In Southern Nigeria Christian missionaries find themselves confronted with a firmly entrenched Mohammedan community. Something over fifty per cent. of the population is Mohammedan, and that of a most attractive order. None can meet the leading Mohammedans of that colony without being impressed with their simple piety and their tenacity to what they regard as their invincible faith. Officialdom opposes the advance of the emissaries of Christianity in the more northerly territory, on the ground of trouble with the Moslem community. This attitude is regarded by most Mohammedans as anything but a compliment to their religious faith, holding firmly as they do that the Koran is powerful enough to withstand all the assaults of another creed. Below Nigeria, that is south-east of the Niger delta, Mohammedan influence is left behind, and Christianity is confronted with simple paganism. Not the bloodthirsty and strongly entrenched barbaric paganism which confronted Livingstone in East Africa, Ramseyer at Kumasi, Hannington in Uganda, and Grenfell in the Congo, but a paganism so broken by the forces of civilization, so rent and riven by internal mistrust, that the masses of the people are crying out: “Who will show us any good?” Efforts to win West Central Africa to Christianity divide themselves into two periods. The first effective efforts were made by the Portuguese and Dutch settlers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The first period was almost exclusively due to Roman Catholic zeal, which, under the blessing of the Pope, regarded the tropics as a preserve of the Vatican. The nineteenth century witnessed but little advance, until Livingstone’s enthusiasm and his romantic career lighted a flame which spread throughout the civilized world, and Protestantism, awaking to its opportunity, began to pour missionaries into the tropical regions of West Africa. The Basel Mission attempted the Gold Coast, and its first missionaries perished to a man; the Church Missionary Society pushed on its work from Sierra Leone away up the Niger, where men and women did little more for a time than replace the dead and dying; the Methodists, never behind any other denomination in enthusiasm, began work in Sierra Leone, Calabar, and the islands of the Gulf of Guinea; the Baptists established an excellent mission in the Cameroons, where they were “elbowed out” by the Germans, and at a later date commenced their great work in the Congo. [Sidenote: RELIC WORSHIP]