The Wanyika consider service, like slavery, a dishonour: they have also some food prejudices which render them troublesome to Europeans, and those who live amongst them are obliged to engage Moslem menials. As regards the success of the ‘Mombas Mission,’ which was established in 1846, and upon which a large sum of money has been expended, the less said the better. Dr Krapf had started with the magnificent but visionary scheme of an ‘Apostle’s Street,’ a chain of mission posts stretching across Africa from sea to sea: he never, however, made converts enough to stock a single house. Those unacquainted with savage life would think it an easy task to overthrow the loose fabric of wild superstitions, and to raise upon its ruins a structure, rude, but still of higher type. Practically, the reverse is the case. The Wanyika, for instance, are so bound and chained by Adá, or custom, that inevitable public opinion, whose tyranny will not permit a man to sow his lands when he pleases; so daunted and cowed by the horrors of their faith; so thoroughly conservative in the worst sense of the word, and so enmeshed by tribal practices, of which not the least important is their triple initiation, that the slave of rule and precedent lacks power to set himself free. We may easily understand this. Religion is the mental expression of a race, and it cannot advance in purity without a correspondent intellectual improvement on the part of its votaries. On the other hand, not a few nations, especially in the dawn of civilization, have risen despite their follies of faith: but these are peoples who have within them the germs of progress. Judaism did not make the Falasha of East Africa, nor the remote colonists of Southern Arabia, an intellectual people: the Jews of Aden, to this day, show no traces of mental superiority over their neighbours. Christianity has done nothing for Abyssinia or Egypt: these lands are inhabited by peoples which have remained as nearly stationary as it is possible for human nature. Nowhere, indeed, has ‘the Church’ proved herself in the long course of ages a more complete and hopeless failure than in her own birthplace, and in her peculiar ethnic centre, Syria. Here the Marronites are in no ways superior, and in many points, such as courage and personal dignity, inferior to their neighbours, the Metawali, who have a debased religion, and the Druzes, who have none. El Islam, also, has not much to boast of on the coasts of Guinea and of Zanzibar, except that it has abolished certain abominations such as witch-killing, twin-murder, and poison ordeals, of which many have been practised in semi-civilized Europe and Asia. When, therefore, we tell the world that the Bible made England or the Koran Stambul, we merely assist in propagating a fallacy. ----- Footnote 18: From Nyika, the wild land, comes Mnyika, the wild lander; Wanyika, the wild land folk; and Kinyika, the wild land tongue. Footnote 19: