The principle of the African ordeal is that there is an eternal connection between guilt and retribution; and knowing of no righteous God to execute vengeance, they attribute wrath to the dumb forces of nature; these, they conceive, are in league against the wrong-doer and will execute vengeance. The belief is the more impressive because it is directly contradicted by the facts of experience. Fire burns the innocent; the lightning-stroke is no respecter of persons; the fury of the tornado is not partial to the good. And yet the belief persists. It persists because of the irrepressible instinct that wrong-doing deserves punishment, and that somewhere at the heart of the universe there is a moral power that connects guilt and retribution. The same instinct accounts for the sleepless Nemesis and the whips and scorpions of the Furies of ancient mythology. There is a peculiar and striking instance of it in the Scriptures: Paul, having been shipwrecked on the island of Melita, gathered a bundle of sticks and laid them on the fire which the natives had kindled; but a viper, by reason of the heat, came out and fastened on his hand. Then the natives said one to another: “No doubt this man is a murderer, whom, though he hath escaped the sea, yet vengeance suffereth not to live.” But when, instead of falling dead suddenly, they saw no harm come to him, they changed their minds and said that he was a god. One still night, as we lay at anchor in the middle of the broad river, amidst profound darkness, a deep-voiced man related to the crew a story of how a certain man, whose father and sisters had been killed by another man in a tribal war, not being able to avenge himself, at last “threw his face on his enemy.” It is not necessary to repeat the unpleasant details of how this is done; but in many tribes they believe that where a great wrong has been unavenged it really can be done, and, intentionally or otherwise, it illustrates in a gruesome manner a principle of remorse of which some suppose that the African is incapable. Ever after the man threw his face on his enemy the enemy saw that face. It haunted him in the midst of all his joys, made his sorrows the heavier, and poisoned all the pleasures of his life. Fetishes, prayers, incantations were all in vain; he still saw it, saw it alike in the darkness and the light, and saw it always. At last, when madness threatened him because of this haunting face, he killed himself to escape from it. But it is very doubtful whether he would escape it even in death; for there are those who say that a face thrown upon a man will continue to haunt him in the next life even as in this.