Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/248

 about joining the Church that will require his entering into the married state with only one woman, whom he knows he may not whack, and who, he knows, will also know this and carry on in all directions, and go and report all his little failings up at the mission, and get him into hot water with the missionary whose good opinion he values highly. And he is artful enough to know he enjoys this good opinion more as an interesting possible convert, than he would as a Church member requiring "discipline."

The worst classes of cases wherein polygamy troubles the missionary are those of boys trained in the mission school and married to school-trained girls. For a time they live according to Church ordinance; and then they keep it to the eye, and break it to the heart; and during this period of transition, during which the missionary fights a hard and losing fight for these souls against their inherited sensualism and sloth, they sink into a state that to my mind, seems worse than they would have been in had they never seen a missionary. But I will not go into the disintegrating effects of mission training here, because my opinions on them have no reference to the work done by the Mission Évangélique whose influence upon the natives has been, and is, all for good; and the amount of work they have done, considering the small financial resources behind them, is to a person who has seen other missions most remarkable, and is not open to the criticism lavished on missions in general.

Mission work was first opened upon the Ogowé by Dr. Nassau, the great pioneer and explorer of these regions. He was acting for the American Presbyterian Society; but when the French Government demanded education in French in the schools, the stations on the Ogowé, Lembarene (Kangwe), and Talagouga were handed over to the Mission Évangélique of Paris, and have been carried on by its representatives with great devotion and energy. I am unsympathetic, for reasons of my own, with Christian missions, so my admiration for this one does not arise from the usual ground of admiration for missions, namely, that however they may be carried on, they are engaged in a great and holy work; but I regard the Mission Évangélique, judging from the results I have seen,