God’s fatherhood includes His care. And this relates God to nature, through which that care is largely exercised. His first lessons on nature the African learns not from science, but directly from Jesus. Jesus multiplies the loaves, and the value of the miracle for the African, and for us, is not the wonder of it, but the lesson that it is God who gives us our daily bread. Jesus stills the storm on Galilee and thus teaches that the Father is present in all storms and always rules the sea and the wind, which are not under the control of demons. Jesus heals the leper, and we learn His power over all disease, and that a loving will afflicts and heals. He raises Lazarus from the dead, and reveals that death is never in the hands of a malignant foe, but under the control of a sympathetic Power. The thought of the African is completely reversed by this knowledge of God. Nature is not the result of myriad spirits hostile to himself, but the product of one single mind, and its laws, the expression of a constant and loving Will. It is as if the forked lightning at which he trembles in the darkness should flash upon the storm-cloud the word _Father_; and fear becomes faith. In Jesus the _One God_ of conscience, the _Father_, becomes supreme over nature. A certain native named _Toko_, of the Mpongwe coast tribe, who had been for some years a Christian, went back into the interior among the Fang, preaching the Gospel. The Fang were notorious robbers, who at every opportunity plundered the cargo of traders as it passed in boats up and down the river. While Toko was preaching one day, some one interrupting him said: “I don’t believe that God is good, as you say. For why did He make this river so crooked that in order to reach the coast we have to travel nearly twice the straight distance?” “My friend,” replied Toko, “God knew that you wicked Fang were going to live along this river and that you would plunder passing boats; and He made the river crooked so that you can’t see the boat coming until it is so near that you have not time to get out to it before it is past.” The wit aside, and however defective the teleology, observe the underlying attitude towards nature, and the fundamental change it implies. God is in nature, which is therefore under law, is sympathetic towards man, and working on the side of righteousness—a view that excludes and dooms fetishism and witchcraft. This simple man, and his fellow Christians with him, had the right basis for a scientific knowledge of nature. It is truly astonishing how the African mind, despite its rude materialism, beginning with the idea of love, as revealed in Jesus, grasps ultimately the spirituality of God and the spiritual nature of true worship. One instance must suffice for illustration: