142 Report S.A.A. Advancement of Science. 



I mention first of all the Christian doctrine and ideals which the 

 missionaries are teaching all over the country and which spread with 

 a remarkable speed amongst the kraals. Christianity is at the same 

 time a religious doctrine and a moral teaching. When a native, in 

 the dim, sometimes half unconscious act of believing (Kholwa) has 

 adopted Christianity, he has put the axe at the root of an immense 

 tree, and sooner or later the tree will fall. The adoption of the 

 new creed, first of all, ruins at once his own, old religious ideas, 

 viz., the belief in the spirits of his ancestors as being his gods. This 

 ancestrolatry is the first branch of the tree which falls. It falls so 

 quickly that very soon after his conversion the black Christian laughs 

 at the idea that he could have believed such an absurdity. Nothing 

 is more striking than the victory won by the idea of the only God, 

 Creator of heaven and earth, on the old, puerile representation of 

 heathenism. Now, with the ancestrolatric belief, all the customs of 

 the heathen religion will have to fall. No more sacrifices with their 

 sacramental formulas, no more prayers addressed to the deceased 

 forefathers for the welfare of the house or of the tribe. One of 

 the ties which bind together the members of the nation, viz., the 

 idea that common ancestors are the gods of all, will disappear. The 

 moral teaching of Christianity has not such a rapid action as its 

 doctrinal aspect. However, submissive to authority as the native is,, 

 he adopts at once the Bible as the guide of his life, when he has 

 converted himself to Christianity, and the Christian ideals, which 

 he is very far from realising at first, take hold of him and 

 alter his conception of right and wrong. Every custom having some 

 immorality in it, according to the standard of the New Testament, 

 will be condemned, and probably abandoned. Circumcision, which, 

 amongst the Bantu, is but a grotesque imitation of the Semitic rite, 

 accompanied with a vast flow of unclean language ; customs of 

 " hugango," or free and unchaste relations between young people 

 of both sexes; ^^ lobola,^' or the buying of wives, which is entirely 

 based on the idea that the woman has become the property of her 

 husband and of the family of her husband ; -polygamy, which is but 

 a sequel of lobola, and is, moreover, incompatible with a more 

 advanced civilised stage ; the conception of parental relations so 

 peculiar to Bantu tribes, with its strange way of considering Ifie 

 parents in law, a set of ideas which is a direct result of polygamy 

 and lobola ; all these pillars of the heathen system, all these main 

 branches of the heathen tree have already been partly cut away in 

 native Christian congregations, and will certainly disappear under 

 religious and social influences. 



The adoption of Christianity, which will he universnl at least 

 in the more advanced South African States before the end of this 

 century, is the most powerful destroyer of heathenism. But a second 

 agent comes in, together with civilisation, with the development of 

 schools, with the beginning of education : Scienti-fic truth. It rules 

 the whole of the civilised world. Its action on the mentality of lower 

 races will be slower, because it requires a higher degree of intelli- 



