Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/237

Rh apparently made no well-sustained effort at religious investigation at Aru or anywhere else.

The following gives evidence of further carelessness in quoting: In writing of certain tribes in the country of Karaque in Africa, Sir John says, "Captain Grant could find no distinct form of religion in some of the comparatively civilized tribes visited by him." What Captain Grant says is this: "We could not trace any distinct form of religion among this interesting race, but there were certain indications or traces of Jewish worship." Then Captain Grant tells us that the king had "many superstitions"; that he "combined in himself the offices of prophet, priest, and king"; that on the feast of the new moon he "assumed the priestly garb"; and that a younger brother of his "consulted daily with the gods," and was considered a greater prophet and priest than his royal brother.

"According to Burchell," writes Sir John, "the Bachapins (Kaffirs) had no form of worship or religion. They had no belief in a good deity, but some vague idea of an evil being." One would glean from this quotation that the only approach to religious thought among the Bachapins consisted of a vague belief in an evil spirit, whereas Burchell distinctly states that they possessed a religion, although he believed they had no "form of worship" or "religion." What he says is this: "Their religion may be characterized as an inconsistent jumble of superstition and ignorance, among which no signs were to be discovered of its having ever been derived from any purer source, or that it was aught else than the offspring of barbarous and uncultivated minds." He then further states: "The superstition of the Bachapins—for it can not be called a religion (although he himself had called it so)—is of the weakest and most absurd kind. These people have no outward worship, nor, if one may judge from their never alluding to them, any private devotions; neither could it be discovered that they possessed any very defined or exalted notion of a supreme and beneficent deity, or of a great and first creator. Although they do not worship a good deity, they fear a bad one, whom they name Mooleemo, a word which my interpreter translated by the Dutch word for devil. They also believe in amulets as preservatives against evil, in lucky and unlucky omens, in witchcraft and sorcery."

Now, if language means anything, Burchell's testimony may be summed up thus: "The Bachapin Kaffirs possess a religion scarce worthy of the name, consisting of witchcraft and sorcery and the recognition of an evil spirit called Mooleemo. Their