‘Well, sir,’ he said, ‘I know that God made me, and I feel quite certain that whoever wrote the Bible knew a great deal about me; for it describes my state and wants as a sinner so exactly, that no one who did not know me could have pictured them as the Bible does. Now I know that no Malagasy wrote the Bible, or could write it--you Europeans brought the book from over the sea; and what European there knows anything about me? You know more about me than any other European, but you did not write it; for the Bible was here years before you came. The way I explain it, sir, is this: God made me, and “holy men of God” wrote the Scriptures, “as they were moved by the Holy Ghost”--and that is how I find my low and lost estate and my wants so pictured there.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that is very good; but suppose the European were to say: “My good old man, that may satisfy you, but that proves nothing, and certainly does not prove that the Bible is true or the Word of God. It is only a tissue of cunningly-devised fables, legal fictions, and falsehoods.” What would you say then, and how would you answer that, and prove that the Bible was trustworthy and the Word of God?’ ‘The Bible a fable, full of fictions or falsehoods, sir,’ he said, ‘that can’t be; for the work it has already done in the land proves that it must be the truth of God; I don’t know what your European falsehoods, fables or folk-lore may be like; but the Scriptures are very different from our Malagasy ones. Our fables and folk-lore are filthy trash, and our lies as black as they can be made. I am an old man, but I never in my life knew a lie do any good. As our Malagasy proverbs say: “A falsehood may be very fat when it is uttered, but it becomes very lean when confronted.” “A lie is like the early rice--it serves the occasion, but does not hold out.” ‘No, sir,’ he said, ‘if we think of the good that the Bible has already done in this country, that seems to me to prove it to be God’s book; for no book could have done what it has done in this land unless it were the Word of God. What was this country before the Bible came? The people are not nearly so wise and good yet as we hope they may become; but a great change has come over them, and it is the Bible that has wrought that change. I remember what the past was, and I know what the present is, and so can compare them. The book that has brought this great change about cannot be a mere tissue of fables and folk-lore, fictions and falsehoods--it must be the Word of the Almighty to have wrought the miracles it has wrought in the land, and to have done the good that it has done. I could not believe that any collections of mere fables and folk-lore, or fictions and falsehoods, could be the cause of all the good that has been done.’ Razàka was quite right: the Bible is its own best witness, and the miracles it works, both at home and among the heathen, the best proof of its divine origin.