Page:The Native Tribes of South Australia (1879).djvu/130

 68 FIRST DIVINE SERVICE. single instance did they receive insult or annoyance from the numerous blacks who lived upon the place. On the first Sunday after my arrival I opened the largest room in my house for divine worship, and invited the blacks to attend. A good number came and listened with attention while I read and prayed and tried to address them in simple language from the text, "The Lord is a great God." At that time I knew very little native; but some of the blacks knew a great deal of broken English, and by using their way of speaking, and coming down to their level, I managed to make some of them understand. When I first spoke to the natives about religion, I found that they believed in a god Nurundere, and at first I was inclined to adopt that name in speaking to the blacks for our English word God; but I soon found that Nurundere was only a deified blackfellow whose attributes were gigantic vices. I therefore determined always to use the word Jehovah for our God, and thus avoided the confusion which would have resulted from using the native name. Our Sabbath worship soon became crowded, and I was heard with deep interest. I went through the chapters of the "Peep of Day" and " Line upon Line," turning them into language intelligible to the blacks, and they came and heard me gladly. And now I began to seek to influence the minds of the natives in favour of civilisation. The great difficulty was to fathom the depths of their ignorance. We have received so much knowledge in early life that we take it as a matter of course that others possess the same. The tribe here had not had much intercourse with the whites. I remember well the first time some of the women heard our clock strike. They listened with astonishment; then inquired hurriedly in a whisper, "What him say?" and rushed out of the house in terror without waiting for an answer.* they first saw white men on horseback, and thought the horses were their visitors’ mothers, because they carried them on their backs! I have also heard that another tribe regarded the first pack-bullocks they saw as the whitefellows’ wives, because they carried the luggage!
 * The natives told me that some twenty years before I came to Point Macleay