By certain parts of their experience, these natives, it might almost be said, have had their minds prepared for receiving the Gospel message. They know what it is to be redeemed from the evil consequences of their own actions (80), as well as from slavery, and they see numerous cases where a criminal is legally set free while another man occupies his place. As a matter of fact, many of them began to understand what was meant by the statement that “the Son of God died to save sinners,” and were affected by it, and told their companions that it was wonderful news. Often, in places where a religious creed has been long established, persons hear these words without reflecting on their meaning, but intelligent Africans cannot do this. Again in our Western world we do not know so well as they do what it is to be _entirely_ at the disposal of another, and to have no private ends. Amidst the ordinary life of struggle and bustle, our ideal of a successful man is a person that is intensely devoted to his own interests, while their state of society, with all its defects, produces men that are as intensely devoted to the interests of another, and some of whom could enter with much sympathy into the feelings of the apostle who called himself the slave of Jesus Christ. We occupied a position of most momentous importance, standing as we did at a point where a savage assemblage was becoming more like a Christian church. Already we could discover the workings of a mind that had shewed itself in the history of the past. The natives might easily be led to believe that certain ordinances were as important in the Christian religion as certain charms were in their old faith. They would soon infer that the waters of Baptism would have as great an effect upon them as the waters of the Jordan had on Naaman the Syrian. In accordance with this they would attribute the greatest powers to the Missionary, and, as regards the majority of the people, who depended on him for all their religious information, that personage would be to them nothing if he were not infallible. To such views the people around us, many of whom had once been slaves, seemed very much inclined when they approached the subject with earnestness. Well might one suggest to them the prayer:— “Be with us in this darkened place This weary, restless, dangerous night, And teach, O teach us by thy grace To struggle onward into light!”