Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/238

226 with regard to a supreme and beneficent deity, or of a great and first creator, are indefinite and degraded; they have no outward worship, and they never alluded to their offering private devotions." All this, however, implies a great deal more than Sir John's bare statement, "According to Burchell, the Bachapins (Kaffirs) had no form of religion and worship," etc.

"Some of the Australian tribes," writes Sir John, "are said to have no religion," and he gives as his authority for this statement a reference to Collins. Sir John does not quote literally from Collins; he sums up his testimony, but his mode of doing so is scarcely satisfactory. For Collins, while stating that the Australians worshiped neither sun, moon, nor stars, or any object, admits that those he came in contact with had "some idea of a future life"; that the greater number of them believed that after death they "went to the clouds." Conversing with Ben-nil-long as to where the black men came from, his answer was, "They came from the clouds, and when they died they returned to the clouds—Boo-row-e," and he endeavored to make Collins understand that when the black men died "they ascended as little children." Collins further states that these Australians have ideas of the distinction between good and bad, and of right and wrong, but their knowledge of the difference between right and wrong never extended beyond their existence in this world, and their ideas about the future state had no influence on their lives and actions—an assertion that might, unfortunately, be truthfully made in connection with the religious views of many professing Christians.

In dealing with the lake tribes of Central Africa Sir John gives Burton as his authority for stating that some of them "admit neither God, nor angel, nor devil." His words are: "Burton also states that some of the tribes in the lake districts of Central Africa 'admit neither God, nor angel, nor devil.'" This quotation is very meager, and its meagerness is scarcely just toward Burton. Burton is describing fetichism, which he says "admits neither God, nor angel, nor devil."—a statement certainly open to argument—and then he proceeds as follows: "Fetichism," he writes, "is the adoration, or rather the propitiation, of natural objects, animate or inanimate—to which certain mysterious influences are attributed. Though instinctively conscious of a Being beyond them, of a first cause to every effect subject to their senses, the Africans have as yet failed to grasp the idea, in their feeble minds it is an embryo rather than an object, at the best a vague god, without personality, attributes, or providence. They call that being Mulungu—the Ahlunga of the Kaffirs, and