140 
In the Zulu tribes of South Africa we have just such a people 
as he supposes. They have no god and no worship, and the 
only idea of beings different from themselves which they pos- 
sess is that the spirits of their ancestors survive their death, 
and enter the bodies of snakes, of which, as a consequence, 
they have a superstitious fear. But among these people the 
missionaries do not discuss the question of ancestry, or bring 
back and illuminate the shadowy tradition of “ the Great Great 
One,” whom they only know as the author of death; but they 
relate the facts of Holy Scripture, and state the obligations and 
blessings which those facts guarantee and enforce. And, 
although this statement contains the most perfect revelation 
the Creator has made of Himself, yet the Zulu, who had no 
idea of what religion is, finds no greater difficulty in receiving 
it than a well-educated Englishman. He so receives this tes- 
timony as to become conscious of a Divine joy ; of a righteous, 
pure, true, and benevolent direction or inclination to his mind, 
and of a superhuman power, enabling him to embody in his prac- 
tice the virtues of his mind.* The missionaries among these 
tribes are able to point to many who began life without any 
idea of what religion is, who not only have lived for many 
years a blameless, useful life as the fruit of the religion which 
came to them by revelation ; but the renewed natives have 
become the teachers of their equally ignorant fellow-country- 
men, whom they have led into the light, and joy, and power of 
the true religion, A dozen years since, Abantwana, the uncle 
and general-in-chief of Tshaka, who followed the terrible Zulu 
king in all his battles, and commanded when he was absent, 
who was an old man before he heard anything of the Gospel, » 
who had never before had any conception of a being superior 
to Tshaka, might have been seen, as an example of the ability 
of the most ignorant to receive the perfect revelation, and of 
its transforming power when received. Nor did those who 
knew him doubt but that, by his acceptance of this revelation, 
he had been “ made meet to be a partaker of the inheritance 
of the saints in light.” 
Cases like the above, which might be multiplied indefinitely, 
show that man is capable of receiving religion by revelation. 
To them it came in a declaration from another man, accom- 
panied by a Divine demonstration of its reality to each indi- 
vidual. And this ought not to be a difficulty to Mr. Muller, 
for he tells us : — 
“No doubt there existed in the human mind, from the very beginning, 
something, whether we call it a suspicion, an innate idea, an intuition, or a 
sense of the Divine. What distinguishes man from the rest of the animal 
* Psalm cxix. 130. 
