Missionary Travels and Researches in South AfricaLivingstone, David
Religion
Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa
Livingstone, David
Missions -- South Africa; South Africa -- Description and travel
* The popular notion, however, of the primitive Church is
perhaps not very accurate. Those societies especially which
consisted of converted Gentiles--men who had been accustomed
to the vices and immoralities of heathenism--were certainly
any thing but pure. In spite of their conversion, some of
them carried the stains and vestiges of their former state
with them when they passed from the temple to the church. If
the instructed and civilized Greek did not all at once rise
out of his former self, and understand and realize the high
ideal of his new faith, we should be careful, in judging of
the work of missionaries among savage tribes, not to apply to
their converts tests and standards of too great severity. If
the scoffing Lucian's account of the impostor Peregrinus may
be believed, we find a church probably planted by the apostles
manifesting less intelligence even than modern missionary
churches. Peregrinus, a notoriously wicked man, was elected
to the chief place among them, while Romish priests, backed by
the power of France, could not find a place at all in the
mission churches of Tahiti and Madagascar.
We can not fairly compare these poor people with ourselves, who have an
atmosphere of Christianity and enlightened public opinion, the growth of
centuries, around us, to influence our deportment; but let any one
from the natural and proper point of view behold the public morality of
Griqua Town, Kuruman, Likatlong, and other villages, and remember what
even London was a century ago, and he must confess that the Christian
mode of treating aborigines is incomparably the best.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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