‘Now,’ I said, ‘I am quite convinced that you are bringing a false charge against your wife.’
‘Indeed he is,’ she said; ‘I would sooner die than disgrace my father and friends by such conduct.’
‘It is very easy for you,’ I added to the husband, ‘to bear false witness against your wife, and so deceive us by lies; but how will it be when you have to face those lies at the judgement-seat of God?’
He was startled for a moment, but soon recovered himself, and stuck to his charge. When we rejoined the others, I said, ‘I feel quite satisfied that this man is bringing a false charge against his wife, but, as he holds to it, we must probe the affair to the bottom.’ I asked him if he had any witnesses, and he named some. I caused them to be summoned. I again turned to him and asked, ‘Who is the other culprit, do you know him?’ He answered that he did not, that he was a petty chief from the north. I asked, ‘Would you know him again if you saw him?’ He replied that he would not. ‘That,’ I said, ‘is rather unfortunate for you, because you must find him and bring him before me, as we must get to the bottom of this business.’ He replied that he was not going to trouble himself hunting for him or bringing him before me. We might seek him if we liked, but he would not. ‘But,’ I said, ‘the matter cannot be settled in that way, it is far too serious. You know that, for the time being, we are “father and mother” to both districts of Vònizòngo.’ He replied that he did. ‘Then,’ I said, ‘in virtue of that, your wife is our daughter, and as we believe her to be quite innocent of the charges you bring against her, we mean to stand by her and have her proved innocent. I give you a month to seek for that petty chief, and bring him before me; but if you fail, I shall write to the prime minister to ask him, as a personal favour, for a sergeant and six soldiers to go with you to help you to find that man; because if he is still alive and in the island he must be found and brought before me.’
The man looked at me with astonishment and terror, and if he had been a European he would have turned deathly pale; but, as it was, his colour became something between a green and an ashy grey hue, and when he had found his tongue it was to confess that the whole charge was false!
The thought of meeting his falsehoods at the judgement-seat of God had no terrors for him (although, poor fellow, he was nearer eternity than he or any of us thought, for he died within three months); but to face the prime minister was too serious a matter. That was an unusually serious case, but it will help to give some idea of the work which we had to undertake.
As far as is known none of the tribes in Madagascar were ever cannibals. The Hovas in particular would have been the last to dream of hòman’ òlona, cannibalism in any form. They regard it as the most hideous and revolting practice conceivable. Their great respect for the dead, the care they take of the corpse, and the fine family tombs they build, all point in the opposite direction. The horrors of cannibalism, as known in New Guinea and on the Congo, were utterly unknown in Madagascar. But this, notwithstanding, all the tribes in the island—including the Hovas, the ablest and most advanced in civilization of them all, and until the advent of the French the dominant tribe—had sunk to a most revolting state of moral degradation. This is still the condition of the majority of the other tribes. Most of the crimes in that long black list, which the Apostle Paul brings against the Corinthians, might have been brought against the tribes in Madagascar, even against the Hovas, with the sentence, ‘Such were some of you.’ So that if missionaries had done nothing more for the Malagasy than raise some of those tribes—the Hovas in particular—to a platform of common decency, and inspire them with the desire for higher and better things than they had ever known, it was a work well worth doing. But the Gospel has done much more for the Hovas than this. It has made thousands of them ‘new creatures in Christ Jesus.’
When Christianity was first introduced to Madagascar, and for many years after, the Malagasy might have been said to have been perfectly destitute of spiritual instincts, and hence the reception by them of spiritual mysteries, not to say spiritual truth, was almost impossible. Their moral natures, their spiritual instincts and conscience had almost to be created or recreated. The progress which Christianity made during the fifteen years that the first missionaries were among them, and as the result of their labours, was truly astonishing. Persecution and martyrdom only rooted the faith more firmly in the hearts of the faithful few, and spread it among others. Hundreds were thus led to inquire about that ‘faith’ for which their fellow countrymen and women were prepared to die rather than renounce. Thus by the time the idols were burned in 1869, and the queen, prime minister, and government professed their adhesion to Christianity, a great change had come over the minds of a large number of the people in Central Madagascar with regard to the ‘new religion,’ as also in their attitude towards it. Still, in both respects the change was very superficial, and could hardly have been expected to have been anything else.
The Christianity of thousands who professed it, when the queen did, was but a thin veneer over their heathenism or semi-heathenism. Christianity had become the religion of the queen and government, and thus became the professed religion of the great mass of the people in Imèrina, some of the outlying provinces, and most of the Hova stations among the other tribes. Christianity was professed publicly in many cases, while idolatry and the ‘working of the oracle’ were practised in private. Even after the majority of the people in the central provinces had built churches, worshipped in them, and become church members, heathen practices lingered among them, and died hard, as they always do. In many cases church membership was not regarded as incompatible with moral laxity, and hence suspension from church fellowship was painfully frequent. But there was nothing strange or astonishing in such a state of things. It was only history repeating itself.
As I have already said, mission work in Madagascar has always suffered in some measure from its very success. It has lacked in depth from its great extension. Hence individual dealing with candidates for church membership was almost an impossibility. During the first rush into the then existing churches, and into those that were formed just after the idols were burned, the work of the missionaries then in the island was difficult in the extreme. They could not overtake a tenth of the work that suddenly came upon them. There were so many pressing duties, so many village churches and preaching stations to superintend.