Racial antipathy towards the black man is also a reason of hostility to missions. The intensity of this feeling where the inferior race is in the majority is surprising, even in men who in all their other relations are generous and considerate. In the opinion of many a white man in Africa the black man is little better than a beast, and they treat him accordingly. To speak of him as a brother man is to insult the white man. This antipathy actually prefers that the black man should remain in his present degradation—perhaps to justify itself. It resents every effort to elevate him; and as it sees him actually rising to the moral level of the white man it is only intensified into hatred. One soon perceives that the object of the white man’s greatest aversion is not the lowest native, but the best. The critic may therefore be sincere when he declares that he can see no good in the native product of missions, for he is blinded by this special prejudice. Racial antipathy is much more marked in the government official than in the trader; yet even the traders when they live in communities often have a code of arrogant manners according to which they ostracize any of their number who may extend to the native a degree of social recognition. This antipathy must necessarily be hostile to missionary work. For the work of the missionary implies that he regards the black man as a brother man; one who is also capable of moral elevation. He is not necessarily blind to the present degradation of the native; but he insists that he does not belong to the present, but to the future; that he is endowed with an immortal soul and the moral possibilities which immortality implies. He admits the worst but “sees the best that glimmers through the worst,” and “hears the lark within the songless egg.” And experience has justified his faith. The missionary treats the native according to this belief, and as he rises gives him exactly the social place to which his character as an individual entitles him. He takes very little interest in the abstract question of equality, or whether the black man is inherently inferior and different in kind from the white man. But he believes that in Christian brotherhood there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither black nor white. This attitude and the behaviour which comports with it are obnoxious to many white men, and are inevitably a source of much hostility to missions. To the impulse of racial antipathy there is often added that of angry passion unchecked by social restraints, and stimulated by the irritability of a malaria-infected temper.