Standing in the village street, surrounded by a company whom their chief has courteously summoned at my request, when I say to him, "I have come to speak to your people," I do not need to begin by telling them that there is a God. Looking on that motley assemblage of villagers,--the bold, gaunt cannibal with his armament of gun, spear, and dagger; the artisan with rude adze in hand, or hands soiled at the antique bellows of the village smithy; women who have hasted from their kitchen fire with hands white with the manioc dough or still grasping the partly scaled fish; and children checked in their play with tiny bow and arrow or startled from their dusty street pursuit of dog or goat,--I have yet to be asked, "Who is God?" Under the slightly varying form of Anyambe, Anyambie, Njambi, Nzambi, Anzam, Nyam, or, in other parts, Ukuku, Suku, and so forth, they know of a Being superior to themselves, of whom they themselves inform me that he is the _Maker_ and _Father_. The divine and human relations of these two names at once give me ground on which to stand in beginning my address. If suddenly they should be asked the flat question, "Do you know Anyambe?" they would probably tell any white visitor, trader, traveller, or even missionary, under a feeling of their general ignorance and the white man's superior knowledge, "No! What do _we_ know? You are white people and are spirits; you come from Njambi's town, and know all about him!" (This will help to explain, what is probably true, that some natives have sometimes made the thoughtless admission that they "know nothing about a God.") I reply, "No, I am not a spirit; and, while I do indeed know about Anyambe, _I_ did not call him by that name. It's your own word. Where did you get it?" "Our forefathers told us that name. Njambi is the One-who-made-us. He is our Father." Pursuing the conversation, they will interestedly and voluntarily say, "He made these trees, that mountain, this river, these goats and chickens, and us people." That typical conversation I have had hundreds of times, under an immense variety of circumstances, with the most varied audiences, and before extremes of ignorance, savagery, and uncivilization, utterly barring out the admission of a probability that the tribe, audience, or individual in question had obtained a previous knowledge of the name by hearsay from adjacent more enlightened tribes. For the _name_ of that Great Being was everywhere and in every tribe before any of them had become enlightened; varied in form in each tribe by the dialectic difference belonging to their own, and not imported from others,--for, where tribes are hundreds of miles apart or their dialects greatly differ, the variation in the name is great, _e. g._, "Suku," of the Bihe country, south of the Kongo River and in the interior back of Angola, and "Nzam" of the cannibal Fang, north of the equator.