Church History, Volume 3 (of 3)Kurtz, J. H. (Johann Heinrich)
History
Church History, Volume 3 (of 3)
Kurtz, J. H. (Johann Heinrich)
Church history
§ 184.4. Livingstone and Stanley have made marvellous
contributions to our geographical knowledge of =Central Africa=
and to Christian missions there. The Scottish missionary, David
Livingstone, factory boy, afterwards physician and minister,
wrought, A.D. 1840-1849, under the London Missionary Society in
South Africa, and then entered on his life work of exploration
in Central Africa. During his third exploring journey into the
interior in A.D. 1865 as a British consul, he was not heard of
for a whole year. H. M. Stanley, of the _New York Herald_, was
sent in A.D. 1871, and found him in Ujiji on Lake Tanganyiká.
Livingstone died of dysentery on the southern bank of this lake
in A.D. 1873. Still more important was Stanley’s second journey,
A.D. 1874-1877, which yielded the most brilliant scientific
results, and was epoch-making in the history of African missions.
He got the greatest potentate in those regions, King Mtesa of
Uganda, who had been converted by the Arabs to Mohammedanism, to
adopt Christianity and permit a Christian church to be built in
his city. Stanley’s letters from Africa roused missionary fervour
throughout England. The Church Missionary Society in A.D. 1877
set up a mission station in the capital, and put a steamer
on the Victoria Nyanza. The church services were regularly
attended, education and the work of civilization zealously
prosecuted, Sunday labour and the slave trade prohibited, etc.
French Jesuits entered in A.D. 1879, insinuating suspicions
of the English missionaries into the ear of the king, and the
machinations of the Arab slave-dealers made their position
dangerous. Missionaries arrived by way of Egypt with flattering
recommendations from the English foreign secretary in the name
of the queen. But the traders, by means of an Arabic translation
of a letter purporting to be from the English consul at Zanzibar,
cast suspicion on the document as a forgery, and represented its
bearers as in the pay of the hostile Egyptians. Mtesa’s wrath
knew no bounds, and only his favour for the missionary physician
saved the mission and led him to send an embassy of three chiefs
and two missionaries to England in June, A.D. 1879, to discover
the actual truth. His anger meanwhile cooled, and the work of
the mission was resumed. He was preparing to put an utter end
to the national heathenism, when suddenly a report spread that
the greatest of all the Lubaris or inferior deities, that of
the Nyanza Lake, had become incarnate in an old woman, in order
to heal the king and restore the ancient religion. The whole
populace was in an uproar; Mtesa, under threat of deposition,
restored heathenism, with human sacrifice, man stealing, and the
slave trade. Then the Lubari excitement cooled down. Mtesa, moved
by a dream, declared himself again a Mohammedan, and converted
the Christian church into a mosque. The English missionaries,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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