Illustrative of traveller Declè's haste or inexactitude in the use of language, he apparently contradicts himself on page 153, in speaking of a tribe, the Matabele, adjacent to the Barotse: "The idea of a Supreme Being is utterly foreign, and cannot be appreciated by the native mind. They have a vague idea of a number of evil spirits always ready to do harm, and chief among these are the spirits of their ancestors; but they do not pray to them to ask for their help if they wish to enter on any undertaking. They merely offer sacrifices to appease them when some evil has befallen the family." Perhaps he and other cursory travellers, in making such hasty assertions, mean that the native has no idea of the true character of God; in that they would be correct. The accounts which some travellers have given of tribes without religion I either set down to misunderstanding, or consider them to be insufficient to invalidate the assertion that religion is a universal feature of savage life. However degraded, every people have a religion. But they are children, babes in the woods, lost in the forest of ignorance, dense and more morally malarious than Stanley's forest of Urěga. In their helplessness, under a feeling of their "infinite dependence," they cry out in the night of their orphanage, "Help us, O Paia Njambe!" Their forefathers wandered so far from him that only a name is left by which to describe the All-Father, whose true character has been utterly forgotten,--so forgotten that they rarely worship him, but have given such honor and reverence as they do render literally to the supposed spiritual residents in stocks and stones. "Lo! this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions." Offering in the following pages a formulation of African superstitious beliefs and practice, I premise that I have gathered them from a very large number of native witnesses, very few of whom presented to me all the same ideas. Any one else, inquiring of other natives in other places, would not find, as held by every one of them, all that I have recorded; but parts of all these separate ideas will be found held by separate individuals everywhere. After more than forty years' residence among these tribes, fluently using their language, conversant with their customs, dwelling intimately in their huts, associating with them in the varied relations of teacher, pastor, friend, master, fellow-traveller, and guest, and, in my special office as missionary, searching after their religious thought (and therefore being allowed a deeper entrance into the arcana of their soul than would be accorded to a passing explorer), I am able unhesitatingly to say that among all the multitude of degraded ones with whom I have met, I have seen or heard of none whose religious thought was only a superstition.