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X. THE MISSION 
uneducated, disappears when one gets talking with the 
forest dweller about our relations to each other, to man- 
kind, to the universe, and to the infinite. “ The 
negroes are deeper than we are,” a white man once said 
to me, “ because they don’t read newspapers,” and the 
paradox has some truth in it. 
They have, then, a great natural capacity for taking 
in the elements of religion, though the historical element 
in Christianity lies, naturally, outside their ken. The 
negro lives with a general view of things which is inno- 
cent of history, and he has no means of measuring and 
appreciating the time-interval between Jesus and our- 
selves. Similarly, the doctrinal statements which 
explain how the divine plan of redemption was pre- 
pared and effected, are not easily made intelhgible to 
him, even though he has an elementary consciousness 
of what redemption is. Christianity is for him the light 
that shines amid the darkness of his fears ; it assures 
him that he is not in the power of nature-spirits, 
ancestral spirits, or fetishes, and that no human being 
has any sinister power over another, since the will of 
God really controls everything that goes on in the world. 
“ I lay in cruel bondage, 
Thou cam’st and mad'st me free ! 
These words from Paul Gerhardt ’s Advent hymn 
express better than any others what Christianity means 
for primitive man. That is again and again the thought 
that fills my mind when I take part in a service on a 
mission station. 
It is well known that hopes and fears about a world 
beyond play no part in the rehgion of primitive man ; 
the child of nature does not fear death, but regards it 
merely as something natural. The more mediaeval 
