the coast, and which are occasionally disseminated over the world by some writer who has made a brief stay in Africa and who is so ignorant of the whole subject of missions that it ought not to require much discretion to be silent.
Those who condemn missions on sociological grounds—who, like Professor Starr, think that civilized folk have no right to change the customs, institutions or ideas of any tribe, even with the purpose of saving their souls—are easily answered. For not only does such a view utterly repudiate the claim of Christ to be the world’s Saviour—the “Light of the world,” to which every man and nation has a right—but it is also contrary to the accepted principles of sociology. It is untrue and unscientific to say that the social structure of any given people has been fashioned by the people themselves, and therefore meets their needs; and that progressive changes must be brought about by the people themselves without the introduction of outside elements. The student of social evolution knows that the social structure is not always fashioned by the people themselves: it is sometimes altered radically by conquest. Neither does it always meet the people’s needs. The first need of a people is bread; and wherever the population is pressing too hard against the means of subsistence, as in India and China, with their recurring famines, there is a sure sign of weakness and defect in the social structure. Neither is it true that progressive changes must be brought about by the people themselves; for there may be social evils—impediments to progress, or tendencies to degeneration—which can only be corrected by the introduction of new ethical elements from without. Mohammedanism, a foreign religion, has become perfectly naturalized in a large portion of Africa, and our critics—most of them—vie with each other in proclaiming the good it has wrought. The spread of Buddhism in the Orient introduced new ideals. Christianity, originating in the Orient, brought new ideals to Europe. In Japan many of the elements worked out by Western civilization have been adopted and naturalized.
Besides, the let alone policy for Africa even if it were rational is hopelessly late. Foreign trade and government have long been established and show no sign of withdrawing. And the question is whether we shall send to Africa our civilization, with all its burden of new demands and moral responsibilities, without disclosing to its primitive and childlike people that which alone supports our material civilization and enables us to bear its moral weight—that which is deepest and best in our thought and life.
One of unusual gifts and attainments, who in all probability would have occupied a position of great influence in the church in America if he had remained at home, after labouring more than forty years in Africa, speaks thus of the temporal benefits consequent upon the spread of Christianity:
“For the feeling with which I was impressed on my very first contact with the miseries of the sociology of heathenism, entirely aside from its theology and any question of salvation in a future life, has been steadily deepened into conviction that, even if I were not a Christian, I still ought to, and would, do and bear and suffer whatever God has called or allowed me to suffer or bear or do since 1861 in my proclamation of His Gospel, simply for the sake of the elevation of heathen during their present earthly life from the wrongs sanctioned by or growing out of their religion.”[[3]]
[3]. Rev. Robert Hamill Nassau, D. D., Fetishism in West Africa, p. 26.
But to this apologetic the missionary adds his confident belief that the Christian faith affects not only the Africans’ redemption from “the miseries of the sociology of heathenism,” but also and chiefly the salvation of their souls; for he has seen the evidence in the lives of many who have been morally transformed by the power of a new and transcendent hope. Christian missions have made high claims, but their self-estimate has been justified by their achievement.