18 BAPTISM OF SECHELE. Cjiap. I. 



Sechele continued to make a consistent profession for about 

 three years ; and perceiving at last some of the difficulties of his 

 case, and also feeling compassion for the poor women, who were 

 by far the best of our scholars, I had no desire that he should 

 be in any hurry to make a full profession by baptism, and 

 putting away all his wives but one. His principal wife, too, 

 was about the most unlikely subject in the tribe ever to become 

 anything else than an out-and-out greasy disciple of the old 

 school. She has since become greatly altered, I hear, for the 

 better ; but again and again have I seen Sechele send her out 

 of church to put her gown on, and away she would go with her 

 lips shot out, the very picture of unutterable disgust at Ins new- 

 fangled notions. 



When he at last applied for baptism, I simply asked him how 

 he, having the Bible in his hand, and able to read it, thought he 

 ought to act. He went home, gave each of Ins superfluous wives 

 new clothing, and all his own goods, which they had been ac- 

 customed to keep in their huts for Mm, and sent them to their 

 parents with an intimation that he had no fault to find with them, 

 but that in parting with them he wished to follow the will of God. 

 On the day on which he and his children were baptized, great 

 numbers came to see the ceremony. Some thought, from a 

 stupid calumny circulated by enemies to Christianity in the 

 south, that the converts would be made to drink an infusion of 

 " dead men's brains," and were astonished to find that water only 

 was used at baptism. Seeing several of the old men actually in 

 tears during the service, I asked them afterwards the cause of 

 their weeping ; they were crying to see then father, as the Scotch 

 remark over a case of suicide, "so far left to himself." They 

 seemed to think that I had thrown the glamour over him and 

 that he had become mine. Here commenced an opposition winch 

 we had not previously experienced. All the friends of the 

 divorced wives became the opponents of our religion. The at- 

 tendance at school and church diminished to very few besides 

 the chief's own family. They all treated us still with respectful 

 kindness, but to Sechele himself they said tilings wliich, as he 

 often remarked, had they ventured on in former times, would 

 have cost them then lives. It was trying, after all we had done, 

 to see our labours so little appreciated; but we had sown the 





