WEST AFRICAN MISSIONS. Τ GENERAL INTRODUCTION. HE African peoples have endured for ages the utmost miseries possible to man; it has been as though the snake and the tiger had contended for the mastery over them. The Arab slave-hunter has drawn his track in blood across the face of the Dark Continent; the white trader has done a thriving business in muskets and rum; philosophers have discovered that the African may be useful as a chattel, but has no rights as a man; and theologians have been found hardy enough to affirm that the children of Ham suffer from a judicial sentence, and, therefore, to attempt their redemption would be to fly in the face of the Supreme Providence. The African himself has thoroughly learned the dismal lessons so faithfully taught him; his tribal wars, his detestable superstitions, his horrid vices have set up a process of self-destruction which, in the Divine order, surely follows unbridled wickedness. The innocent child of nature, the lusty savage, the sort of ideal man, free at once from the vices and the clothing of an effete civilisation, may exist on the pages of a fashionable review; but the actual savage, as he is found on the African shores, is a creature of quite another stamp. To say that there is in him no good thing, no vestige of a better nature, would be untrue; in Africa, as elsewhere, there may be found those who have an indomitable kindness of heart, some who know what generosity means, and who stretch out their hands towards a light they cannot see, but for which they hope. But of the mass it may be said that they are hateful and hating one another, living without God and without hope in the world. Surely we may ask, has not the time for Africa's redemption fully come; have not her children a wealth of affection and of trust, a capacity for service, which Christ alone can discover and win, and winning, help these dark degraded people to find their nobler manhood, and prove that they, too, are children of God? In the early days, leav ing the circuits of Judæa, the child Jesus went down into Egypt; later at Pentecost the people of Libya and of Egypt formed part of the crowd that listened to the new-born message of the Gospel; and later still the man of Ethiopia found in Christ the goal of all his hopes. Do not these facts of the evangelical history give promise of an African harvest, the fulness of which yet remains to be gathered in? Even still we wait the larger fulfilment of the ancient word-"Out of Egypt have I called my Son." In these brief pages we shall try to tell in outline, and no more, what our own Mission has attempted towards the bringing on of this blessed consummation. Short as the space of time embraced by that work may be, it is long enough to exhibit a wonderful blending of human activities and an all-embracing Divine purpose. We shall find in it abundant evidences of the great principles of continuity and development, so that to go back no further-an act of national justice, performed by the English people more than fifty years ago, became the starting-point of a movement which to-day has carried our missionaries a thousand miles inland from the mouth of the River Congo into the very heart of the African continent. The tiny eddies and back waters of our plans and of our blunders have been caught in the sweep of a larger current; from the orderly sequence of events tending to good, evolved out of the most various, complex, and even opposing forces, we can argue a Divine mind and a living heart ruling over all; we can say the finger of God is here, what hath God wrought! MAPS COMPARED. Let us compare two maps of Africa, the one published in 1817, the other in 1890. That comparison will show what has been accomplished in the way both of geographical discovery and of actual settlement in the mysterious continent. For the most part, the early map is a blank; with the exception of the Nile, not one great river is fully shown; the Niger has no visible outlet, the Zambesi is only partially given; the Congo, with its thousand miles of navigable waterway above the Pool, is represented by a small curve running south; the great chain of eastern lakes does not appear. To make up for this paucity of actual facts, and to give at least a pictorial completeness to his work, the geographer has put in mountains with a lavish hand, boldly drawing a great chain which is made to extend from Sierra Leone to Abyssinia, and called in part the Mountains of the Moon. These mountains, and the desert of Sahara, |