All the air and the future is peopled with a large and indefinite company of these beings. The attitude of the Creator (Anyambě) toward the human race and the lower animals being that of indifference or of positive severity in having allowed evils to exist, and His indifference making Him almost inexorable, cause effort in the line of worship to be therefore directed only to those spirits who, though they are all probably malevolent, may be influenced and made benevolent. I. ORIGIN. The native thought in regard to the origin of spirits is vague; necessarily so. An unwritten belief that is not based upon revelation from a superior source nor on an induction from actual experience and observation, but that is added to and varied by every individual's fancy, can be expressed in definite words only after inquiry among many as to their ideas on the subject. These, I find, coincide on a few lines; just as the consensus of opinion on any subject in any community will find itself running in certain channels, influenced by the utterances of the stronger or wiser leaders. 1. It appears, therefore, that some of the spirits seem to have been conterminous with the life of Paia-Njambi in the eternities. An eternity past, impossible as it is for any one to comprehend, is yet a thing thinkable even with the Bantu African, for he has words to express it,--"pěkě-na-jome," ever-and-beyond, "tamba-na-ngâmâ," unknown-and-secret. Away back in that unknown time existed Paia-Njambi. Whence or how, is not asked by the natives; nor have I had any attempt even of a reply to my own inquiries. He simply existed. They are not sufficiently absurd to say that He created Himself. To do that He would need to antedate Himself. I have met none who thought sufficiently on the subject to worry their minds, as we in our civilization often do, in effort to go back and back to the unthinkable point in time past when God was not. Indeed so little is the native mind in the habit of any such research that I can readily perceive how their "We don't know" could easily be misunderstood by a foreign traveller, scientist, or even missionary, as a confession that "they did not know God,"--a statement which is true, but not the equivalent of, or synonymous with, that traveller's assertion that the native _had no idea of a God_. The native thought, wiser than ours, simply and unreasoningly says, "He is, He was." Conterminous with Him in origin there may have been some other spirits. This has been said to me by a very few persons with some hesitation. But if those spirits were indeed equal in existence with Njambi, they were in no respect equal to Him in character or power, and had no hand in the creation of other beings. In the Mpongwe tribe at Gabun one writer, Rev. J. L. Wilson, D.D., fifty years ago, thought the belief existed that "next to God in the government of the world are two spirits, one of whom, Onyambe, is hateful and wicked. The people seldom speak of