A CHALLENGE FROM WEST AFRICA.
'Where Moslem mosque and pagan temple are side by side.'
The Bedouin Arab with his camel or his herd of goats camps unthinking upon the sacred sites. Bethlehem, Nazareth, Cana, Capernaum, Calvary, Olivet mean nothing to him. He spreads his prayer-mat towards Mecca and invokes Mohammed.
We have traversed Asia from the farthest East, and the voice of the muezzin has haunted our ears. But we have not finished yet.
Africa.
Africa lies before us, the land of trackless deserts, overpowering forests, pestiferous marshes, vast inland seas.
It is the continent of pagan races, negro and Bantu crowding in mud-built towns or scattered in countless villages on the river banks. No stately temples of sculptured marble enshrine their pagan gods; weird sacred trees, fetishes, sacred stones take their place.
The pagan continent—is it so indeed? What means, then, the muezzin call from Cape to Cairo, from Lagos to Zanzibar? Whence come fanatic Moslems facing eastward and northward in the old strongholds of Christian Churches in North Africa and Egypt, in the heart of the Sahara, in the great, walled cities of Sokoto, in the vast bush lands of West Africa, where Moslem mosque and pagan temple are side by side? Down through central, pagan Africa, the land where Livingstone's heart still lies, we find the Moslem convert where ten years ago Mohammed was not known. Pagan Africa! its paganism fades into the past, and it fades before the crescent, not the Cross.
Urgent Problems.