18 
BAPTISM OF SECHELE. 
Chap. I. 
Secliele 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 bas 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 liim how 
he, having the Bible in his hand, and able to read it, thought he 
ought to act. He went home, gave each of his superfluous wives 
new clothing, and all his own goods, which they had been ac¬ 
customed to keep in their huts for him, and sent them to their 
parents with an intimation that he had no fault to And with them, 
but that in parting with them he wished to follow the will of God. 
On the day on wliich 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 their father, as the Scotch 
remark over a case of suicide, so far left to himselfT They 
seemed to think that I had thrown the glamour over him and 
that he had become mine. Here commenced an opposition which 
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 things wliicli, as he 
often remarked, had they ventured on in former times, would 
have cost them theh lives. It was trying, after all we had done, 
to see our labours so Httle appreciated; but we had sown the 
