136 APPENDIX. [sect. 



burst of deafening laughter, and on its partially subsiding, 

 the chief man begged me to say no more on such trifles, 

 lest the people should think me mad 1 !" 



Native converts have positively declared to Mr Moffat, 

 after conversion, that they had no notion of a God until he 

 taught them. 



Dr Livingstone generally found a more or less clear 

 acknowledgment of the being, power, and eternity of God, 

 among the natives, and especially among the more intel- 

 lectual of the newly discovered tribes. 



He says of the Bakwains, that their most intelligent men 

 scouted the idea of any of them ever having been without 

 tolerably correct ideas about good, evil, a future state and 

 God. Of these people he adds: "There is no necessity for 

 beginning to tell even the most degraded of these people of 

 the existence of a God, or of a future state, the facts being 

 universally admitted. Everything that cannot be accounted 

 for by common causes is ascribed to the Deity, as creation, 

 sudden death, &c. ' How curiously God made these things!' 

 is a common expression ; as is also, ' He was not killed by 

 disease, he was killed by God/ And, when speaking of 

 the departed — though there is nought in the physical ap- 

 pearance of the dead to justify the expression — they say, 

 1 He has gone to the gods,' the phrase being identical with 

 1 abiit ad plures 2 .'" 



Despite the individual cases of pure atheism found 

 among the heathen by travellers and missionaries, yet these 

 cases do not disprove the existence of a moral sense or 

 natural conscience in the whole body of the heathen. How- 

 ever dark may be the spiritual perceptions of any tribe of 

 men, still there exists a "feeling after God" in the soul 

 endued with immortal promptings. St Paul decidedly 

 teaches this view in Rom. i. 20; and especially so in ch. ii. 

 14, 15 ; a passage well-known among scholars as the basis 

 1 Missionary Labours, pp. 267, 268. 2 Travels, p. 158. 



