The explanation is partly that given by him later, that "a rain-maker seldom dies a natural death," [83] most being executed as impostors for their failures. To this effect there are many testimonies. [84] Among the Bushmen, says Lichtenstein, when a magician "happens to have predicted falsely several times in succession, he is thrust out of the kraal, and very likely burned or put to death in some other way." [85] "A celebrated magician," says Burton again, "rarely if ever dies a natural death." [86] And it is told of the people of Niue, or Savage Island, in the South Pacific, that "of old they had kings; but as they were the high priests as well, and were supposed to cause the food to grow, the people got angry with them in times of scarcity, and killed them; and as one after the other was killed, the end of it was that no one wished to be king." [87] So, in Uganda, if a chief and his medicine-men cannot make rain, "his whole existence is at stake in times of distress." One chief was actually driven out; and the rain-doctors always live on sufferance. [88] In such a state of things religion might well lose vogue. Among some peoples of the Slave Coast, it appears, the regular priests, despite their power and prestige, are always under suspicion by reason of their frequent miscarriages; and they are--or were--not unfrequently put to death. [89] Here there is disbelief in the priest without disbelief in the God. But a disbelief in the priest which tended to exterminate him might well diminish religion. On the other hand, a relative indifference to religion in a given tribe might result from the influence of one or more leading men who spontaneously doubted the religious doctrine offered to them, as many in Israel, on the face of the priestly records, disbelieved in the whole theocratic polity. In modern times preachers are constantly found charging "unbelief" on their own flocks, in respect not of any criticism of religious narrative or dogma, but of simple lack of ostensible faith in doctrines of prayer and Providence nominally accepted. [90] Among peasants who have never seen a freethinking book or heard a professed freethinker's arguments may be heard expressions of spontaneous unfaith in current doctrines of Providence.