PRIMITIVE MAN AND THE RELIGION OF JESUS 155 
form of Christianity which keeps anxiety about a judg- 
ment to come in the foreground, has fewer points of con- 
tact with his mentality than the more ethical form. To 
him Christianity is the moral view of life and the world, 
which was revealed by Jesus ; it is a body of teaching 
about the kingdom of God and the grace of God. 
Moreover, there slumbers within him an ethical 
rationalist. He has a natural responsiveness to the 
notion of goodness and all that is connected with it in 
religion. Certainly, Rousseau and the illuminati of 
that age idealised the child of nature, but there was 
nevertheless truth in their views about him — in their 
belief, that is, in his possession of high moral and 
rational capacities. No one must think that he has 
described the thought-world of the negro when he has 
made a full list of all the superstitious ideas which he 
has taken over, and the traditional legal rules of his 
tribe. They do not form his whole universe, although 
he is controlled by them. There lives within him a dim 
suspicion that a correct view of what is truly good 
must be attainable as the result of reflection. In pro- 
portion as he becomes familiar with the higher moral 
ideas of the religion of Jesus, he finds utterance for 
something in himself that has hitherto been dumb, and 
something that has been tightly bound up finds release. 
The longer I live among the Ogowe negroes, the clearer 
this becomes to me. 
Thus redemption through Jesus is experienced by 
him as a two-fold liberation ; his view of the world is 
purged of the previously dominant element of fear, and 
it becomes ethical instead of unethical. Never have I 
felt so strongly the victorious power of what is simplest 
in the teaching of Jesus as when, in the big schoolroom 
