l^i'^ PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS SECTION E. 



ceived. The objection is not to circumcision qua circumcision, 

 for most folk are agreed that thei e are excellent reasons which 

 favour a continuance of circumcision under proper conditions. 

 Nor is it even a question of securing evidence against this or 

 any particular custom on the ground of the abuses connected 

 with its observance. The crux of the whole matter is simply 

 that it is, so far as the native mind is concerned, indissolubly 

 associated with the ancestral superstition ; and that is what is 

 wrong, from a Christian point of view, with practically all of 

 the customs, even with those which are seemingly good in them- 

 selves. This powerful superstition, which underlies the whole 

 tribalism, cannot be tolerated ; and these customs, even though 

 imrified and cleansed of animalism and other objectionable 

 features, would still fail either to emancipate the 

 people from the fundamental bondage Oif the inherent super- 

 stition, or to give them that individualism and liberty that is the 

 inheritance of every thinking man. According to the implicit and 

 unanimous belief of the people, the spirits in some cases acting 

 arbitrarily cause illness or other misfortune, because they are 

 ofifended, and need, to be appeased by sacrifice ; in other cases, the 

 spirits are supposed to have been worked upon by means of the 

 charms of some sorcerer, in which case the witch-doctor sets 

 to work to " smell out " the individual responsible for the mis- 

 chief. The one accused by the witch-doctor usually paid the 

 extreme penalty in such cases, and that without alternative. 

 But whatever view we take the effect was always the same, 

 namely, to .secure the most rigid adherence to the minutest 

 detail of custom. "Why did you do so?" "It is our custom." 

 That in a nutshell explains everything. The light of reason 

 cannot operate in heathen life — it dare not. No one would ever 

 dream of acting according to sound reason if the custom pre- 

 scribed some other course ! So, then, that brings us again to 

 the heart of the matter. 



If custom and its power is broken, the change is not merely 

 external but fundamental. It is psychological in character. The 

 native is beginning to think, and to reason. He is no longer a 

 part of the tribal machine, a cog of the great wheel. He is no 

 longer a mere human animal, governed by animal impulse, he 

 is on the wav to become a man governed and controlled by an 

 ordered mind. What is in native life from our point of view 

 so indescribably immoral is explained when we realise that in 

 his tribal state the native is not so much immoral as simply non- 

 moral — a healthy animal, strongly sexed, human in shape, with 

 mind unenlightened and undeveloped, and dominated by super- 

 stitious fears. 



Thus do we get tribalism and individualism thrown into 

 fierce contrast. In this pitiable condition, beset by the most 

 unreasonable fears of supernatural powers, the victim of 

 tyrannical slavery, struggling in the toils of this communism, 

 alwavs and only acting according to custom, the slightest in- 



