110 HOME LIFE OF THE AFRICAN. 



Apparently, then, there is a very Httle of real home life in an 

 African heathen Negro hut. The women each have their own apart- 

 ment adjacent to their polygamist husband's larger bamboo house. 

 But polygamy can make no home. It does not ask for love. It buys 

 only service, degraded, shameful, unfaithful service. These women 

 are only slaves, and they give only the service of slaves. 



In our mission school, visions are given of what a woman's life 

 may be in a Christian home. The school girl wildly grasps after 

 this. Often the ideal is too high, and she obtains only a part of it. 

 Then, she being so far forth a failure, her young monogamist hus- 

 band, himself, perhaps, a professing Christian, but probably not an 

 ideal husband, blames his wife and the school and civilized mar- 

 riage as a failure. 



Sometimes the' mission school girl, viewing only one vista of 

 the Christian wife's life, i. e., its liberty as contrasted with the 

 heathen slave-wife's, mistakes liberty for exemption from law, and 

 makes her home a failure by exasperating impertinence and unneces- 

 sary disobedience. Our mission efforts towards the development of 

 a civilized home, with a Christian liberty, necessarily partake of the 

 trying experiences of all transition stages of life. Yet even now 

 there are many Christian homes where the parents are united by a 

 true affection and the children are brought up in the love and fear 

 of God. 



